If you have read the Creation account of Genesis 1, coming across this phrase in verse 16, you would be forgiven for crediting Moses with a sense of sublime understatement.
14 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. 16 Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also.
We speak often of the grandeur of our universe, the glory of Creation, and the power of our God. Every single one of us is subject to the testimony and witness of the Creation of God. It declares to us his glory, says Psalm 19.
Romans 1 informs us that every single day, God declares his character, his attributes, his eternity, his power, his Godhood. Wherever you live and whatever constellations are visible above you, there is a silent testimony to God’s being. Screaming out at you from every flower, every snowflake, every landscape is the undeniable intelligence and finger of Almighty God.
You peer upward through a telescope - approximately 2000 stars visible to the naked eye. Today with the two hundred inch telescope at Mount Palomar astronomers can look into space for four billion light years - twenty five sextillion miles – a starscape bursting with billions of suns across seemingly infinite numbers of galaxies.
On our own solar doorstep there are vast distances and huge gas giants such as Neptune, Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter. Enormous! There are seemingly infinite numbers of asteroids, comets and meteorites. The Milky Way above us is dazzling – a beautiful spiral rotating majestically through the cosmos, trailing its glowing arms behind it with a conservative estimate of 200 billion stars – one of which is our sun. Billions upon billions of galaxies beyond that all contain countless numbers of stars, and there are 6 hundred thousand trillion miles on average between each galactic mass. We live in a BIG universe. Amazing, then that Psalm 147 tells us that God counts the number of the stars and knows them all by name!
This video clip left me more aware than ever both of the power of our great God, and of the understatement that is Genesis 1: 14. It is, indeed, a vast array.
Posted by Danny at February 20, 2007 2:49 PM | TrackBack