Just How Big is God?

Most Christians are familiar with the following terms that are, at best, man’s feeble attempts to describe God. He is omnipresent, equally present in all of His creation continually. He is omniscient; He knows everything that can be known and will ever be known. He is omnipotent; all power in heaven and on earth is His.

Yet, even though I am very familiar with these words, every so often I am bowled over in a fresh new way by just how little I truly understand of their meanings. I experienced this once again today during my morning devotional reading.

From Psalm 147 I read, “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting. He determines the number of the stars; He gives to all of them their names.” You might want to read that again before I move on.

When this psalm was written, the observable night sky was all that the psalmist could see. Though he understood it was vast (Psalm 19:1–6), he had no idea what lay beyond his limited ability to see into space.

Astronomers estimate there are up to 200 sextillion stars (2 followed by 23 zeros) in the observable universe. Because the universe is so immense, this is only a rough estimate. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 100 billion stars of its own.

Whatever the number of stars may be, God knows. He is the one who spoke the cosmos into existence. The writer of Hebrews puts it like this: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3).

What does that mean? It means that God began His creating process with nothing but the power of His spoken word: “Let there be…” And since God’s presence occupies the farthest reaches of the cosmos, in dimensions that are no more and no less than what He occupies in the room in which you find yourself, is the feat of His knowing and naming the stars an outlandish concept?

If looking into outer space gives us a sense of the immensity of God, how about when we look into inner space? We are told that the adult human body contains 30 to 36 trillion cells, with which our God is also very familiar. Psalm 139:13–16 says, “For You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Think about it: one day in the past, a one-cell sperm united with a one-cell ovum, and you were conceived. Those two cells then turned into the 30 to 36 trillion cells that now make up your adult body. God was present at your conception; He is also present and aware of every fiber of your being today.

Whether it be looking into outer space or the inner space of a human cell, no one is as familiar with it all as God is. After all, He created it; He sustains it. And when I ponder that, all I can do is fall at His feet in worship.