Ever since my first airplane flight as a middle schooler on the 1970’s era Delta Tri-Star, I have loved window seats on jetliners. If allowed, I could entertain myself from Atlanta to L.A. with little more than a Coca-Cola, a window seat, clear skies, and a GPS fired up and plugged into a laptop computer loaded with Microsoft Streets or Mappoint software. I know that’s weird, but it’s true. I love maps. At some point a number of years ago I traded that preference in for an aisle seat, since after all GPS devices are not, as far as I know, allowed on airplanes, and I usually have more pressing work to do than I did then. My laptop battery won’t make a coast to coast trip anyway. But at times I still end up with the window seat, which is still much preferred to the dreaded middle seat. And without fail, whenever I am in that window seat, I find myself looking out the window at all of the houses below and mentally computing how large a number of people there must be in this huge space I can view from 20,000 feet, and yet at the same time marveling at how small this number of people is compared to the total number of people in the world. This seems to be a pretty big world.
Indeed, I as a resident of this earth, am very small. Very insignficant. Just another dude among several billion people…lots of billions, if you also consider everyone who has come before us. Yet many of us seem to have this compelling urge to somehow view ourselves as big deals, as if we’re living life on some kind of celestial 1-10 scale camped out somewhere around #6 headed to #7, hoping to get closer to God over at the perfect #10, figuring we’ll get most of the way and God will pull us the last 100 yards over the top in some kind of a cooperative joint effort.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Actually, there is a lot wrong with it, but what is initially wrong is the scale. OK, maybe we’re a #6 headed to #7…but God isn’t at earthly perfect #10. God is at heavenly perfect #fifteen billion to the 1 millionth power light years away. Or farther, acutally…infinity. We’re miniscule, compared to God. Beyond miniscule, actually, since God is infinite. That’s the great gulf that Jesus trancends. But you wouldn’t sense that if you get more of your theology from "Christian" TV preachers and motivational leadership gurus than you do from God’s Holy Word.
Still think you’re pretty big? I mean, sure, you know God is big and you’re not. But have you ever really looked at just how big the universe is, and considered how big the God who made it must be? Look at these models and see just how puny the earth is compared to other features of the universe. We’re really not big at all, compared to other things God made that make earth look like a grain of sand by comparison.
Just circling around Atlanta courtesy of Delta Airlines and bad weather, Atlanta seems huge. Then I think about how big Georgia is. The southeast. The USA. North America. The earth. But earth, as you know if you looked at the models linked to in the previous paragraph, isn’t really that big to God. As the old fill-in-the-bubble assessment tests might have once queried "our solar system is to the universe as an orange is to earth."
Speaking of the universe: writes Wade Burleson, with regard to this photograph of the Sombrero Galaxy:
… voted by scientists as the best among the thousands of space photographs taken by the Hubble telescope – pictures the Sombrero Galaxy. This galaxy, also called M104, is 28 million light years from Earth. That means if you began today traveling toward the galaxy at the speed of light, it would take you 28 million years to reach it. Though the photograph makes Sombrero seem small, it actually has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across, which means it has eight times more stars than our own Milky Way galaxy and stretches half the distance across space than that of the Milky Way (which is approximately 100,000 light years across).
When one considers that M104 is only one of 500 billion galaxies in the known universe (we are not sure about that which we do not know), it makes earth seem quite small. And from a scientific standpoint, our world is tiny.
I’m glad thinking about how big God is makes my head hurt. If I could fathom God, he’d probably be sitting around 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. But instead, He’s here AND he’s billions of light years away. If getting to God meant moving from a 5 to a 10 I might not need a Savior to save me. Help me, yes. Heal my wound and bring me home, yes. But save me, to bring me to a place of holiness billions of light years away from my current , relative sorry state? There is no way I have a snowball’s chance of covering that distance. Thankfully I don’t have to. Jesus did. He covered that distance. In body. In blood. And when I die I can rest assured that the God who is big enough to create this amazing universe that we can only see a sliver of, even with today’s amazing technology…He’s big enough to secure my soul no matter what forces may try to steal it.
It’s too bad I live in a smoggy city. Maybe you too live in a smoggy city. If so, make it a point to head to the country, to the hills of Montana, the deserts of the southwest, or a remote prairie or mountaintop in your state. Look at the stars. And remember that what you see is only the outer layer of God’s creation.
So earth really isn’t big after all. God is.