WARNING: By beginning to read this article, you are committing yourself to a really long post! You may want to take a break in the middle, but I encourage you to wait until you have enough time and stamina to make it through. ;)
Ok, so we all know that God is great, right? We know that He’s bigger than the universe, but still sees the sparrow fall. We know that nothing is out of His control, and His timing is always best. We say these things in church all the time, and we believe it wholeheartedly. But do we really comprehend the vast truth of what we’re saying? Does it really sink in? Well, in this post, I’m going to try to paint a bigger picture by splicing together many Scriptures and thoughts of my own to express, in my feeble, human capacity, how awesome and powerful our God really is. It might help if you read it a bit slower than normal just to let the words sink in. It actually impacted me more when I was writing it than when I went back to read it over.
I first want to take a look through the eyes of David in Psalm 139. In this psalm, David expresses the immense reach of God’s presence, His omnipresence. He begins by expressing to God his wonder at the fact that God knows him better than he knows himself. “O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.” So, God knows when we sit down and when we stand back up… He knows when we walk… when we run, cook, go to work, come home from work, put gas in our car, and on and on. He knows what we are going to say before even we know!
Our first reaction may be to think that God has much better things to do than pay attention to our every move, no matter how insignificant. But that’s the first thing our minds can stretch around: God is SO powerful and SO knowledgable and SO huge and So mighty and SO cool that He can keep an eye on the world governments, go about setting up the end-time events, keep the stars in their place, and work miracles all across the world, and still pay attention to every little thing that we do!! And not just each of us, but every single one of the six to ten BILLION people that inhabit this Earth (there are conflicting reports on just how many live here). And He doesn’t just know what we do, He knows exactly how many hairs are on your head AND–get this–how long each one of them is, in both the English and Metric systems of measurement (am I wrong?). That, and He knows exactly how many molecules make up each strand of hair. He knows how many times your heart beats in a day, how much blood is flowing in your veins, how well you can hear, what your IQ is, how much of your brain is in use, how many scars are on your body, and when the last time was that you washed your socks. And of course, He knows things about us that science and medicine have not yet discovered to even exist! Yes, David, you are right, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. No doubt about it.
Have I lost you yet? Is your head hurting? Did you know that that was only four verses of the Bible? Did you know that there are 31,169 more verses that I haven’t looked at yet? Don’t worry, I won’t go through them all. I honestly hope you’re confused, because God’s not. And that’s part of understanding how great and deep and wide God’s power is. Moving on…(take a deep breath…maybe blink a couple of times…pinch yourself)
In this chapter (Psalm 139), David goes on to say that God is absolutely everywhere. He is in front of us, behind us, beside us, above us, around us, and inside us. We could travel to the ends of the Earth, fly to the greatest heights that an airplane or rocket could take us, dive to the greatest depths that a submarine could take us, and visit any so-called “Godforsaken” place, and still be no further away from God than we are when we’re at church! The psalmist even went so far as to say, “If I make my bed in Hell, behold, thou art there.” Yes, God is absolutely everywhere. A song says that He’s “out beyond the furthest morning star, yet close enough to hold me in [His] arms.”
Let’s just get the picture of that last line. Do you really have any idea how big the universe is? First of all, anyone who has travelled this Earth knows full well how big it is. Last year, four of us guys drove down to St. Petersburg, Florida, from Rochester, MN. By rotating drivers and making minimal stops, we made it in just under 24 hours. That was a LONG drive. That was around 1,500 miles of driving! Think about that. BUT if we were to drive around the equator (24,900 miles) at the same rate we were traveling that day, it would have taken us 365 hours, or 15 and a half days!! I’m glad we weren’t doing that. Earth is HUGE, ok? But look at how small Earth appears in this picture taken from Mars http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/ (<—- you have to click there)It’s that tiny blue dot at the top of the first picture on that page. But the distance between Earth’s orbit and Mars’ is very small when compared to the size of our entire solar system. And the size of our solar system compared to the size of the Milky Way Galaxy is about the same comparison as a grain of sand compared to this Earth. But even that great, big, ginormous galaxy gets lost in the vastness of space. Take a few MILLION similar sized galaxies that are relatively close to each other out in space, and you’ve got what they call a cluster. There are empty spaces between these clusters of galaxies which span countless lightyears, but if you can zoom out far enough, you can see that even the clusters gather together to form separate superclusters. That’s as far as I know about how big space is. But science is in general agreement that the universe is essentially endless. Watch this http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/ and maybe watch it again, just to let it sink in. It begins 10 million lightyears away from our galaxy and ends looking deep into the subatomic world of quarks that only the most brilliant minds on our planet can theorize about. And even that far-out view is only a small portion of this glorious universe that God has created and put us in.
