“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him … ? (Psalm 8:3-4).
Have you ever been on a camping trip in the mountains, or at the beach, or possibly out on the desert away from the lights of the city? As you sat around a campfire and drank coffee with your friends, the evening stars begin to light up the western sky. Perhaps you lay on your back on a pallet or sleeping bag and you marveled at the tremendous display. As it grew darker, you notice the Milky Way spread from the north to the south. You marveled at its beauty as men have done for centuries.
But perhaps what you didn’t grasp is the magnitude or the marvelous size of those heavenly bodies. Apart from the sun, which actually is a star, the closest star to planet earth is Alpha Centauri, 26 trillion miles away (that’s a 26 followed by 12 zeros). Alpha Centauri is five times the size of the sun. It takes a long time for light to reach us from that star. When you begin to move into space, it becomes cumbersome to measure distance in miles or meters. So, scientists use a measurement called a light year; that’s the distance light travels in a year at the speed of light—186,300 miles per second.
Now, some of the stars are large, very large. “The largest stars,” says the World Book Encyclopedia, “would more than fill the space between the earth and the sun. Some stars have a diameter—that’s the distance through the center—about 1,000 times as large as the sun’s. To grasp how great are these masses of hydrogen and helium we call stars, let me give you a picture that may help.
On a winter’s night, the constellation Orion can be seen quite clearly. Orion is the hunter, Betelguese is the shoulder. It’s a brilliant, blue star that penetrates the sky. Betelguese is also very large, so large, in fact, that you could hollow out the center and leave a crust 200 million miles thick. Then, set the sun in the middle of that hole, and let the earth rotate around the sun, and you would still have a million miles to spare.
It defies comprehension! It is little wonder that a shepherd boy spent long nights looking up at the stars of the sky and then wrote, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man, that you are mindful of him … ? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:3-5).
Strange, isn’t it, how we take those stars for granted? Oh, they’re up there, all right, and we just assume their existence. For centuries, sailors have used them for guidance, and now satellites in the skies automatically fix upon them and give directions to people who may not be able to see them because of weather disturbances. But seldom do we think about who put them there and who keeps them there.
An astronomer had a model builder construct a miniature of the planets revolving around the sun. They were in perfect scale—very small. A friend came into the laboratory and the model caught his attention. “Hey, pretty nice! Who built that?” he asked. “No one!” replied the friend. “Oh nonsense! Come on, somebody built it!” “You’re right,” he said, “But that’s what you tell me when you deny the fact that God placed the stars in the heavens!” Interested in knowing more about Creation? May I suggest you begin with the book of Genesis—the first book in the Old Testament? And as you encounter Him who made the “Sun to rule by day … the moon and the stars to rule by night” (Psalm 136:8-9, KJV), you will discover what life is all about. “When I consider your heavens,” said David, “what is man, that you are mindful of him … ?”
Resource reading: Psalm 8.
