Putting The Universe in Perspective
If you lean more to the artistic side, imagining God creating the universe must illicit every creative bone in your body. The wonder, the creativity, the originality, etc.
All of it can be almost overwhelming.
To have a blank canvas like that and to unleash a level of creativity unlike anything seen before or since…
…what ingenuity, what beauty, what mastery.
But if you’re more of a pragmatist, the creation narrative may not elicit as strong of emotions. Nothing about the creation narrative feels tangible or concrete. All of it is “painted” (see what I did there) in broad strokes without a lot of detail as to how life came to be the way it did.
If that’s where you find yourself, know that I understand. However, that doesn’t make the ingenuity of God’s creation any less true.
Let’s go deeper…
In the beginning, God created the heavens…
The universe is currently estimated to be circa 7 trillion light years wide and constantly growing.
With the greatest technology that humanity has to offer in 2022, we can observe about 0.3% of that, around 93 billion light years away. Within that stretch of 93 billion light years, there are approximately 2 trillion galaxies, containing an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 sextillion, or 1 billion trillion) stars.
The point?
The heavens are vast. So vast that all that information and all those numbers don’t even make sense. So, let’s try to put it into focus.
Think about a marathon.
That’s 26.2 miles. That’s a long way, right? The universe is estimated to be 4.11 x 10^25 miles wide. That’s 1.5 x 10^24 marathons or 1.5 septillion marathons you’d have to run to cross the universe.
Good luck trying to run that race.
Again, just to put it in reference, there’s a billion more stars than marathons you’d have to run to cross the universe as we know it.
As you can see, miles work for us on Earth, but they quickly lose effectiveness in space. So, scientists developed another unit of measurement to use in space: the light year. It sounds like measuring time, but it’s really measuring distance.
1 light year is the distance traveled in a year at the speed of light.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 miles per second, making 1 light year a distance of 5.88 trillion miles. For perspective, that’s the distance between the earth and sun…times 63,000.
And yet, think about the WONDER of the heavens. Think about the nights star gazing, where you’ve gone outside and have seen the stars in the sky, caught the faint glimpse of a plane flying, maybe seen a shooting star or a meteor falling, and in those moments, the universe seems so…close. In some places, it feels like you can actually reach out and touch the stars.
But here’s the thing: if you wanted to reach out to the closest star to us, you’d need to reach past the moon (240,000 miles), past all the planets (Mars @ approximately 34 million miles, the sun @ 94 million miles, Jupiter @ 365 million miles, and Neptune @ 2.8 billion miles), outside of our solar system to over 4 light years, or 24 trillion miles, away to Alpha Centauri, the foot of the Centaurus constellation.
And though the stars around it appear to be clustered together from where we sit on Earth, they sit—on average—nearly a whole light year (5.88 trillion miles) away from each other!
Friends, it’s impossible to fathom the power and creativity necessary to create the universe we call home.
So, rather than attempting to disprove it, deny it, and be discouraged by it, what if we simply sat in the wonder of it?
What if we allowed gratitude to well up within us for the God of the universe choosing us to do life with?
The God of the stars is also the God of here and now. As vast and powerful as He is, He’s also personal. And He loves you. He sees you. And He longs to be in relationship with you.
Welcome Him in.
And then? Worship His Name.
Be encouraged.
