How Great Thou Art! Part 2
This is part 2 of a series about the greatness of God. You may read part 1 here.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. (Ps 19:1)
If we look to the heavens, our solar system, and the universe beyond, we begin to get a glimpse of the majesty of God. The diameter of our Earth is about 12,756.2 kilometers or 7,926.3 miles, a mere speck compared to the sun at 1,391,000.0 kilometers. We revolve around our sun at a mean distance of 149.6 million kilometers. Our solar system has a mean diameter of 11,826 million kilometers, yet ours is one of the smaller solar systems. And moving out, our nearest star is 40,454,400 million kilometers away!
Those numbers are hard to grasp, so let’s put that in perspective. On a scale where the sun is just 32 inches in diameter, our Earth would be a tiny bead 0.3 inches in diameter. And we would be spinning around about 29 feet away from our tiny sun. Mars would be 44 feet away from the sun and Pluto, the farthest away, would be 1,141 feet away. You could fit the whole solar system in the average sports stadium. So, on that scale, where do you suppose our nearest star would be? If we started walking from Foundry church, how far would we have to walk to reach that scaled down nearest star? Maybe to the county line? Or perhaps all the way to Portland? Would it be beyond the state line, off in Idaho somewhere? No, keeping to the above scale, to reach our near star you would have to walk almost all the way to Dallas, Texas. Or Anchorage, Alaska. That's our nearest neighbor, right close to home.
Size of the universe
Our solar system is just a small speck in the universe. The distance from the moon to the earth is 1.3 light-seconds. In other words, it takes 1.3 seconds for light from the moon to reach the earth. In contrast, our nearest star is 4.3 light-years away. (That’s 135,604,800 light-seconds.) The time to reach our nearest star, travelling at the current max speed of a spacecraft, is 72,000 years. That’s our nearest neighbor. The most distant star discovered is more than a billion light-years from Earth.
Is that a problem? Some estimate that the earth is about 6,000 years old, yet it takes more than a billion years for light to reach earth from a distant star. But notice in Genesis chapter one that God created light on the first day of creation, and then later created the stars on the fourth day. The star is not the source of the light, God is.
Is star travel possible? Would you like to take a trip to the nearest star? The trip should take 72,000 years. That’s possibly longer, way longer, than the world has been in existence.
O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!