The Magnitude of God

As I drive to my first stop in the morning and as I drive back from my last stop in the afternoon I have a fair amount of time to let my mind wander, usually about God or what I had been discussed on Wretched Radio that day (which is always about God and theology.) For the past few weeks I have been thinking about the magnitude of our God.

Not that anyone wants to know but I am 5' 7" tall, compared to most people I know, I am short. I am telling you what my perspective of height and size are. Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet (about 5.5 miles) above sea level and the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is 35,840 feet (about 6.8 miles) below sea level. These are the highest and the deepest points on our planet. This is absolutely amazing and hard to fathom these heights, but that is not all the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. The earth is also home to 6.7 billion people. That kind of make me feel insignificant, but my mind does not stay there, it keeps going.

Now the Earth's volume can fit into the volume of Jupiter a thousand times and Jupiter can fit into the volume of the Sun a thousand times. Feeling small yet? Our solar system is 3.7 billion miles across. But wait there's more! As my mind expands out we not have to switch measurement scales, we now need to use the speed of light. Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles per second (light can travel 7.5 times around the Earth in one second!) A light year is 5.9 trillion miles and our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars. Our closest galactic neighbor is Andromeda, which is 2 million light years away. I read recently that the Hubble Space Telescope has a current viewable distance of about 12 billion light years. There are millions of galaxies out there, we will never be able to say definitively how large the universe is and how many galaxies there are.

I know that this is a lot data and it is hard to comprehend the scope of it all, but I do have a point. In Isaiah 40:12, Isaiah tells us that God measures the universe in the span of His hand. There are millions of galaxies with billions of stars in them and Psalms 147:4-5 tells us that He not only knows the number of the stars but also knows the name of each one. God also knows each and every person that has lived, is living, and will live on this Earth. God also knows the number of hairs on each person's head, your head (Matt 10:30.) Are you starting to see the magnitude of God?

God commands the galaxies to form, and their stars to shine, and they do. He commands planets to form around the stars, and they do. He commands the mountains to rise and the ocean's depths to drop, and they do. He commands the seas to go only so far and the wind to blow, and they do. He commands storms to form and to dissipate, and they do. All of Creation obeys the commands of it's Creator, all but one group. Humans, the one part of Creation that God created with the ability to appreciate and enjoy the rest of Creation and to glorify and worship God as a result. But what happens? God calls us to to obey and glorify him and we say "NO! I want to do things MY way!" Woe to us rebels, God clearly laid out his commands and we all fail to meet his standards. He is so Holy and so Righteous and so Just that He cannot have sin, our disobedience, in His presence.

We have all fallen short of His standard. When we have lied, stolen, and taken his His name in vain He see us as lying, thieving, blasphemers. God also sees our thought life as well. In Matthew 5:27-28 Jesus tells us that just looking with lust (sexual desire) is adultery of the heart, and in verses 21-22 we are told that even being unjustly angry is murder of the heart. Who of us has not broken these commandments? Being guilty of these God sees us as lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterers and murders at heart, and these are just five of the ten commandments! The first five commandments deal directly with God himself. Have any of us always put God first in their lives? How many of us have fashioned an incorrect view of God in our minds?

As the Bible says, God is Holy, Righteous and Just and must punish sin eternally (for a description of Biblical hell view this post I wrote about it.) But God also has other attributes such as Mercy and Grace. God wants to show His mercy and grace but cannot just universally hand it out because He is a Just Judge. The Law has been broken by all men and the fine needs to be paid. We have to stand in front of this huge and mighty God. How can we justify ourselves, we can't.

God sent the Son, Jesus, to be the payment for all sin, all transgression of God's Law. Jesus was crucified and suffered the full wrath of God as payment for all of our sins. Jesus willingly walked into the court room and paid our fine. How great a sacrifice! The God who measures the universe with the span of his hand paid the fine! In order to receive forgiveness we need to respond to Jesus and his sacrifice in repentance and faith. Repentance is a turning from and forsaking of all sin and asking for forgiveness from God. Faith is putting your full trust in Jesus that he has saved you, like trusting a parachute when jumping from a plane. If you do this God will change you from the inside making you a new creature with new desires. All of the sinful things that you used to love you will start to hate and the things you used to hate, like read the Bible and going to church, you will start to desire.

I beg you, if you have not responded to God's grace and forgiveness on His terms, please do it! Think of all of your sins, your rebellion against God, and then think of His sacrifice on the cross. While we were and are sinners He still died for us to make that payment for sin. Let that burden crush you, then call out to God for forgiveness in repentance and faith!



"Peace to all of you who are in Christ." (1 Peter 5:14 ESV)

--The Wretch