God's Mighty Acts in Creation by Starr Meade

Author:Starr Meade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2010-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

As for me and my house . . .

• Plan a time with no moon (or just a small one) and a place with no man-made light when you can spend time looking at the night sky.

Praise God that he is great—even greater than the entire universe, his creation—and that he has no limits at all.

24

He Guides the Stars by Name

The Omniscience and Omnipotence of God

“He determines the number of the stars;

he gives to all of them their names.

Great is our LORD, and abundant in power;

his understanding is beyond measure.”

Psalm 147:4–5

Camping on a clear night, you can look up and see countless pinpricks of light as well as what looks like a long strand of wispy cloud. The cloudy, or milky, looking thing is what we can see from earth of the Milky Way, the galaxy containing our sun, our earth, and all our planets. What looks like cloud or haze is really many, many stars so far away that we cannot see them clearly. Their combined light gives the effect of a bright cloud.

The Milky Way contains billions of stars. One estimate is between two hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. And the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies in the universe, each galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars of its own. That’s a lot of stars! As you can see, those numbers are not very precise, and they’re only astronomers’ best guesses. No one knows for sure, especially since there is only so much of the universe that can be observed from earth.

God knows the exact number of the stars. Our key verse says he not only knows it, he determined it. He decided exactly how many stars there would be. Like the stars, our key verse tells us, God’s understanding is beyond measure. The best scientists have limits to what they know. Like everything else about him, God’s knowledge is infinite. We use the word omniscient to speak of God. Omni means “all” and scient means “knowing.” God is omniscient—knowing all.

Some of the stars in the Milky Way are grouped together in what astronomers call “globular clusters.” Each globular cluster holds anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars. Imagine trying to name all the stars in a globular cluster! That would be impossible, so scientists just name the clusters, not all the individual stars. They give the clusters uncreative names like “M4” or “M13.” Our key verse also tells us that not only does God know how many stars there are, he has names for all of them!

“Lift up your eyes on high and see,” the prophet Isaiah said about the stars. “Who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one of them is missing” (Isa. 40:26). Another omni word we use when describing God is omnipotence. Again, omni means “all.” Potent means “having power.” To say that God is omnipotent is to say that he has all power.

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