When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? (Ps. 8:3-4). The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handywork. (Ps. 19:1). He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: His understanding is infinite (Ps. 147:4-5).
Before thinking about the stars in the heavens, we might well ask, “Who made the universe that contains all the heavenly bodies? In other words, who made space?” The thought boggles the mind, as well it might. Spurgeon said that “any part of the creation has more instruction in it than the human mind will ever exhaust, but the celestial realm is peculiarly rich in spiritual lore.”
If it cost a penny to travel a thousand miles, a cruise to the moon would be only $2.38. But if you wanted to go to the sun, the one-way ticket would cost $930. And a trip to the nearest star would be–hold onto your hat–$260 million.
With the naked eye, we can see about 5,000 stars. With a homemade telescope, 2,000,000 come into view. The Palomar telescope enlarges our vision to billions and billions. Sir James Jeans said that there are probably as many stars as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. Yet the stars are not crowded together. Rather, they are like lonely lightships on an ocean without shores.
Astronomers can see objects 10 billion light years away (a light year is the distance light travels in a year). Since it travels 186,282 miles a second, it covers six trillion miles a year. When we look into the heavens at night, we are seeing history, not current events. For example, we see the star Rigel where it was 540 years ago. It has taken that long for its light to reach our planet.
The galaxies seem to be traveling away from us at enormous speeds. If some are traveling at the speed of light–too bad!–we will never see them.
As far as size is concerned, our planet is very insignificant in the universe. It is like a speck of cosmic dust. A thousand earths could fit inside Jupiter. It would take 1,300,000 earths to make one sun. The Milky Way contains 300 million suns. Some stars could hold 500 million suns the size of ours.
It is estimated that there are some 100 billion galaxies and 100 billion stars in every galaxy. Einstein believed that we have scanned with our largest telescopes only a billionth of “theoretical space.” If we were somehow projected out into the cosmos, the chance that we would land on any heavenly body is infinitesimally small–not worth mentioning. The stars are, on the average, light years apart.
Even unbelieving scientists are forced to admit that the galaxies reveal a universal and extraordinary order and beauty. An astronomer said that galaxies are to astronomy what atoms are to physics. Another astronomer spoke of the awe which the universe inspires because of the intricate and subtle way it is put together.
Actually the size of the universe is beyond our comprehension. It is profuse with amazing facts, with astounding interrelationships, and with awesome mechanical precision.
A recent scientific article said that the universe is so finely tuned that the odds of achieving it by chance would be the same as throwing an imaginary microscopic dart across the universe to the most distant quasar and hitting a bull’s eye one millimeter in diameter. Actually this graphic illustration is pathetically inadequate. The odds are infinitely less than that!
Wonder of wonders! Vast surprise!
Can bigger wonder be?–
That He who built the starry skies
Once bled and died for me.
–Author Unknown