The Canvas of the Heavens

In Isaiah 40, the Scriptures establish that God is the Creator of the earth and the entire universe:26 Lift up your eyes on high, And see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, By the greatness of His might And the strength of His power; Not one is missing. 27 Why do you say, O Jacob, And speak, O Israel: "My way is hidden from the Lord, And my just claim is passed over by my God"? 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth, Neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable.

Unbelievable - way beyond our own human understanding - this is the God who is truly able to do exceeding abundantly beyond what we can ask or think.   The heavens tell a story, and Psalm 19 says that they declare the glory of God.   You could even regard the skies as a canvas through which God displays His glory and character.   He tells us how mighty that He is as we look at these incredibly numerous, highly majestic, created begins - the stars, the planets, the vastness of space.   And, He presides over it all - but He's not too large to be unconcerned with the intricacies of our lives.

In Psalm 33, we get just an idea of the might and majesty of our Creator God.   Picking up with verse 6, we can read:
6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. 9 For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.

Last night, actually early this morning, marked the peak of the Quadrantids meteor shower.   There was even live streaming available through Huntsville's Marshall Space Center.   The meteor shower is named after an extinct constellation and only lasted a few hours, unlike the Perseid and Geminid meteor showers.

The Quadrantids originated from an asteroid, which could be a piece of a comet that broke apart several centuries ago. The meteors last night represented small debris from that. The Quadrantids have been orbiting the sun for hundreds of years and enter the atmosphere at 90,000 mph and burn up 50 miles above Earth's surface.

I really begin to think about how the heavens represent a canvas on which God displays His glory.   Consider this new announcement from Space.com:  The Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more.

"It's a staggering number, if you think about it," lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. "Basically there's one of these planets per star."

Swift and his colleagues arrived at their estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which lies about 915 light-years from Earth. The five worlds were detected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope,  which flags the tiny brightness dips caused when exoplanets cross their star's face from the instrument's perspective.

The Kepler-32 planets orbit an M dwarf, a type of star that is smaller and cooler than our sun. M dwarfs are the most common star in the Milky Way, accounting for about 75 percent of the galaxy's 100 billion or so stars, researchers said.

The team considered only planets orbiting close to M dwarfs; their analysis didn't include outer planets in M-dwarf systems, or any worlds circling other types of stars. So the galaxy may actually harbor many more planets than the conservative estimate implies — perhaps 200 billion, or about two per star, Swift said.

Now, these researchers are attempting to draw conclusions about planet formation and migration.   But, consider that a Creator God, in an instant, created it all, as it says in Genesis.   That is way, way too much to comprehend in our human brains, but again, the heavens provide a canvas on which God expresses His might and majesty.

Louie Giglio, founder of the Passion conferences, one of which is currently underway in Atlanta, shares these thoughts, recorded in a GodTube.com devotional from last September:

A God who created stars with the breath of his mouth could surely comprehend and overcome our struggles. What if instead of beginning prayer with requests for God, we began with meditating on His character? With remembering how He made the heavens and can collect the sea into jars. Remembering that He is the one who speaks things into existence, commands life to be still and it is still.

But our sin skews our image of God. In the shadow of our imperfections, selfishness and pride God is suddenly smaller and we are suddenly bigger. And when we are bigger than God, then how could we ever trust Him with our lives, current and future? Or resolve issues from our pasts? Life is up to us and God is just a part of it.

Consider our galaxy. Just the Milky Way galaxy alone is too huge to wrap your mind around. Even the size of the sun—that little blazing ball in the sky that we squint at has a surface level large enough to fit 960,000 of our little earths. God made the sun, and He made stars much, much bigger than the sun.

So when our circumstances seem too heavy to bear and our problems too big to fix, remember that the God you are praying to is the God of the entire universe. He has gone before your circumstances and has made a promise He is more than capable of fulfilling: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Is. 40:31, KJV).

That really says it all - God has created the heavens and the earth, and as we gaze into the skies, we can worship the maker of the skies and all that is in them.    The One who has incredible power, but is incredibly concerned with even the most minute detail of our lives - how great is our God!