Majesty of God

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

To give these verses some perspective, the distance from one side of the universe to the other is an incredible 93 billion light-years. Using this as our measure, God likens the distance between our thoughts and his thoughts to the distance from one side of the universe to the other.

To put that immense number another way, 93 billion light-years is 544 septillion miles (544 followed by 20 zeros). Even if we tried to travel from one side of the universe to the other at the speed of light (5.88 trillion miles a year), it would take an infinite amount of time. That's because the universe will continue to expand whilst you are travelling, even at the speed of light. So, the edge of the universe will remain forever sealed off from you — even travelling at the speed of light.

That means that your best thought on your best day is ninety-three billion light-years short of how great God really is.

Possible Preaching Angles: Greatness of God; Omniscience of God; Trusting God – The immense wisdom, insight, and love of God should calm our fears. You may not understand your current crisis and worry about the outcome, but God is in control, His love for you is everlasting, His plan for you will happen, and you can rest secure that your Father is watching over you.

Astronomers have found the brightest known object in the universe—a glowing core of a galaxy, called a quasar, located 12 billion light-years away. Quasars are the brightest objects in the cosmos, each consisting of a supermassive black hole that’s actively devouring an orbiting disc of gas and dust. But the black hole in this record-setting quasar is gobbling up more than a sun’s-worth of mass every day, making it the fastest growing black hole scientists have ever seen.

The gargantuan object stretches about seven light-years across, and it puts our sun’s luminosity to shame—the quasar shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the star in our solar system.

Christian Wolf, lead author of the new study, said, “This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe. It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now.”

The black hole in the quasar is ravenous, consuming an amount of material equivalent to as much as 413 suns each year, and its black hole weighs about the same as 17 billion suns.

Wolf said, “It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second. He told reports that he doesn’t think anything will ever top this record for the universe’s brightest object.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This newly identified object is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun! How can anything be that bright? Thinking about this star gives us a sense of what the glorious presence of God is like, for Scripture says that God is a being who "lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

In his recent book, Paul Tripp describes a trip to the see world’s tallest skyscraper:

Wherever you go in Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet (just over half a mile) it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave you in mouth-gaping awe. As you move around Dubai, you see all of these buildings and you say to yourself again and again, "How in the world did they build that?" But the Burj Khalifa is on an entirely other scale.

Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing this structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of the other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those build­ings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one.

When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic looking elevator and, in what seemed like seconds, was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building, because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. Those "small" buildings were skyscrapers that, in any other city, would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit. They looked small, unimpressive, and not worthy of attention, let alone awe. I had experienced the greatest, which put what had impressed me before into proper perspective.

By means of God's revelation of himself in Scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God's perfection. There is no holiness as holy as God's holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon his holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory.

Scientists studying two different parts of God’s awesome creation—the oceans below and the sky above—have made two startling discoveries.

First, (in January 2022), an underwater mapping project off the coast of Tahiti took an unexpected twist. Deep sea explorers discovered a sprawling, two-mile long coral reef resembling a bed of roses. The remarkably well-preserved and pristine reef is the largest ever found at its depth. One scientist called it a “dream.”

Then, two months later (March 2022), astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a record-setting image showing the most distant individual star ever seen. The star lies 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. It is believed to be about 50 times as massive as the sun and millions of times brighter. The scientists expressed awe and surprise at their own discovery. Individual stars far from Earth are often too dim to be seen even with powerful telescopes. But Hubble was able to spot the massive star with help from “gravitational lensing,” in which light-bending gravity from massive celestial objects functions as a magnifying lens. The star was dubbed Earendel, which NASA said means “morning star” in Old English.

God’s creative ability truly is more wondrous than anything man can conceive. For example, the spider and its web elicit considerably more astonishment than the man-made intricate world wide web. The 48,000 known species of the spider were given an awe-filled treatment by the magazine New Scientist.

Weighing between 50 and 80 milligrams most spiders know how to plan ahead. They alter the size and structure of their webs according to the remaining silk reserves in their glands, ensuring that they don’t run out midway. They are also sensitive to the weather. In low temperatures, they make simpler structures with bigger gaps between the spirals to avoid spending too much time exposed to the cold.

Spiders are so adept in the manufacture of their webs, that in most cases the prey has no chance. They tweak the tension of silk strands to boost the transmission of vibrations from a struggling insect, allowing the spider to respond more quickly. They can even learn from near misses. If their prey hits the web but then escapes, spiders will lay down more sticky silk to ensure this doesn’t happen in future.

