A blog post from one of our Crosspoint elders, Ben Martin…

 

This past month we vacationed at one of our favorite locations, the beach in North Carolina. It’s a great place to see God’s splendor, His awesome power, and His vast creation.  It’s a place where you feel humbled by the Almighty Creator as you take in the surroundings of unending blue sea, miles of seashore, and feel the power of big waves.

While relaxing and looking out at all the sand a question came to my mind, “I wonder if there are more grains of sand in the world or stars in the sky?”  So when posed with a question like this, what do you do?  You of course “google it”…..duh!  Well low and behold there was an article published in Sept 2012 by science writer, David Blatner.  The numbers in this article are guesstimates, but they do put in to perspective how mind blowing God’s universe is. The data was done by a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii.

So here we go, “if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly (and we’re speaking very roughly here) 7.5 x 10 (to the 18th power) grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.”  Just to give you an idea, one quintillion has 18 zeros and 1 quadrillion has 15 zeros.  So now lets talk about stars.  On a clear and starry night, the ordinary stargazers might be able to see several thousand stars.  This would make sand a landslide victor.  However, Blatner goes on to say, “When our stargazer gets a Hubble telescope and a calculator, so that now we can count distant galaxies, faint stars, red dwarfs, and everything we’ve ever recorded in the sky, and boom! Now the population of stars jumps enormously, to 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe (a 2003 estimate), so that we’ve got multiple stars for every grain of sand — which means, sorry, grains, you are nowhere near as numerous as the stars.”

Well I guess that makes stars our champion right?  Maybe for the time being, but that’s when Blatner hits us with a new contender into the equation and really blows our mind.  He states that you will find the same number of molecules “in just ten drops of water.”  So, if you took 10 drops of water (not extra-big drops, just regular drops, I’m presuming) and counted the number of H2O molecules in those drops, you’d get a number equal to all the stars in the universe.  Yep, mind officially blown!  When I read this I then looked out at my view of the ocean and thought about the amount of H2O molecules……whew, that’s a lot!  Then when you take into account that about 75% of the Earth’s surface is water, that can be unthinkable and unbelievable to us.  It’s not for God though, it’s all in a days work for him. Genesis 1:9-10 says, “and God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”

It is so evident to see the organized creation in this and the mark of an intelligent designer…Scripture says the creation and heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1), and that God determines the number of stars and gives names to all of them (Ps 147:4).  We serve an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-present God.  Only He knows exactly the true number of stars ever created, grains of sand above sea and below, total water molecules on the earth, atoms and cells that make up our body, and the number of hairs on our head.  He is worthy of our time and praise.  He is God and no one else is like Him.  We should be honored and humbled to be recipients of His glory and power.  We should worship Him like no other, we should make Him the first and most important thing in our life.

So the next time you take a drink of water, think about how awesome and grand our Father in Heaven is.