Verse of the Day Devotion: Psalm 19:1  

“The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” – Psalm 19:1     

One of the most beautiful things I enjoy looking at is a starry sky on a cloudless night.  I look up and see the many lights that fill the night sky and ponder just how many are there.  The vast majority of these ‘lights’ are stars that are relatively close to our planet.  Let us look at a few things.  Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second.  Our sun is approximately 93 million miles away.  It is so far, it takes approximately 499 seconds, or 8.32 minutes for its light to reach earth.  Whatever happens at the sun takes 8 minutes for us to see it. 

Now, our closest star, aside from the sun, is Proxima Centauri.  In contrast to the sun where the light takes 8.32 minutes to reach the earth, it takes approximately 4.23 years for light from the nearest star to reach the earth.  And according to universetoday.com, there are at most 8,479 stars visible from earth.  Going even farther, there are around 10,000 galaxies visible, each with millions of stars in each,  in just one image, using the Hubble Ultra Deep Field telescope.  According to NASA on the website imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov, the closest galaxy to our milky way is some 25,000 light years away.  These are astonishing numbers.  It takes light approximately 25,000 years to reach earth. And this is the closest galaxy.   Just this alone shows the vastness of the universe.  And it is understood that the universe extends far beyond our ability to even view the outer regions of its existence. 

Many scientists believe that all matter has either existed eternally, or that it came into existence from  nothing.  These are the only possibilities aside from being a creation of God.  For nothing to create something does not make sense since change only happens based on an outside event.  And this event would have required something to trigger it, therefore it had to exist prior to what was the cause of its creation.   And, if it has always existed, it would have run out of energy and it would have died at some point, also in eternity past.

Therefore, this universe had to have been created by something that existed prior to the universe.  And it was, by an eternal God who created it for us.  And when we examine this universe, and we see  the immense size of it, the incredible order of this amazing universe, and the beauty as we look out into it from this single planet called earth.  As His word says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-2.  And after having created the heavens and the earth, He brought order and life on the earth, and finally, at the end, man.  (Read Genesis chapters 1-2.)  How can we look at this, His creation, and not see God and His glory in it? 

William Funkhouser MDiv, ThD, Founder and President of True Devotion Ministries.