by John Grant
“He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them.”
Psalm 147:4
According to a recently released study, our Milky Way is home to at least 17 billion planets that are similar in size to Earth. That’s more than two Earth-size planets for every person on the globe. They estimated at least one in six stars in the galaxy hosts a planet the size of ours, translating to at least 17 billion Earth-size worlds. If you look up on a starry night, each star you’re looking at, almost each one of them has a planetary system.
When I read that, I thought of a night we were at a game preserve in South Africa. It was a cloudless night and we were so far from civilization that there was no ambient light to reflect into the sky. To top it off, there was a total eclipse of the moon. We laid down on out backs and looked up. It was so dark that we were unable to see our hand in front of our face, but what we saw in the heavens… Oh my!
I have never seen anything like it.
I could only think of Psalm 8:9, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.”
Can’t you just picture David as a shepherd, sitting on some hillside in Judea one warm summer night, gazing up at the stars? It was just him, the sheep and the vast show that was the moon and stars.
He tells us in Psalm 147:4 that He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them. I couldn’t even begin to count what I saw, let alone giving them a name, but truly only a Creator could create what I saw with my naked eye.
He considered the heavens and the work of God’s fingers. He meditated on the glory and majesty of God’s power to create all that he was looking at. And he asks, ‘what is man that you are mindful of him?’
Have you ever done that? Looked up at the vastness of space and wondered why God ever bothers with you? No wonder we say along with David “God you created and maintain all this… and you are still mindful of man.”
Why? God is mindful of us. He thinks about us and cares for us. God is more interested in people than in planets. The God of the vastness of space is the God of the innermost place in our hearts. The amazing thing is the glory of God is not ultimately seen in the vastness of creation, but in His passion for us!
You can comment on this devotional online at:
http://thoughtsaboutgod.com/blog/2013/04/30/jg_what-he-has-ordained/
John Grant is a former Florida State Senator and is a practicing attorney