The Unique Greatness of Our God (Part Three)

A description of God's greatness similar to Isaiah 40:26 is found in Psalm 147:4-5: "He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite." This is a truly incredible, mind-boggling, almost mind-numbing idea to think about—that God has numbered, counted, and named all the stars in the universe. Can we really grasp the enormity of this assertion?

Following through on this concept really expands the mind. When we gather all the information, it becomes clear that astronomers have no idea how many stars there are—although they have some widely varying estimates. Men have designated and numbered more than a billion space objects (not all of which are stars), and star charts and catalogs are available both as books and online, the largest compiled by the U.S. Naval Observatory. Recently, the journal Nature published an article in which researchers at Harvard and Yale give their reasons for increasing the estimate of the universe's stars to 300 sextillion. That is a three followed by 23 zeroes!

We will take this number of stars at face value. Remember that God not only made and numbered them all, but He also named them. It has been estimated that the average person can, with work, identify about 1,000 people by name, and in a great many people, that ability is quite stunted. Most people have trouble remembering five hundred names and their corresponding faces. In truth, we all have empty thimbles for brains in comparison to God!

Perhaps this will help to increase our awe for God. To begin, we will assume that fifty billion people eventually enter the Kingdom of God, becoming God-beings. After all the dust has settled, God says to them, "My sons and daughters, as part of your reward, I am giving you all an equal number of stars and planets to develop, beautify, and rule. Here are your stars!" What a tremendous gift! The question is, how many stars would He have given each of His children?

We once thought that we might be given one star or solar system. However, knowing what the present estimates are, the number of stars that we may one day receive from God can be intimidating! The number is stupefying: six trillion stars! This nearly unfathomable number does not even include the planets that orbit them! Contemplating such huge numbers, we can catch a glimpse of the vast amount of work that will be required to finish and beautify the universe.

If, when it all winds up, there are indeed fifty billion sons of God, how many galaxies will we each inherit? If we consider the Milky Way to be an average-sized galaxy, and the low-end estimate of its number of stars is 100 billion, then each child of God will govern sixty galaxies equal to the size of our own. And we are intimidated by the possibility of ruling a few cities during the Millennium? How about multiple galaxies? That is the vision God has in mind for us.

What about God's ability to plan future events? We know about His overall plan that He designed millennia ago to bring many sons to glory, but what about all the little details? When we plan for the future, our finite minds are bound to fail to account for myriads of minor details, possibilities, and unintended consequences of intervening events. Thus, our plans tend to be tentative and subject to frequent change as new information comes to our attention. Does God work that way? Or does He plot out all the little details and account for all the possibilities?

We can learn a bit about the intricate mind of God from Job 38:22-23, where God says to him, "Have you entered the treasury of snow, or have you seen the treasury of hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war?" This is the kind of God we worship—One who prepares reserves of snow and hail just in case He will need them in a time of trouble, such as a battle or other event that warrants such miraculous intervention.

The Bible tells us of a few instances when these treasuries of snow and hail were or will be put to use. Notice the record of Exodus 9:22-24:

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt—on man, on beast, and on every herb of the field, throughout the land of Egypt." And Moses stretched out his rod toward heaven; and the LORD sent thunder and hail [making use of His treasury], and fire darted to the ground. And the LORD rained hail on the land of Egypt. So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, so very heavy that there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.

If we were God, we would probably say, "Quick! Moses just asked for hail. Let us go make some!" Our God, however, had this event planned long in advance, and He had the treasury of hail ready for a time of trouble as it was in Egypt when the children of Israel were about to be freed from slavery. God's mind plans far in advance; He does not just play things off the cuff.

God will make use of His treasury of hail again in the near future. Knowing Him, He has probably been stocking His hail hoard in recent years because He knows He will need it shortly, as Revelation 16:17, 20-21 prophesies:

Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air. . . . Then every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And great hail from heaven fell upon men, every hailstone about the weight of a talent. And men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, since that plague was exceedingly great.

Not only has He been stockpiling hail, God has been crafting extra-large hailstones for this occasion! John says that these hailstones will weigh about a talent. Translating that weight into its modern equivalent, these hailstones, which God has been saving for just a time as this, will weigh between 44 and 48 pounds apiece! Our God is a farsighted yet very detail-oriented God.

