The Same Hands
There are approximately one billion trillion stars in our universe. That’s one with twenty-one zeros on the end. On a clear night with a dark sky, the unaided eye may be able to see around three thousand of them.
Our nearest star (the sun) burns with the energy of eighty thousand trillion power stations. That’s eight with sixteen zeros on the end. It burns 4 million tons of fuel a second – the equivalent to four thousand NASA space shuttles. It holds enough fuel to burn for another five billion years. Without the protection of the earth’s atmosphere, heat and radiation from the sun (which is on average 93 million miles away) would destroy us.
The sun is known as a yellow dwarf, which as the name suggests means that its size is dwarfed by its rivals. Every star you can see in the night sky is bigger than our sun. The largest known star in the universe, VY Canis Majoris, is around one thousand times greater (in radius alone) than the sun. If placed in our Solar System, it would engulf all planets up to and including Jupiter.
In the account of the creation of the world, in Genesis 1:16, we hear that God, with his hands “also made the stars”. A work of physics that utterly eclipses the greatest of human achievements- yet it merits the briefest of mentions. For as vast as the skies are (and as vast as His creation is – I could have talked about the 25,000 species of orchids or the 10 million species of organism that currently exist on Earth, the majority of which have not been described yet), God created the world because He is a God of love and a God who desires relationship with us.
The same God who created the world, created us. The same hands that flung stars into space “created my inmost being; knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:16). We were created in His image – to love, to weep, to laugh, to show compassion, to walk with him, to know Him in the minutae of our everyday lives. The same hands that flung stars into space, the same hands stretched out and cruelly nailed to a wooden cross – the same hands reach out in love to ours. We have a choice to extend our hands to Him, to seek Him, to find our true place on this earth in relationship with Him.
Andy King
The Gateway Church, King Lynn