Gazing Skyward!
“He knows the number of the stars; He calls them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power” (Psalm 147:4–5).
The darker the night, the better we can see the stars, all of them vast distances away. Some of them are hundreds of trillions of miles away. King David enjoyed gazing at them and wrote: “The Heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Do you enjoy them too? How strange that some people try to figure out how the starry skies came into being when the answer is found in many places in the Bible. Here is one: “The worlds (stars) were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). The stars came into being at God’s command!
Astronomers admit they have not been able to find an end to the stars and are increasingly amazed at what they discover with electron telescopes. They report that the galaxy called the Milky Way, of which our world is a very tiny part, has an estimated 200 billion stars in it, and that there are at least 175 billion galaxies with a total number of stars so large that it is impossible for our minds to grasp the number. Yet, as our opening Bible verse tells us, God knows the exact number of stars, and even more amazing, He has a name for each one of them! Actually, there is no point in trying to count them, for God himself declared, “The host of heaven cannot be numbered [by man]” (Jeremiah 33:22). We are also told, “one star differeth from another star in glory [beauty]” (1 Corinthians 15:41). No two are alike. What pleasure our blessed God must have had when He stretched “out the heavens like a curtain” (Psalm 104:2).
Here is an example of how the Creator made each star different from all others. Earth’s diameter is 7,926 miles, compared with the star Betelgeuse’s diameter of 540,000,000 miles and the star Aurigae’s diameter of 750,000,000 miles. Our sun is 865,000 miles in diameter, or more than 100 times Earth’s size. If we were to compare others within reach of telescopes, we would be astounded to discover what great differences the Creator has made in all of them.
It has been calculated that our fastest spaceship traveling from Earth would take 40,000 years to reach the star known as Alpha Centauri, which is 26,000,000,000,000 (26 trillion) miles away from us. (Even at that distance, it is the third brightest star in the night sky.) Yet, for all these great distances, which boggle the minds of astronomers, the Creator has each heavenly body under His constant gaze and keeps each one in its proper orbit. Only He could make them, place them in their orbits in space, and keep them in order.
We sing a hymn that states it so well, “Isn’t He wonderful!”
