From the very beginning, human beings have craned their necks toward the night sky and stared in wonder at the stars.
How many there are!
How tiny!
And so near, it seems as though one could reach out and touch them. This is one case where appearances can badly mask the truth. For in reality, the universe contains untold trillions of stars, not the mere thousands that can be seen from earth by the naked eye. Some 100 billion stars light up the Milky Way galaxy alone – and the cosmos harbors billions of galaxies, some vastly larger than our own.
And tiny? Hardly. Some of those twinkling little specks of light – such as the red giant Betelgeuse – are actually up to 500 times larger than our own sun. Of course, other stars may take up far less space. A star massive enough to create a supernova, for example, may after the explosion shrink to a sphere no larger than twelve to thirty miles in diameter. But don’t plan on visiting it any time soon; it would still have a mass several times that of the sun and a density millions times greater. A teaspoon of it would weigh thousands of tons.
And forget about near. The closes star to earth is Proxima Centauri. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you 4.3 years to get there – but at the fastest speeds humankind has thus far achieved, it would take almost 280 centuries. When you consider that the Milky Way galaxy alone stretches some 70,000 light years across, you stop talking about “near.”
AND YET…
God not only created the stars (Genesis 1:16), He set each one in place (Psalm 8:3). The stars may look impossibly bright to us, but in His eyes not even the stars are pure (Job 25:5). The psalmist calls upon the stars to praise God (Psalm 148:3) and our Lord warns us not to worship the starry host (Deuteronomy 4:19). Though they stagger us, they hide no secrets from Him:
“HE DETERMINES THE NUMBER OF THE STARS AND CALLS THEM EACH BY NAME.” GREAT IS OUR LORD AND MIGHTY IN POWER; HIS UNDERSTANDING HAS NO LIMIT.” (Psalm 147:4-5)
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