When I Consider the Stars

Yahweh, our Lord! How majestic is Your name in all the earth, You who have put Your glory upon the heavens. . . . When I see Your heavens, the works of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established—[I ask,] ‘What is man that You remember him, and the son of man that You visit him?’ ” (Ps. 8:1-4).*

City dwellers can only long to imagine what David, the shepherd boy, saw in the 1000 B.C. heavens above Bethlehem. Surely a full moon at times would loom over him like a piece of red raw fruit. But the stars? On a cloudless moonless dusk, the vanishing sun would drag out of twilight the cold white fire of stars burning incandescent to the horizon. Whatever David’s cosmology, or however far away he deemed those stars to be, and however many he saw (a few thousand at most in ideal conditions), the psalm reveals his wonder that the God who created these heavens above remembered, and even interacted with, humanity on the earth below.

 But, please! If back then David could marvel that the God who put those stars in the heavens would care for us humans on earth—how much more should we be awed that God cares about us here, the God who created a cosmos that David surely couldn’t have comprehended. Gawking at photos from Hubble and from the James Webb Space Telescope, we can’t fully absorb what our eyes funnel into our minds. We barely grasp the concept of c, the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second—second? And so how do our brains (chemicals, electrical currents, water) translate a light-year, 5,878,625,370,000 miles, much less a million light-years, or a billion, or 20 billion, into a concept cemented inside our skulls? 

Or how do we comprehend a galaxy with 100 billion stars, much less 2 trillion galaxies of 100 billion stars each? These are numbers that we use to console ourselves with the illusion that we, somehow, know how many stars there are out there and our distances from them. God has created a reality too big for us to clasp onto (and too small, too: try comprehending the numbers and sizes of the atomic and subatomic realm).

And so, if David, awed by what he saw looking up at the stars raw, at just splashes and splatters of light, could ask Yahweh, What is man that You remember him, and the son of man that You visit him? what chutzpah—with our space telescopes gazing at billions of stars light-years away—on our part to think that Yahweh would not only remember us but, indeed, would visit us? 

And not just visit us, but to go to the cross for us when He did come? When we look at Jesus at Calvary, bearing the punishment of our sins (Isa. 53:4-10; 1 Peter 2:24; Rom. 4:25; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 John 2:2)—we are looking at the One who not only created (John 1:3) the cosmos but who sustains it as well (Heb. 1:3).

How do we, really, wrap our minds around this, and what it says about God’s love for us? 

*Author’s translation.