Like humans, spiders have a fondness for travel. Spider silk--the envy of human engineers--is put to a huge range of uses. This includes using it for a sort of flight known as “ballooning,” in which a few threads, lifted by electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, carry them far and wide on nothing more than a light breeze. Spiderlings are known to survive without food while travelling in air currents of jet streams for 25 days or longer.

Brett Baddorf, a missionary to the South Pole (yes, he lives and works at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station), has surprisingly discovered God’s incredible beauty in this remote place. Baddorf writes:

My best moments during the winter here … are spent walking outside where isolation and darkness meet. I pause to reflect on God’s vast infiniteness, gazing at a crystal-clear view of the Milky Way and at constellations invisible back home. Stepping outside into 90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit with an average 30-degree wind chill is daunting, but every moment in the wild I feel God’s overwhelming presence as I’m made aware of his transcendence.

I enjoy learning about the sciences that explore the vastness of space. But the more I learn, the more I see the intricate hand of God weaving the tapestry of the sky. One person on the station told me it was absurd amid all of this infinite wonder to believe in a God who would be bothered with such an inconsequential planet, let alone the people on it. Gazing into the unbridled magnificence of our galaxy, however, I felt anything but irrelevant to God. Quite the opposite. I felt God’s tender grasp.

The most unique of my outdoor experiences at the South Pole has been standing beneath the Aurora Australis. Even with a scientific understanding of what causes this phenomenon, it is easy to stand in awe of a Creator who moves beyond simple function and into indescribable beauty—it is entirely possible God is doing both at the same time. Watching as wild green curtains dance above a barren and inhospitable landscape, one cannot help but wonder if God reserves some of the more marvelous masterpieces for the few who strive to the furthest corners of this world.

In Star Struck, David Bradstreet shares the following examples of the wonder of God's creation:

When the summer sun is beating down, do you ever wish you could store some of that heat in a jar until wintertime? Perhaps that's one of the reasons God created the oceans, which cover three-fourths of the surface of our planet at an average depth of more than two miles. The oceans help regulate our planet's temperatures, turning dramatic highs and lows into averages that are just right for us.

Like oxygen, liquid water is essential to life. And while almost every other planet we've studied lacks flowing liquid water, our world is awash in the stuff, some 352, 670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, according to the National Ocean Service.

And like convection—the process God uses to circulate our air and keep it fresh—our planet's water cycle constantly circulates our water, which evaporates from the ocean, rains down on the land, and then flows back to the ocean to do it all over again.

Think for a moment about the mysteries of just one of God's creatures—a whale. These big, beautiful creatures spend 95 percent of their lives in the ocean, one of the deepest and darkest places we know about. And without warning, they pull 30,000 pounds of blubber against gravity and leap out of the water for unexplainable reasons. Some baby whales gain 100 pounds an hour while nursing. The song of a humpback whale, lasting for 10-20 minutes and being repeated for hours at a time, is produced for no apparent reason. Biologists speculate it may be related to mating, but truthfully no is quite sure. The reason they breach is also a mystery. For show? For mating? For fun? There are speculations, but no one really knows why.

Behold them for a second and you feel helpless, out of control; not the terrible kind of helplessness, but the beautiful kind where we feel small and God feels big, and the mysteries of the world are acceptable to be unexplained.

Writer Philip Hoare tried to describe his sense of awe as a huge finback whale swam underneath his ocean vessel:

In that one motion, my entire presence is undermined. I feel, rather than see, this eighty-foot animal swimming below. Knowing it is there tugs at my gut, and something inside makes me want to plunge in and dive with it to some unfathomable depth where no one would ever find us.

The March/April 2016 issue of Psychology Today attempted to give readers several reasons to cultivate a sense of awe and wonder with their article "It's Not All About You!" The article mentioned the following secular sources about our need for awe and wonder:

• University of Pennsylvania researchers defined awe as the "emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self."
• A popular theoretical physicist wrote: "Awe gives you an existential shock. You realize that you are hardwired to be a little selfish, but you are also dependent on something bigger than yourself." Being enraptured is a way "to remove the tyranny of the ego."
• Therapist Robert Leahy, PhD writes: "Awe is the opposite of rumination. It clears away inner turmoil with a wave of outer immensity."
• Social scientists have found that when people experience a sense of awe, they feel more empathetic and more connected with others. One scientist concluded, "Wonder pulls us together—a counterforce to all that seems to be tearing us apart."
• The Wharton School of Business evaluated the New York Times' most emailed articles and found that the ones that evoked awe were the most shared.