Ok, now, pick up the remnants of your brain which have probably burst forth from your head after trying to fathom all that, and think on this: God is so big that He can hold that universe in the palm of His hand. Now, how could a God like that still see a sparrow fall??? How could a God with enough imagination, creativity, and power to create all of that still know how many hairs are on my head? How could He spare any time to lover me? “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? (Psalm 8:3-4)” Well spoken, David. How do you compete with that? What could we possibly do to compare to that grandeur? What are we that God would even know we exist? I don’t know, but He knows. In fact, though we are but a speck on a speck on a wall of a palace in God’s great creation, He values us above all things! And when He decided to come to Earth, He chose to come as a human, like you and me. Crazy, huh?
He loves us that much!!!
Bro. Brent Keating did a wonderful job Thursday night at Youth Congress conveying a whole bunch more of God than what I’ve written about here. If you weren’t there, you should try to track down the DVD. He mentioned God’s response to Job’s attempts at self-justification. God goes on for four chapters (38-41) asking Job some very humbling questions like, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Have you been responsible for making the sun come up every day of your life? Do you command all the great constellations, and do you tell the stars where to go? Can you design every different animal to serve a unique purpose? Can you tame behemoth and leviathon?” And on and on He goes. Clearly, the answer is, no, man has no real power, God rules and reigns. He commands and ordains. He is powerful above all creation.
The psalmist again asserts God’s power in Psalm 29, and instructs us to give all glory to Almighty God to which He is most definitely entitled. Read it for yourself. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=23&chapter=29&version=9
I could go on and on with this topic, and a part of me really wants to see just how much of God I can fathom if I set my mind to it, despite my knowledge that I’ll never be able to come close to fully wrapping my mind around Him. But the thing I really want to bring this home to is the fact that God still values us above all His other creations. He gave man dominion over the creatures of the Earth, both plant and animal. And now He has given us dominion over the evil forces in this world through the power of the Holy Ghost. I Peter 5:7 says, “Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you.”
In summary: God is wonderfully, incredibly, exponentially, awesomely, hugely, and a whole bunch of other -lys PERFECT! And He loves us with an EVERLASTING love (Jer 31:3)! And He has ALL power in the universe (Matt 28:18). So, now that we’ve read this, (and even followed up on your own. hint, hint), we should have no right to ever doubt God’s promises; no right to fear the enemy; no right to think that He could never forgive our sins. He loves us, cares for us, is faithful, will supply all our needs, give us strength, power, authority, and protection, lead us beside still waters, restore us, heal our hurts, save our families, friends, co-workers, cities! He will pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, call you into the ministry, give you strength for the ministry you’re already in. He’ll give you peace and joy within, He’ll give you victory over your struggles! He’ll hold you in His arms, when you’re weak and hurting, He’ll give you strength to live righteously, and boldness to share this blessed gospel with those around you!
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to drop to your knees and thank Him for His goodness, and commit yourself to Him anew.
Smile! Jesus loves you!
Wow! That was a fantastic read. Good use of links to visuals. I would try to add something to what you have written, but I think that I would just ruin it. Good work!
Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate your appreciation. :) But I don’t really think you would ruin this by adding to it. In fact, there are so many dimensions of God that if we were to go into and explore every one of them, all of cyberspace could not hold what would be written. Even so, it is a dream I have (though I’m not really working towards its achievement) to go through the Bible verse by verse and examine, in similar detail to what I have done here, everything about God you can glean from each verse. Because I believe that most of the verses in the Bible can have countless applications in our lives, and you can never exhaust God’s power. You can never study Him enough.