A British scientist claimed that if every known star was reduced to a grain of sand we could cover the British Isles with a layer of sand 12 feet deep. Among those tiny grains of sand would be one tiny Planet Earth. Populate that tiny grain of sand with billions of people and one of them would be you.
Travelling at 299,000km per second, light takes 8 minutes to reach us from that small star which we call the sun. But the Andromeda galaxy (the nearest to our Milky Way) light takes 800,000 years to reach us. And that is close – other light comes from much further out. Our little planet, travelling through space at 97,000 km/h, is just the right distance from the sun. At double the distance we would freeze over, at half the distance we would fry.
So here we are, a dot in the middle of space racing around a dangerously hot star. What is it all about?
Did it happen by chance, the result of some cosmic accident? One biologist has observed, ‘the probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory. Albert Einstein spoke of a ‘peculiar religious feeling’ among the best scientific minds of ‘rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law’.
The Bible says that ‘the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the works of his hands’. In wonder the Bible asks the very important question, ‘what is man that you are mindful of him?’ And then in the deepest thankfulness it celebrates the fact that the Maker of this vast universe once stepped onto our tiny grain of sand to rescue us from our selfish rebellion against him. To forget this fact is to miss the point of everything.
As we seek to serve our Maker with our lives let us not lose this vital point. Let us not be distracted by the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things (see Mark 4:19).