“O Lord , our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth, Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens! From the mouth of infants and nursing babes You have established strength Because of Your adversaries, To make the enemy and the revengeful cease. When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained; What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty! You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen, And also the beasts of the field, The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas. O Lord , our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth!” (Psalms 8: 1-9)
Ever since I was a little kid, the night sky has fascinated me and the more I learn about the things in that sky, and about how far away they are and how big they are, the more I’m in awe of what God has created.
It took about 10 years of taking pictures from a satellite in space to get all of the exposures required to create the Hubble Extreme Deep Field image, which is part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble space telescope was pointed to an area of the sky that, to our eyes, appears to be completely black, like there is absolutely nothing there. In the resulting image of that apparently empty region of space, there are approximately 5,500 galaxies, each made up of thousands or millions of stars. The Hubble Extreme Deep Field is 1/32,000,000th of the sky.
Our God has made, and continues to make, an amazing universe. The vast majority of what He has made we will never see. The universe is full of things we can’t possibly fathom and we are minute little specks in it. Really, the entire galaxy in which we live is a minute little speck in this universe! And yet, what does Psalm 8 say about man? That God has made mankind a little lower than Himself, that he has crowned mankind with His glory and majesty! That He has put all things under our feet. God, the creator of all that there is, wants to take our hand and wants us to rule with Him, wants us to shape our world into something beautiful by being His image bearers, wants us to bring His love to those who don’t know him.
That love is what all of this is for. He created this nearly infinitely vast universe and placed us into it simply because He wants to love us and wants us to love Him and to love each other. Hopefully, when we see how small we are, but that God made everything there is because of His love for us, and also that He came to us in order to fix the relationship that we broke, we can see not how insignificant we are in the universe, but rather how much God loves us and how much we mean to Him, and then go share that love with those around us.