According to astronomers, infinity has multiplied! Recently, astronomers have analyzed portions of our sky, and based on their calculations, they have increased their estimate of the number of galaxies from ten to 50 billion. This news is so stunning and so great that it defies our understanding.
Keep in mind that millions, even billions of stars are in a single galaxy. The Milky Way, which can be seen clearly on a dark night stretching across the heavens from north to south, is but one galaxy. Until recently, scientists said there were two galaxies for every person on planet Earth. Now they are telling us that there are ten galaxies for every man, woman, boy and girl alive today.
Let’s go back in history for a moment to put this in perspective. About 150 B.C., the Greek astronomer Hipparchus contended that there were 1,026 stars. He was wrong. A century and a half later, Ptolemy, the Roman scientist who lived at the time of Christ, did a recount. He came up with thirty more–1,056 stars.
Things didn’t change much until A.D. 1610 when Galileo aimed his first primitive telescope up into the heavens and lost his breath trying to see how many there were. Then came the 200-inch Mount Palomar telescope, followed by the $1.5-billion Hubble telescope with magnification 500 million times more powerful than the naked eye. Orbiting Earth in space, the Hubble telescope can peer at astral bodies 14 billion light years away.
Understanding something of the scope of the universe makes me ponder on the power of the Almighty and how God relates to all of this. The Bible says simply that "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth" (Psalm 33). Logic decrees that God is greater than anything He makes. And the number of the stars out there, according to His count, is greater than man will ever fathom. Though conventional wisdom dictates otherwise, God has revealed to His prophets that the number of stars cannot be counted. And God told Abraham that his descendants would be as immeasurable as the sands of the sea and the stars of the heavens.
Jeremiah, in the seventh century before Christ, said, "As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant..." (Jeremiah 33:22, kjv). Psalm 147 says simply that God counts the stars and numbers them. The way things look now, scientists are so far behind. It will be a long, long time before they can catch up. Think of it–for every person alive today, there are ten galaxies, each of which contains millions and millions of stars.
Resource Reading: Isaiah 40:15-31