Today In The Word: The Vastness of God's Creation [Spirituality & Religion]
Thus says the Lord:
"Heaven is My throne,
And earth is My footstool.
For all those things My hand has made,
And all those things exist,"
Says the Lord (Isaiah 66:1-2).
Let's translate to our modern-day terminology. God said, "I live in heaven; it is My throne; I made the earth. It's a footstool before My throne. I am bigger than you are even capable of thinking. I am God."
Stop and meditate on this. Perhaps you will catch a glimpse of His awesome glory! He created the earth and the universe. He positioned the stars with His fingers!
Psalms 147:4 ~ He telleth the number of the stars: he calleth them all by their names.
Most of us do not comprehend the vastness of the universe. Those with a background in engineering, have researched some of the fascinating facts we know about the vastness of God's creation:
Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second (not per hour but per second). That is roughly 700 million miles per hour. A Boeing 747, typically cruises at 567 miles per hour.
The moon is roughly 238,855 miles (384,400 km) away from the Earth. If we were to travel to the moon by plane, it would take us twenty days. But light travels there in 1.3 seconds!
The sun is 93 million miles from the earth. To reach the sun by plane, your journey would last over twenty-one years. Think of how long the past twenty-one years of your life has been. Then imagine flying that long without stopping to reach the sun! For those of you who prefer driving, it would take you roughly two hundred years, without any rest stops! Yet it takes light only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun to the earth!
The nearest star is 4.5 light years from the earth. To reach it by plane would take approximately fifty-three billion years! That is 53 with nine zeros behind it! Yet light reaches it in only four and one-half years!
The average star you can see unassisted with the naked eye is 100 to 1,000 light years away. I wouldn't even attempt to calculate the amount of time it would take for a plane to reach it. But think of it: Light traveling at a rate of 186,000 miles per second takes one thousand years to reach the earth. That means there are stars you see at night whose light emanated from them in the days of King Richard's reign in England, and it has been traveling at the rate of 700 million miles per hour ever since, without slowing down! That light originated seven hundred years before America became a nation!
Let's expand this further. In the mid-nineties NASA's Hubble Space Telescope sent back pictures of galaxies that were 7,000 light years away! Our minds cannot even comprehend distances like these. Are you getting a greater glimpse of His glory?
