The Grandeur of God’s Creation

“…When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:3-4)

Prompted to contemplate the glory and grandeur of God’s creation, you might be inclined to go out on a clear night and gaze into “outer space” at the innumerable stars in the heavens. Of the thousands of stars visible to the naked eye, only 12 are within a range of 10 light years, and only 133 within 50 light years. If there were a means of travelling somehow at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), you could span almost 6 trillion miles in a year, and yet at that speed, it would take you over 4 years to reach Proxima Centauri, a relatively small brown dwarf star not much larger than  Jupiter, and the closest star to our sun. If you take the most distant stars visible to you and me, those at a distance of approximately 2000 light years away, we’re still talking about a distance that is only 1/50th of the diameter of the Milky Way.

That’s “outer space.” Let’s take a look at “inner space!” To put things in perspective, picture a relatively large body of water, such as the Gulf of Mexico.  Emptying into the Gulf is a rather non-descript river system we call the Brazos. There are hundreds of smaller tributaries that in turn feed the Brazos. Among those, just north of Abilene, 3 small creeks—the Elm, Catclaw, and Cedar—merge, and, after a small hiccup called Ft. Phantom Lake, flow into the Clear Fork of the Brazos.

Now, pull a single eyedropper of water from Cedar Creek and place a drop between two glass slides. Beneath the lens of a microscope, a marvelous universe appears!  This is where I believe God did some of His finest work. Look! There’s an amoeba! Its size is only about 90 μm (symbol for micrometers), and yet it moves and digests and reproduces. It is a living, single-cell organism. In comparison, it’s about 900 times the size of an average virus; and to put that in terms that are a little more visual, it’s like a 6 ft. man standing next to a man over a mile high.

Consider the human body that is made up on a cellular level of countless muscle fibers, bone fibers, blood cells, dendrites, nerve endings, tissues—none of which on an individual level has the remotest ability to conceive what the concerted work of all as a whole looks like or is able to achieve. And we honestly fail to consider what a wonderful machine we are. We fail to appreciate all the unique and individual parts that make up our physical, mental, and emotional being.

Whether we look to outer space or inner space or our own wonderfully constructed beings, why are we so tempted to limit our imaginations? Is it really so hard for humankind to contemplate that whatever we have become in this vast universe of outer and inner spaces we are…under our Creator’s eyes?

Keith Morgan
Abilene, Texas