The Gift of God
Have you ever been outside on a cloudless night and admired the stars? Aren’t they amazing? Ever tried to count them? I have tried to count the stars, and every time my efforts end quickly, realizing again that there are too many. God made every single star. He named them and He knows exactly how many there are. Psalms 147:4 says “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”
So how many stars are there? A group of astronomers based at the Australian National University have calculated the number of stars as 70 sextillion — 7 followed by 22 zeros — and those are just the ones we’ve found so far. In case you’re wondering, 70 sextillion is 10 times as much as the number of grains of sand on all the world’s beaches and deserts. And yet God knows all these and has named them! Isn’t amazing that God still cares about us? And He has no idle curiosity in us: He knows everything about us! He knows the minutia of our lives, from where we go, when we sit, where we sleep, what we say, (Psalm 139: 1 – 4) and the very number of hairs on your head. (Matthew 10:30)
It boggles the mind! I have tried to comprehend this — the sheer power and knowledge of God, the fact that he knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything, and I am overwhelmed! I can only say with the psalmist, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, I cannot attain unto it.” God knew about each one of us before we were even born, ordaining us for a certain time and purpose, as God says in Jeremiah 1:5.
Even though He could have been counting the stars or creating new galaxies with a single command, God saw you before you were even born . . . and fell in love with you. With all our flaws and blemishes, He loved us enough to come to earth and die for us. He didn’t have too. He could have wiped us all off the face of the earth, and he would have been justified. As it says in Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” There are no exceptions, no room for debate. Therefore we all deserve to die. We broke the law, and we deserve punishment. But thank God the story doesn’t end there! Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” God paid the price that we couldn’t pay. He died for us so that we can live forever with Him in paradise! That is unwarranted mercy. That is unmerited favor. That is amazing.
That’s a pretty clear path through scripture: from the scale of God’s grandeur to the depths of amazement we should have at his attentions to us, all the way to the value and measure of salvation. All of it foretold, all of it documented, all of it preserved.
Let’s make all of it appreciated and acted upon!
amazing to realize that He does know us like that. Thank you for this article. Really made me think.
The comparison/contrast is a great way to look at it. The numbers you through out there put it in perspective. It’s good to be amazed at His love from time to time.