He calls the stars by name

He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.

Great is our Lord and mighty in power, his understanding has no limit.  Psalm 147: 4 – 5

The minute we start to consider the universe or gaze in wonder at the night sky, our small brains can get quickly overwhelmed.  Our galaxy, the Milky Way is stunning and it is made up of between 100 and 200 billion stars. At any one time we can see up to 2000 stars with the naked eye though there are about 6000 stars you could see. That leaves an awful lot of stars that cannot be seen unless you have a telescope. Astronomers say that our little star the sun is out on one arm of our spiral galaxy and it would take over 20,000 light years to reach the centre of the galaxy. It takes over 200 million light years for our sun to travel around the galaxy. Then wait for it – there are an estimated 300 – 500 billion galaxies.

Milky Way

When the Psalmist wrote that God called the stars by name he was looking at about 2000 stars in a night sky unaffected by light pollution. It would have been beautiful and even the Psalmist may have realised that he was not looking at all there was to see yet he confidently asserted that God called the stars by name. Whether you take that statement literally or metaphorically – God created all of it and let’s face it if he can make all those stars he can certainly name them! Not only that but the writer to Hebrews asserts that ‘the Son … sustains all things by his powerful word’ (Hebrews 1: 3). He sustains all the galaxies by his word!

However before we collapse under an overwhelming sense of insignificance we must see that these verses in Psalm 147 are the meat in a sandwich of hope. The bread of the sandwich is, ‘The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds (verse 2 and 3) and ‘the Lord sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground’ (verse 5). This Psalm was written after the exile and these verses were to give hope to a scattered, heartbroken people who had lost everything. They would have felt insignificant in the hands of their oppressors and would have wondered if God had forgotten or finished with his people forever. God wanted to assure them he had nor forgotten them and as creator of the universe, he had the power to restore them.

Crab Nebula

Today, God does not intend us to be overwhelmed by his incredible, mind blowing creation which we are far more aware of thanks to the amazing advances in astronomy. God wants us to take heart that though he created the universe, he also knows, loves, cares and sees each one of us. Too often we look through the wrong end of the telescope at the universe and see everything tiny, remote and far off which reinforces our sense of insignificance. We need to turn the telescope around and see things from God’s perspective. He sees, knows and calls the billions of stars by name but he can also hone right in on Planet Earth and then onto every one of us. We are not small and insignificant to him. He knows, he sees, he cares about all the minutest details of our lives.  What an awesome God!