The Vast Universe

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)

The sky is clear this evening. The heavens are studded with stars. If you know them, you can distinguish the galaxies. How far away are the stars? Far. Very far. Unreachably far. Forget the flat-earth theory. It's disinformation that has flooded the internet since 2010 to bury the real information about fake moon landings, which was becoming increasingly large, convincing, well-known, and professional. Simply erasing information wasn't enough. If you want to delve into this: go ahead. Here's a confession. And here's some more information.

The Earth is an unimaginably small sphere in an unimaginably large universe. The nearest star is just over four light-years away. A light-year is 9.46 trillion kilometers. That's 9.46 million million kilometers. The fout light years of the nearest star is therefore approximately 40 million million kilometers away. Elon Musk's rockets can reach a speed of 28,000 kilometers per hour. Such a rocket would take 1,428 years to reach the nearest star. If we had possessed and launched such a rocket at the beginning of the Middle Ages, it would have reached the star by now. The question many people ask, based on this information, is: how can a God exist with the knowledge of the universe's size?

But is this the right question? The size of the universe doesn't make reality less complex than we thought. On the contrary. That reality turns out to be infinitely more complex. Because even though all those stars are so incredibly far away, they form a very stable spectacle in the celestial vault, in which gravitational fields, distances, movements, and developments in stars and planets play an incredibly harmonious and balanced role. The entire starry sky seems to have been made like a clockwork. In fact, it is meant to be a clockwork, and that's why people have used it for thousands of years to designate days, months, years, and times. Where does this harmony in the universe come from?

And what applies to the immeasurably large also applies to the immeasurably small. Every cell in every living being has proven to be an almost infinitely complex factory, with entire libraries of information that the cell's components constantly utilize in all their functioning, interacting and cohering. Instead of asking the question: how can there be a God given the immeasurable greatness and complexity of the reality in which we live, you could also ask the question David asked: "What is man that you are mindful of him? What is the son of man that you regard him?" (Psalm 8:5)

Is it not a wonder that this great God, who created the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and the infinitely complex, is especially interested in you and me? Jesus told his disciples that God's attention to humanity extends so far that He has even numbered every hair on our head. It is unimaginable that this great God wanted to become a small human child and mingle with his creatures, so much so that he ultimately allowed himself to be crucified so that those creatures could return to him.

What many people do then is the opposite of what they do with the size of the universe: they consider the universe too vast for a God to exist who formed it. But with sin, the situation is suddenly reversed. They portray God as very great and the problem of sin as small, and ask: if God is so great, surely he can also make those sins disappear into oblivion? He doesn't need to come to earth and die for that in person, does he?

The key question in everything is really: How great is something in the eyes of the Creator God? In our eyes, the universe is immeasurably large and our sins are insignificantly small. But for God, it could be quite different. The universe is child's play for Him. But our sins are a life-sized problem for Him. The point is: the universe is not a moral issue, and our sins are. God is bound by nothing but Himself. His omnipotence in no way binds Him to govern the universe. On the contrary, in governing the universe, He lives out His omnipotence and His faithfulness.

However, His love, His justice, and His truth do bind Him to simply forget about human sins. His love, justice, and truth demand that He deal with them. And the only way He could deal with them was for Himself to take the sins of people onto Himself, as a Man, for people, so that His love, His justice, and His truth would be simultaneously satisfied.