You are Unfathomable
As a child, I was fascinated by the planets and stars. My father was an aeronautic engineer and partly responsible for landing men on the moon. I can remember getting a small telescope from my father for my birthday one year and perching it up on the back deck of our family home in Southern California (in those days, you could actually see stars at night). I remember looking through my new telescope and discovering a whole new dimension of creation that I never knew existed. I saw millions of stars, and I wondered, Who put them there? Why do they twinkle like that? Why don’t they fall? In my naivety I remember sitting out one night on a quest to count the number of stars in the sky … 99, 100, 101 … surely with a little time and effort I could count them in a single evening, right?
It is estimated that there are as many as 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. We aren’t able to see all of them yet, as we currently can’t build a telescope big enough to peek into the farther reaches of space. Scientists believe the number of stars in the universe is about 50,000 billion billion. A billion billion? That’s 1 followed by eighteen zeros! That’s a thousand times one hundred million billion. And once we even begin to comprehend the concept of a billion billion, multiply that by 50,000. Believe me, it’s a lot.
Staggering statistics like these bring at least partially fathomable meaning to the phrase “God is awesome.” God called this vast universe into existence, and He knows every star by name. The Bible says, “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” (Ps. 147:4–5, TNIV). That, my friend, is a bunch of names. You think about coming up with 50,000 billion billion names! I have four kids, and I can’t even remember their names all the time. But God knows each star individually. For God to intimately know each of the six billion people on the planet is easy!
David tried to understand this same mathematical perspective. He wrote, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:3–5, TNIV).
Even beyond the splendor and expanse of a universe that we can’t even understand, God still looks at you as His greatest achievement. He created 50,000 billion billion stars, but none of them are as beautiful as the stars He put in your eyes. You are His masterpiece!
It has been calculated that since the beginning of man there have been fifteen to twenty billion people born. Some who believe that man has been around for millions of years (we’re not going to debate that) estimate the number to be upward of ninety-six billion. In either case, we’re talking about a bunch of people! Currently, there are more than six billion people alive today. Every person ever created is completely different than any other human being.
Here’s how: DNA molecules can unite in an infinite number of ways. The closest number we can figure is 10 to the 2,400,000,000th power. That number represents the likelihood that you’d ever find somebody just like you. If you were to write out that number with each zero being one inch wide, you’d need a strip of paper 37,000 miles long. In fact, if the DNA strands from your body were stretched out in sequence, they would reach to the sun and back (93 million miles) four hundred times.
In a twenty-four hour period your heart will beat 103,689 times. Your blood will travel through your veins more than 168,000,000 miles. You will breathe 23,040 times. You will move more than 750 muscles, speak 4,800 words, and exercise more than 7 billion brain cells.
Your uniqueness is a scientific fact. When God made you, He broke the mold. There has never been, and will never again be, anyone just like you. Your uniqueness is unfathomable!