He is also a faithful Creator (I Peter 4:19), and this means that He is faithful to all of His creation. He also maintains it—and, in fact, one could say that this is what it means to be a faithful Creator. He has not only created us, the earth and the heavens, and all that is in them, but He also makes sure that they all continue. He will also ensure that man, especially, will reach his fullest potential and that His purpose will resolve as He intends. In turn, we have to have faith in Him because He is working out our salvation with us (Philippians 2:12-13).

He did not, as Deists suppose, make everything and then retire to some nice corner of the universe to sit and drink mint juleps for eternity. No, He is very involved. The author of Hebrews writes that God is "upholding all things by the word of His power" (Hebrews 1:3). He is very active in His creation—if He were not, according to the laws of nature, everything would degenerate very quickly. We can be thankful that God is on His throne.

Divine Intervention

On Thursday afternoon's show, Rush Limbaugh joked about Hurricane Frances bearing down on Palm Beach County, Florida, where he lives. He said, paraphrasing, "Since Palm Beach County has voting irregularities like a Third World nation, maybe God decided Palm Beach County should be devastated to be, in fact, Third World."

Many in his audience probably laughed and promptly forgot about it. His observation, however, has a serious side that modern, sophisticated, and predominantly secular Americans never consider—at least seriously. They snicker at insurance policies that refer to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and other natural disasters as "acts of God," when they, in their scientific arrogance, prefer to call them "acts of nature" or "weather events." Even those who are moderately religious, like the Deists of the Enlightenment, do not believe that God is active in earth's events, whether natural or human. To them, He may be watching, but He certainly is not involved in human affairs.

This points out how utterly blind to God most people are, even Christians. For starters, because they are not looking for God's hand of intervention in their lives, they are certainly not going to see it. Having become so secular and scientific in their outlook, the miraculous is totally off their radar. They consider those who report of miracles to be medieval in their thinking and the miracles themselves to be mere coincidences of natural phenomena or overstatements of what actually occurred. To them, miracles are impossible because, by definition, they are unverifiable by scientific methods and therefore do not and never have happened.

Today's thoroughly modern Christian does not derive this negative view of God's intervention from His Book. In the Bible, divine involvement in human affairs occurs from cover to cover—in fact, it is the central fact of human existence, which the Bible takes great pains to reveal. At every critical point in man's history, God has been involved. At Creation, before and after the Flood, at the dispersal of the nations from Babel, in the history of Israel, among the great empires of ancient history from Egypt to Rome—God was instrumental. God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, came to this earth and lived among us, bringing us the good news of His Kingdom and dying for our salvation. Then He sent His apostles to the four corners of the globe to spread the word among those He would call.

That sounds as if God is active and involved in human affairs.

As Creator, He certainly has power over the various elements of His creation. Manipulating the weather is like child's play to Him. He can send rain or drought anywhere, anytime. He flooded the entire earth to a depth greater than the height of the tallest mountain, so flashfloods, coastal floods, and river floods are easy. Spinning tornadoes is like breathing to Him, and earthquakes rumble and tumble at His command. The Bible makes many claims about His power over the elements (Job 26:7-12; Psalm 147:15-18; Nahum 1:3-6; etc.). Jesus Himself calmed the storm with a word (Matthew 8:24-26).

In the book of Amos, God shows that He uses "natural" disasters to teach people lessons, to bring them to repentance, to correct their ways. In this passage, He also admits that most people fail to make the connection between the disaster and their sins. Notice Amos 4:6-13:

"Also I gave you cleanness of teeth [famine] in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places; yet you have not returned to Me," says the LORD. "I also withheld rain from you [drought], when there were still three months to the harvest. I made it rain on one city, I withheld rain from another city. One part was rained upon, and where it did not rain the part withered. So two or three cities wandered to another city to drink water, but they were not satisfied; yet you have not returned to Me," says the LORD. "I blasted you with blight and mildew. When your gardens increased, your vineyards, your fig trees, and your olive trees, the locust devoured them; yet you have not returned to Me," says the LORD. "I overthrew some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, . . . yet you have not returned to Me," says the LORD. "I sent among you a plague after the manner of Egypt; your young men I killed with a sword, . . . yet you have not returned to Me," says the LORD. "Therefore thus will I do to you, O Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel!" For behold, He who forms mountains, and creates the wind, who declares to man what his thought is, and makes the morning darkness, who treads the high places of the earth—the LORD God of hosts is His name.

He also says He will continue to do this in His Millennial Kingdom: He will send drought on areas that refuse to keep His feasts (Zechariah 14:16-19). Are we to assume that, for some reason, He does not punish for sin now?

Maybe Rush was right.