Growing up in New York City, I rarely saw more than a few stars when I looked up at the night sky. But all of this changed for me on one amazing night over 50 years ago when I went on a high school trip as a senior to upstate New York. We must have drove on a chartered bus for seven or eight hours to St. Lawrence County, near the Canadian border on our field trip. I don’t remember much about the trip except for the moment we arrived and I looked up at the night sky. For it was then, as a 17 year-old atheist, I stood in awe at the hundreds of stars shining brightly above me. It wasn’t until about ten years later that I made the connection between the majesty of nature with that of our almighty God who puts these stars in their place.
Little did I realize on that special night that perhaps for the first time in my life, I was viewing God’s majesty on display, yet without knowing it. Back then this canopy of stars, while awesome, were to me just mindless points of light. It was only after I gave my life to Jesus in 1981 that I understood what Billy Graham meant when he said: “Look up on a starry night, and you will see the majesty and power of an infinite Creator.”1
When we read in Scripture: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1), we can see how the stars are a true testament to the glory of God in two special ways.
First, while back in biblical times, we knew very little about the science of the stars. This, however, didn’t impact man’s awe at the sight of these distant bodies of light. In fact, mankind was so fascinated by the stars that he grouped them into constellations and marveled and pondered over their majesty. If the ancients only knew what we now know about stars, I believe their awe and fascination would be even greater.
The second aspect, that to me generates even greater amazement and awe, is our modern scientific knowledge of the stars. First, the ancients could never have imagined the sheer number of stars in our universe. Most modern astronomers believe that there are billions of galaxies just like our own Milky Way galaxy. If we were to estimate 100 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars, we would have 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Clearly it is not humanly possible to count these many stars. Second, biblical star gazers could never have fathomed how distant these stars in the night were to them. The stars they saw were so far away that they had to be measured in terms of light-years away. A light-year is equal to a distance of approximately 6 trillion miles, and the closet star to the earth, other than our sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away. That would make it a mere 25 trillion miles away! And third, when it comes to speed, these objects of light are traveling at incredible speeds. Our sun, scientists tells us, along with all of its planets and their respective moons, is traveling at a speed of 600,000 miles per hour in a gigantic orbit through its galaxy, an orbit that requires over 2 million centuries to complete.
Clearly science tells us we have trillions upon trillions of heavenly bodies, weighing trillions upon trillions of tons, trillions upon trillions of miles away, moving at very high velocities. Our human minds can hardly grasp these incredibly large numbers. No wonder the psalmist proclaimed: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”
So, the next time you look up at the stars, I challenge you to meditate on just how they manifest the majesty and power of our infinite Creator.
1 Quote by Billy Graham: “Look up on a starry night, and you will see the…” (goodreads.com)