Wow, Talk About A Big God!

I've been reading a book by Thomas Dubay called The Evidential Power of Beauty, that has stirred my imagination and caused me to revel in the bigness of the God we serve. Having recently recorded teachings from the book of Job, where God reminds Job of all He has created (Job 38-39), this information was particularly encouraging in understanding more about how big the God is who manges the details of our lives.

Did you know these things:

Our earth is a little over 8000 miles in diameter.
Over a million earths would fit into our sun.
Our home galaxy, The Milky Way, has 2 or 3 billion stars like our sun. (Actually, our sun is a small star compared to many.)
It would take a jet 100,000 million years to make the trip around our galaxy once.
It would take that same jet 5.5 million years to travel one-way to Alpha Centauri, the other nearest neighbor we have in this galaxy.
Our known universe is 12-15 lightyears to its edges. (Remember that light travels at 186,000 miles per second and a lightyear is the distance light can travel in a year.)
Scientists have recently discovered the largest galaxy thus far known. Abell 2029 is sixty times the size of our own and possesses more than 100 trillion stars. It is a billion light-years from us.

Someone has estimated that there are about 10,000 grains in a handful of sand. There are more stars in our universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.

The Hubble Telescope suggests that there are more than 50 billion galaxies in the universe with each having 2-4 billion stars.

Astonomer Chet Raymo wrote that it would take 10,000 boxes of salt to have as many grains as there are stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. Rembember, this is one of 50 billion galaxies.

The largest star discovered thus far is Betelgeuse, which is about 500 times the size of our sun. (Remember that over a million earths would fit into our sun.)

My brain spins thinking of all this, does yours? The psalmist said, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Psalm 8:3-4) I suppose his brain would have exploded if he had had the benefit of the Hubble Telescope.

Wow, what a big God we serve! And to think, he knows and cares about you and me individually. It's mind-boggling.

Check out this link and look at where you live: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html