Overwhelmed By Our Creator

Earlier this week I decided to try a new method of Bible study. It's not really "new" per say, since I've done it before, but it was with a tool I haven't tried out before called The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge by R.A. Torrey is basically a big and detailed book of Biblical cross references, containing over 500,000 of them. The idea behind it is to let Scripture interpret Scripture and to see the Bible as one cohesive whole. My method is to read a chapter, then work through the cross references one-at-a-time for about an hour, maybe more, maybe less. If I can't finish the whole chapter, I continue the next day. And I benefited from our digital age in this; there is a Treasury eBook available on Amazon called the OSNOVA Study Bible. The free sample contains the Treasury through the entire Old Testament. The New Testament section, along with a book and the entire King James Version of the Bible (which is what the Treasury, written in the late 19th to early 20th century, is based off of), is only about five bucks. Without five Amazon bucks to spare, I downloaded an app with the KJV to use for now.

I started today in Genesis 1. I got a notebook and a pen for notetaking. I spent an hour studying. I read the first chapter, then set upon the cross references. I didn't get past Genesis 1:1. There were so many cross references and I took enough notes that it actually consumed the whole hour. But in that study I found myself overwhelmed by the power of our Creator God.

Throughout the Bible, God declares that he created the heavens, the earth, and everything in it. He uses this as proof of his power to help, to save, to rule, and even to judge. Our God created the entire universe! How minuscule are we in comparison?

Note: The following math is based on numbers from Wikipedia, and thus could be wrong. Plus, I am neither an astronomer nor a mathematician.

Let's think about this for a minute. We live here on earth. We stand about five or six feet tall on average. The planet, however, is about 25,000 miles around at the Equator. That's over 130,000,000 feet. That's about 26,000,000 times longer than we are tall.

Now let's look at the Sun. You've probably seen those little model Solar Systems with the Sun and the eight (nine) planets orbiting it. The Solar System looks nothing like that. The Sun actually comprises over 99% of the overall mass of the Solar System. It's about 109 times bigger than our planet. For those keeping count, that's about 2,725,000 miles or 14,170,000,000 feet. That's about 2,834,000,000 of us.

But wait, there's more! The Sun is actually dwarfed by a star known as VY Canis Majoris, which is about 1,420 times bigger than the Sun (or larger). That's about 154,780 times bigger than Earth. That's about 3,869,500,000 miles, or 20,121,400,000,000 feet, around. That's about 4,024,280,000,000 of us. There are not even close to that many people on Earth.

Then there's the entire universe, which is far bigger than that, so large that we don't even know how big it actually it is. From earth, we can observe about 46 billion light years, which is approximately 276,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles (give or take a zero), of it. That's not even taking into account how much of it we can't see, what we don't know about.

God is bigger than that. He created all of that. He knows every inch of that universe.

Overwhelmed yet?