The Glory and Power of God
By George Stroh
May 7, 2012
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)
How glorious and powerful is our God? Consider all that He has created simply by speaking it into existence; The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. (Psalms 19:1)
Our earth has a circumference of 24,901 miles. Scientists estimate that the weight of the earth is approximately 6.6 Sextillion tons. That is 66 followed by twenty zeros!
The earth and the other planets that orbit the sun, along with the many moons, asteroids and comets are all part of our solar system. Our sun is actually a star and a rather small star compared to most other stars, but much, much larger than earth. The sun is about 109 times the diameter of earth and weights about 333,000 times as much as earth. The sun is so large that about 1,300,000 planet earths could fit inside of it.
Our sun and solar system is located within the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years across. In other words, if you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles a second or 700 million miles an hour), it would take you about 100,000 years to fly across our galaxy. That is a lot of Frequent Flyer miles!
Using the Hubble space telescope, astronomers have been able to observe over 3,000 galaxies like the Milky Way. However, it is estimated that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. A recent German super-computer simulation estimated the number may be as many as 500 billion galaxies in the universe.
Each galaxy contains billions of stars or suns. Although only about 2,500 stars are visible to the naked eye at any one point and at any one time on the earth, astronomers estimate that there are 200 to 400 billion stars just within the Milky Way galaxy. Multiply 400 billion stars by 500 billion galaxies and...well... it is a very big number of stars that God created! But since we really don't know how big the universe is, our best estimates may still be way to small.
Here is a warning to those who still deny God's glory and power; For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.(Romans 1:20).
For those of us who love and worship God through faith in The Lord Jesus Christ, like the Psalmist, we can only exclaim: O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth, Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens! (Psalm 8:1). Maranatha!