Author Philip Yancey describes a moment of profound wonder and awe in Alaska's wilderness. He was driving down the road when he came upon a number of cars pulled off to the edge of the highway. Like any of us would have done, he stopped to see what everyone was looking at. Yancey describes the scene:

Against the slate-gray sky, the water of an ocean inlet had a slight greenish cast, interrupted by small whitecaps. Soon I saw these were not whitecaps at all, but whales—silvery white beluga whales in a pod feeding no more than fifty feet offshore. I stood with the other onlookers for forty minutes, listening to the rhythmic motion of the sea, following the graceful, ghostly crescents of surfacing whales. The crowd was hushed, even reverent. For just that moment, nothing else—dinner reservations, the trip schedule, life back home—mattered. We were confronted with a scene of quiet beauty and a majesty of scale. We felt small. We strangers stood together in silence until the whales moved farther out. Then we climbed the bank together and got in our cars to resume our busy, ordered lives that suddenly seemed less urgent.

You may feel as if you are sitting still right now, but it's an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Every 24 hours, planet Earth pulls off a celestial 360. We're also hurtling through space at an average velocity of 67,108 miles per hour. That's not just faster than a speeding bullet. It's 87 times faster than the speed of sound. So even on a day when you feel like you didn't get much done, don't forget that you did travel 1,599,793 miles through space! To top things off, the Milky Way is spinning like a galactic pinwheel at the dizzying rate of 483,000 mph.

If that isn't miraculous, I don't know what is. Yet when was the last time you thanked God for keeping us in orbit? I'm guessing you've never prayed, "Lord, I wasn't sure we'd make the full rotation today, but You did it again"! We just don't pray that way. And that is the ultimate irony: we already believe God for the big miracles like they're no big deal. The trick is trusting him for the little ones.

Humans have devised many scales of measurement. We measure height or length in terms of inches, yards, and meters. We weigh objects in pounds and ounces. We divide time from millennia all the way down to nanoseconds (one-billionth of a second). We measure temperature down to absolute zero (0 degrees Kelvin or minus 459.7 degrees Fahrenheit)

But you may not be aware of these strange measurements:

• The Smoot: As almost every MIT student knows, a smoot is a unit of length equal to five feet seven inches. In 1958, a 5 foot 7 inch tall fraternity pledge named Oliver Smoot agreed to be used to measure the Harvard Bridge which connects Boston and Cambridge. After repeatedly lying down on the bridge and having his position marked in chalk, it turned out that the bridge was 364.4 smoots (and an ear) long. Google now offers the option to measure anything in smoots.
• The "Just a Moment": Whenever somebody asks you to do something and you reply "just a moment," don't think you're being sneaky by not giving them a precise time. You're not. A moment was a measurement of time used during the medieval period that's roughly equal to one and a half minutes.
• The Scoville: The Scoville Scale is used to measure the amount of capsaicin in chilies, because it's important to know the exact temperature of the inferno that's raging in your mouth. For example, the Scolville rates a pimento (100-500), cayenne pepper (30,000-50,000), the Carolina reaper (1,000,000), and law enforcement pepper spray (5,000,000) on the scale.

Possible Preaching Angles: Certain things about God and our live in Christ are completely beyond our measurement instruments—God's power, God's grace, our inheritance, Christ's riches, the value of Christ's blood, God's infinity, eternal life.

Manhattan, New York, pastor Tim Keller once said that in 1970 a Sunday school teacher changed his life with a simple illustration.

The teacher said, "Let's assume the distance between the earth and the sun (92 million miles) was reduced to the thickness of this sheet of paper. If that is the case, then the distance between the earth and the nearest star would be a stack of papers 70 feet high. And the diameter of the galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high."

Then Keller's teacher added, "The galaxy is just a speck of dust in the universe, yet Jesus holds the universe together by the word of his power."

Finally, the teacher asked her students, "Now, is this the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?"

In 1969, in a science lab in New Jersey, Canadian physicist Willard Boyle and his colleagues invented the concept of an electronic eye. Using their knowledge of mathematics and the behaviour of light they provided the science behind digital cameras known as a charged-coupled device or CCD. The CCD technology revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. CCD technology is used on the Hubble telescope and the Mars Lunar probe. It was Boyle's invention that allowed us to see the surface of Mars for the first time. In 2009 Boyle was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

A few years after the original invention of CCD technology, Boyle walked into a store to purchase a new digital camera based on his invention. During the visit, the salesman tried to explain the intricacies of the digital camera, but stopped, feeling it was too complicated for his customer to understand. According to one long-time friend, Boyle was normally a humble man, but on this occasion he was taken aback by the salesman's arrogance and disrespect. So Boyle bluntly replied: "No need to explain. I invented it." When the salesman didn't believe him, Boyle told the salesman to type "Willard S. Boyle" into his computer and see for himself. A Nikon representative in the store heard the exchange and immediately came over to have his photograph taken with the famous inventor.

