Most of us have never travelled more than 500 miles per hour. That’s a good clip, isn’t it? At that rate you can get from New York to Paris in 7 hours; pretty good if consider that for most of human history it would have taken months.
In the context of the universe, however, that speed is useless. For instance, to set out, at that speed, for the nearest star outside our solar system, it would take about 5 million years. Even if we upped the speed to what our fastest rockets can do, it would still take 100,000 years.
The universe is so large that scientist mark distances in light years, the distance that light, at 186,000 miles per second, would travel in a year. It comes out to six trillion miles. That’s 6,000,000,000,000. But that’s the measurements needed to deal with the distances that the universe we find ourselves immersed in demands.
Our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years across. That’s just our own galaxy. The distance to some of the galaxies closest to us are, mind-bogglingly, millions of light years away. Some of the most distant are billions of light years away.
And, yet—what does the Bible teach? It’s captured in this famous text: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16. In other words, the God who created this vast cosmos, and not only created but sustains it (Hebrews 1:3)--God loves this world, this speck amid the billions-of-lights-years wide cosmos, that He came down in the person of Jesus and died for us, regardless of how small, size-wise, in contrast to the universe itself.
That’s kind of hard to wrap our minds around but, to the extent that we can grasp it, and believe it—no wonder that we should shout Hallelujah!
Because, obviously, in the eyes of God—size does not matter.
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