The Majesty of our Creator
Picture from NASA’s recently online James Webb space telescope as it peers into the Carina Nebula revealing for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth (release 07/12/22).
When the Psalmist wrote “He (the Lord) determines the number of stars and calls each of them by name (Psalm 147::4-5),” it was unlikely he or she knew the full implication of what they were writing. The human eye can only see a few thousand stars in the night sky even when there are no ambient lights to wash them out. It is estimated that there are a total of about 10,000 stars visible in entirety around the earth by the naked eye. With the invention of space telescopes, we’ve been able to determine an astounding number of stars. The first time the Hubble space telescope was pointed to a blank section of space where there was no known stars in 1995 for 100 hours, it picked up over 3,000 galaxies. Astrophysicists have been able to estimate that there are over 50 trillion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and there are over 50 trillion galaxies in the universe. That’s a lot of stars! And yet the Psalmist reminds us that God is the creator of all those stars. He knows each and every one of the 250 with 25 zeroes after it, stars. That is mind blowing and should cause us, like the Psalmist , to be in awe of our Creator God, and to praise God saying, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit (Psalms 147:5).” A God who could plan and create all of this (the universe) is more powerful than we can even imagine. His knowledge and understanding are limitless. Perhaps this can also cause us to be confident that this all-powerful, all-knowing God, who cares for us, can do all things for us. That even when we can’t understand why things are happening the way they are, we can find hope and assurance that God has it figured out.