At times we almost act like that impatient salesman in our relationship with God. We tell God how life works or how we think it should work. But God simply and confidently responds, "No need to explain. I invented life."

Suppose you were exploring an unknown Greenland glacier in the dead of winter. Just as you reach the sheer cliff with a spectacular view of miles of jagged ice and mountains of snow, a terrible storm breaks in. The wind is so strong that the fear rises in your heart that it might blow you over the cliff. But in the midst of the storm you discover a cleft in the ice where you can hide. Here you feel secure.

But, even though secure, the awesome might of the storm rages on, and you watch it with a kind of trembling pleasure as it surges out across the distant glaciers. Not everything we call fear vanishes from your heart, only the life-threatening part. There remains the trembling, the awe, the wonder, the feeling that you would never want to tangle with such a storm or be the adversary of such a power.

And so it is with God. The fear of God is what is left of the storm when you have a safe place to watch right in the middle of it. Hope turns fear into a trembling and peaceful wonder; and fear takes everything trivial out of hope and makes it earnest and profound. The terrors of God make the pleasures of his people intense. The fireside fellowship is all the sweeter when the storm is howling outside the cottage.

Colin Smith addresses people who object to God's judgment on sin:

You may say, "Wait a minute. How can any sin deserve everlasting destruction? If God is just, how can he punish like this?"

The best answer I ever heard to that question was given by a friend of mine who is a middle school pastor. He outlined the stages of the following scenario:

Suppose a middle school student punches another student in class. What happens? The student is given a detention. Suppose during the detention, this boy punches the teacher. What happens? The student gets suspended from school. Suppose on the way home, the same boy punches a policeman on the nose. What happens? He finds himself in jail. Suppose some years later, the very same boy is in a crowd waiting to see the President of the United States. As the President passes by, the boy lunges forward to punch the President. What happens? He is shot dead by the secret service.

In every case the crime is precisely the same, but the severity of the crime is measured by the one against whom it is committed. What comes from sinning against God? Answer: Everlasting destruction.

As a researcher and physician, Francis Collins' credentials and accomplishments are well-respected in the scientific community. He headed up the Human Genome Project before serving as the Director of the National Institutes of Health. In 2007 he also wrote a New York Times best-selling book, The Language of God, which weaves together the story of his work as a world-renowned scientist and his journey from atheism to faith in Christ.

Interestingly, although Collins is thoroughly committed to rational inquiry and the scientific method, God also used people and nature to lead Collins to Christ. As a gifted medical student, Collins thought it was "convenient to not have to deal with God." But then, after one of his patients told Collins about her faith, she asked him, "What about you? What do you believe?" In Collin's own words, "I stuttered and stammered and felt the color rising in my face, and I said, 'Well, I don't think I believe in anything.' But it suddenly seemed like a very thin answer. And that was unsettling."

Then after a long period of searching, which included grilling a pastor and reading C.S. Lewis, Collins finally came to Christ after watching the beauty of creation. This is Collin's description of that life-changing encounter:

I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

In his book Soul Searching, Christian Smith summarized perceptions about God that are prevalent in the church and in contemporary culture. He said that most young evangelicals believed in what could best be described as "moral, therapeutic deism" (we could also call this viewpoint "the Santa Claus god").

Moral implies that God wants us to be nice. He rewards the good and withholds from the naughty.

Therapeutic means that God just wants us to be happy.

Deism means that God is distant and not involved in our daily lives. God may get involved occasionally, but on the whole, God functions like an idea not a personal being actively present in our world.

According to Smith, this is the version of God that's prevalent in our culture and in our churches. Often without realizing it, every culture quietly molds and shapes our views of God. But we can't grow in our relationship with God when we insist on relating to God as we think he should be. It's the same way in our human relationships: if I demand that you just meet my needs and conform to my assumptions about you, you will probably feel cheapened and manipulated.

That's why our surrender to God-as-he-is, as revealed in the Bible, is so important. Otherwise, we will have a god of our own imaginations—and, embarrassingly, our American god is an obese, jolly toymaker who works one day a year.