God Can Handle Your Stuff
I think we often get numb to numbers. Given our multi-trillion dollar national debt, the words “billion” and “trillion” tend to become words without a lot of impact. I want us to gain an appreciation for large numbers because I want to talk about the size of the universe.
The width of the universe is estimated at about fifteen billion light years. One light year is the distance light travels in one year at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, which is about 700 million miles per hour. So in one year, light can travel just under six trillion miles. One light year is equal to six trillion miles.
Just to give an idea how much six trillion is (keeping in mind that the USA today recently had a headline that said the United States owes $62 trillion): If I bought a $400,000 Rolls Royce AND a $10 million mansion in Beverly Hills EVERY SINGLE DAY, it would take me 1,580 YEARS to spend six trillion dollars.
So we live in a universe that is 15 billion light years across, in other words, 6 trillion times fifteen billion miles! This is literally unfathomable to the human mind.
Yet God is out there. His presence, His power, His authority, His love are all out there as much as they are in the lives of His followers. And He spoke it all into being by His will and His word.
I think He had to do it that way. He had to make it so huge that we could not fathom it and that it would literally blow us away trying to think about it, but not so overly complex that we can never learn anything about it. In their excellent book The Privileged Planet, authors Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards show that not only is the earth and the solar system it inhabits very specifically designed to support life, but our position within the Milky Way galaxy is optimum for discovery of things outside our solar system. The distance from the center of the galaxy, the distance from our own star the Sun, everything is designed to support life AND to support discovery.
God wants us to discover!
He loves science. He’s the original author, after all, of all the scientific laws that make things like cell iPhones, airplanes and skyscrapers work. Science is one of God’s languages, one of His best revelations to the world about Himself. Christians ought to be the most passionate lovers and supporters of scientific study and research. It’s GOD’S universe we’re talking about here!
So does that mean that God Himself is huge? Well, that conclusion depends upon some very limited, narrow-sighted Newtonian physics. God is neither large nor small since He dwells in a realm where physical size is meaningless. But we know that He is omnipresent – He is in all places at all times. I believe that this says more about His character than His attributes. For me, the idea of God’s omnipresence talks about how He has woven His character, His power, His ongoing creative genius throughout all the fabric of the universe. This does not make Him huge, it makes Him a part of the fabric of space-time itself.
No, this isn’t new-age mumbo-jumbo. It’s biblical truth (see Psalm 139). The presence – and therefore the power, love, grace, mercy, provision, wisdom, etc – of God is woven throughout the very fabric of the stuff from which the cosmos is constructed, and this includes the very matter in your body, brain, soul and spirit.
Surely this God can handle your circumstances. Most of us have some things in our lives that we struggle with, that we don’t like, that we would like to banish from our existence forever, but have had little success. God can handle it, be assured. He controls every atom in every molecule in every element on every planet in every galaxy in the known universe. He not only knows the number of hairs on your head but also the number of helium molecules in the entire universe. Surely He can handle your stuff. Just let Him.