Creation's Cache #3

From the highest of heights to the depths of the sea
Creation's revealing Your majesty
From the colors of fall to the fragrance of spring
Every creature unique in the song that it sings
All exclaiming

Indescribable, uncontainable,
You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.
You are amazing God
All powerful, untameable,
Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing God

Who has told every lightning bolt where it should go
Or seen heavenly storehouses laden with snow
Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light
Yet conceals it to bring us the coolness of night
None can fathom

Indescribable, Chris Tomlin.


    According to the NASA website, there are over 100 billion Galaxies in our Universe. The average number of stars per Galaxy may be as many as 100 billion. Therefore, there may be as many as 10 billion trillion stars. I have attempted to discover how many naughts this number would actually include- result: no one knows. Generally speaking when we pass the "one trillion" marker everyone becomes confused. Words such as "quadrillion", "quintillion" and "sextillion" are flouted about amongst amateur mathematicians, but they themselves disagree as to the quantities involved. As far as I can tell, a trillion is "1" followed by 12 "0"s:  1,000,000,000,000. Nasa suggests that there could be 10 billion times as many stars as that! Following my logic that makes 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars! If you are anything like me, and I imagine that you are, then you lost any comprehension of the numbers involved after about 6! I tried to imagine 10 stars in my head and I sincerely struggled! 
    Let me tell you about a star. In fact, let me tell you about our nearest star- the sun. The sun is a "dwarf star"- astronomers think that some stars are as much as 1,000 times the size of the sun. Be that as it may, the sun is still an impressive 864,000 miles across. That is 109 times the diameter of the earth. All of the energy throughout the solar system comes from the sun- it is a ball of gas and the reactions taking place within its plasma core supply huge quantities of heat and light. The Sun also emits various types of electromagnetic radiation. 
    I am no scientist, I was a fairly unintelligent student where chemical reactions and astronomy were concerned, but even I can appreciate the amazing properties of the sun. And let me remind you again, there may well be as many as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars- some bigger, and some smaller, than the sun. Beyond physical comprehension? You bet! No one, no one at all, can even claim to begin to imagine our universe. There is only one word for it- vast! 
     When I first began to jot down some notes about creation, one of the first things I scrawled done was "Sheer awe-inspiring scale and vastness." Is this how the ant feels when poised at the edge of a cliff?! The very first thing I wanted to notice about the Creator's Creation was this:


   ITS SO BIG! 


   Its is so unimaginably big! I cannot even twist my head around how unimaginable the bigness is! Im not going to bore you with the statistics (guesses) at how long it would take someone traveling at the speed of light to reach the far edge of the universe- after all, no one knows! We have wild stabs in the dark, but we have no way of knowing if we are even close! Man has got as far as playing golf on the moon (a small chunk of rock orbiting our own planet). Big whoop, we can't even breath there without apparatus! 
    Our fiction is saturated with stories of space travel, of mystical new planets, of technology allowing mankind to colonize the universe. Billions of pounds and dollars are spent every week on space exploration and discovery. We are obsessed with seeing what is "out there". Space fascinates us, we are baffled and awestruck by the vast expanse of the universe. It truly is vast!
    
     At the beginning of this post I quoted from the song "Indescribable", let me repeat the chorus again:

Indescribable, uncontainable,
You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.
You are amazing God
All powerful, untameable,
Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing God

    Is that not the right reaction when we view the vast scale of creation? If this is the creation then who is the creator?! Not only was this universe created, but it is also sustained. The Creator of 10 billion trillion stars controls them and orders their every atomic reaction.
    "You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name." Does an artist not know everything there is to know about his or her painting? Does an author not know everything about the characters in their books? God knows everything about his creation. The scale of it does not daunt him, he is not dwarfed by the magnitude of the works of his hands. Rather, creation proclaims that its creator is vast and mighty.
    When away from home and away from street-lamps and car lights, I like to pause and stare at the night sky: to see the stars in the heavens. Scientists say that we can only ever see 3,000 stars at most. But those 3,000 stars are magnificent! They remind me that my God is not small, he is not contained by human wisdom or standards. No, my God is vast!

    The right response to seeing the magnitude and 'endlessness' of God's creation must be silence, and contemplation. I cannot comprehend even a speck of this universe, but I know who can: the Lord God. I might be tempted to ask, as the Psalmist did:

When I look at your Heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him...?

    But I know that although I am tiny in the grand scheme of creation, God cares for me. How do I know this? Because of what I see when I turn my gaze to the earth in which he placed me. Today we have only considered, and very minutely at that, the scale of creation. We have opened Creation's Cache and been amazed at the size of it, just wait until we see the content!!


       King David, the Shepherd King, looks at the skies and has this to say:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.