Our Infinite and Intimate God: How Size Reveals God’s Power and Personal Care
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Many years ago, as I was sharing the gospel with my friend Steve, he made a comment I’ve never forgotten. Speaking of the relative size of the earth to the enormity of the universe, he said that he had difficulty believing that God would target our little planet for any special care.
His remark has stayed with me over time. Are Christians pretentious to claim that men and women bear the image of the Creator of all things and that God Himself became a man and lived on earth?
These questions haunted me. While not upending my faith, they sometimes came into my mind like an unwelcome guest, entering unannounced and whispering dark and dangerous taunts.
And then something occurred to me I had never before considered: Size is inconsequential to God. He exists outside of the universe He made; He does not dwell within it. A Being Who could speak the universe into existence is unconcerned with the human conception of magnitude and places no special value on what to us seems incomprehensible and virtually limitless.
Additionally, size is a very relative thing. For example, NASA’s Kepler telescope was launched in 2009 and was used for nine years to explore the Milky Way galaxy. NASA reports that “astronomers using data from (the Kepler telescope) estimate that at least 100 billion planets populate the galaxy.”[1]
And just how many galaxies are there? Astronomers now estimate that within the observable universe, there are 1.2 trillion of them. And how large is the observable universe? Dr Alastair Gunn, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, has written it is “a sphere with a diameter of about 92 billion lightyears and a volume of about 410 nonillion (410 thousand billion billion billion) cubic lightyears!”[2]
Feeling small?
Don’t feel overwhelmed quite yet. You see, the human body is like a universe unto itself. The American Museum of Natural History reports that “the human body contains about a billion billion billion (10^27) atoms.” Compound this by the 8.3 billion people live today, and you get an almost incalculable number.[3]
Putting all of this into perspective, it’s clear that from the smallest possible entity to the farthest reaches of the universe, God has created things to scale – His scale. His understanding of size and distance is unlike ours. His power and knowledge are immeasurable. He created everything, and the Lord Jesus Christ keeps all things together – every atom and every galaxy – simply through the exercise of His will (Hebrews 1:3).
This is the God of Whom Solomon spoke at the dedication of the first temple in Jerusalem: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You; how much less this house that I have built!” (I Kings 8:27). Yet this same God is the One Who knows when small birds plunge to earth and has counted each strand of hair on every head (Matthew 10:29-30). He provides for lowly ravens and beautifies even wildflowers (Luke 12:24-28).
More than this, His knowledge of us – each of us – is intimate, so personal that, as with the size of the universe, we cannot grasp it fully. As David writes in Psalm 139), “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” This metaphor for the womb speaks to the reality that from conception onward, the human person is so precious to God that he miraculously causes virtually invisible embryos to become babies, children, and adults.
Yet David doesn’t stop there. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” Not only has God formed the trillions of planets and stars, He has formed every person, living and dead, from Adam to the present, and has placed boundaries on their beginnings and ends. This is why a humbled David cries out, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it!”
In His great mercy, the Father’s Son willingly came to our morally corroded world to proclaim good news, heal the sick, model life abundant, assume our guilt, and take into Himself the penalty for sin we all deserve (II Corinthians 5:21). Having risen from the dead, He “always lives to make intercession” for us (Hebrews 7:25).
This same Lord will return to “make all things new” and create “a new heavens and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1-5). Void of sin and magnificent in eternal freshness, all who have trusted in Christ alone for forgiveness and new life can anticipate this day “with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (I Peter 1:8). In the present, the God Who sustains every molecule in our bodies wants a relationship with us, a close fellowship through His Word, His Spirit, and His people.
Were I to revisit that long-ago conversation with Steve, I would draw his attention to these remarkable truths with the prayer that the Lord would use them to open his eyes. Eternity awaits – and for those who know Christ, there will be so much to see.
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/billions-and-billions-of-planets/
[2] https://esahubble.org/videos/heic1620a/; https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/how-many-galaxies-in-universe
[3] https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/scales-of-the-universe/atoms; https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
