The power of God and His care of you

It is possible to consider the attributes of God (possible, but not wise) and to think that while God is great and supreme, that He is also disconnected from us.  “So what if He is all-powerful,” we might irrationally reason, “of what use is that to me?”

In his sermon, “God’s Uniqueness, Our Assurance,” Ray Ortlund, Jr. answers that very question:

The closest star to us is, of course, the sun.  The sun generates energy with the same explosiveness as a hydrogen bomb — its own continuous internal nuclear fission.  The surface of the sun is a relatively cool 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the center is a toasty 27,000,000 degrees.  The diameter of the sun is 870,000 miles, 109 times larger than the earth, and its volume would contain 1,000,000 earths.  Its luminosity is equal to four million trillion 100-watt light bulbs — more than you’ll even find at Home Depot.  And the sun is just an average star.

Our Solar System is inside the galaxy called the Milky Way.  And this galaxy we live in is shaped like a spiral, a gigantic pinwheel spinning in the open expanse of space, with our solar system we live in rotating around the center once every million years or so.  We lie about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy, in what might be considered the boondocks.  The Milky Way is 104,000 light years across, containing over 100 billion stars.  To count them one by one would take us over 3,000 years.  And according to the latest probings of the Hubble Space Telescope, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in God’s universe.

But so what?  Is this all just a big stunt?  No.  God wants us to see something about himself.  The God who brings their host out by number every night, who calls them all by name so that not one of them is missing — this God has made a promise to us about this fifth-rate little world we live in.  He has promised us Himself in all his glory. Do you think this God deserves your confidence?  Do you think this God who manages the universe, right down to the faintest star, will lose track of you? [from his commentary on Isaiah.]