How Small is Our World; How Big is Our God

I travelled to the East Coast last week to visit family and had a layover in the Newark/New York airport. As a result of my 20 years in the Air Force, I am no stranger to various cultures and large concentrations of people, and yet there is still a kind of culture shock for a fella that lives in a small rural Ohio community reexperiencing life in the big city. Mingling with throngs of people of different languages and ethnicities can bring a sense of smallness, or at least reawaken one’s perspective.

In our individual experiences, we can lose sight of the vastness, as well as the intricacies of our Creator. So just when I was feeling that ‘smallness’ in that airport, the Lord of the Universe orchestrated a personal touch for me, and I was soon engaging in a ‘God appointment!’

Sitting at a counter waiting for my flight, a man sat down beside me and began speaking Hebrew on his phone! (I’ve been learning Hebrew for the last two years through an online program.) When he ended the call I inquired, “Attah medaber Evrit? (Do you speak Hebrew?) He responded with “Ken” (Yes) and I immediately panicked and forgot everything else I had learned from the previous two years! I’d never spoken the language with a native speaker…however, his ‘Angleet’ (English) was excellent, and we had a wonderful conversation. He asked me what my motivation was for learning Hebrew, and I was able to share with him my love for Israel because of my love for Yeshua. Being a Reformed Jew, he was not offended by my Messianic Gentile status. The point of this of course, is that God remembered me as I was feeling invisible.

How small is our world, how big is our God? On one hand, Adonai’s vastness is such…He is:

-- supreme over all creation…

-- all has been created through Him and for Him…

-- He existed before all things…

-- He holds everything together…

-- He holds first place in everything…

-- by His word He made the heavens…

-- by His breath He made the whole host of heaven

-- He commanded, and there it stood…

-- He watches everyone on earth…

-- He understands the hearts of all…

-- the universe was birthed through His Word…

-- He stretched out the earth…

-- He gives breath and spirit to all people…

By His breath He made the whole host of heaven…

Let’s take some perspective, beginning with the vastness of His creation. For instance, the sun is 93 million miles away from earth and is so large that 960,000 earths could fit inside it. And that’s just one star in the galaxy that Creator God made for us!

How about Betelgeuse? No, not the movie. It’s a star. It’s 427 light years away, about 5.88 trillion miles. Well, you could fit 262 trillion earths inside Betelgeuse!

But that’s not even the biggest star. The largest known star is Canis Majoris. It’s so big that you could fit seven quadrillion earths in it! Do you know what a quadrillion is? Think of it this way:

1 million seconds ago – 11.5 days ago 1 billion seconds ago – 32 years ago 1 trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years ago 1 quadrillion seconds ago –31,709,792 years ago

Yeah, seven of that number. And these are just the stars that our beautiful God has created… immersed in one galaxy…of an estimated one trillion galaxies in the known universe!

Here’s how big our God is. A light year is travelling at the speed of light…186,000 miles a second. If you travel at the speed of 186,000 miles, not per hour, but per second, you are travelling at the speed of light. But if you travel at that speed for an entire year, you have traveled one light year. Do you know how far you would have to travel to go from one edge of our galaxy to the other? You would have to travel 186,000 miles per second for 100,000 years.

You would pass the earth in a tiny fraction of the first second and never see it…and then travel an additional 100,000 years! So, consider, there are an estimated one trillion galaxies in the universe! And we are on this tiny planet, somewhere amidst just one of those galaxies. Hmmm…somehow, getting cut off in traffic doesn’t seem such a big deal!

God said, “I’ve set my glory above the heavens.”

Dear friends, how small is our world, how big is our God?

Because on the other hand, there’s God’s detail, His intricacies, His minute perfection. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Our beginning lies in one microscopic cell from our mother, and one from our father. These two cells form one new cell, with a totally new and unique set of DNA which contains three billion characters of code. This one tiny cell contains all the information needed to produce you! The single cell eventually gives way to 75 trillion cells in the human body. Every one of these cells has all three billion bits of our genetic code. If I were to read your DNA, reading one character per second, night and day, it would take me 96 years just to read the description of you! Unique from any other human ever...

How small is our world, how big is our God?

So, our vast and magnificent Creator God, pours Himself out for us and desperately wants good for us. Our tender God who even pleads with us at times. Let us remember all of who He is!

So friends, how small are the things we give our time, our mental energy, our youth to…how much credence do we give to the minutiae of our lives and how narrowed is our focus…how small is our world…in our world, we can look around for ourselves, be still and know that He formed us and spoke His perfect creation into existence…we can look up and consider the heavens that He formed from the breath of His mouth…those things He spoke into being, planned from eternity past, and yet He watches over us in every intimate detail…how big is our God?

Let us see the fullness of who He is! Never lose sight of His magnificence, His perfection, His power, and in-so-doing honor Him in reverence and great awe! The One who is, who was, and who is to come…the great “I Am.” To Him and Him alone is all honor and power and glory, forever and ever!