The Greatness of God
From the very beginning of the Bible, God is revealed as the Great One, the Mighty, the all-powerful Creator.
Genesis 1:1-5:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
The psalmist repeatedly celebrates the glory and greatness of God:
Psalm 19:1-2
The heavens proclaim the glory of God.
The skies display his craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak;
night after night they make him known.
Paul picks up that truth:
Romans 1:20
Forever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.
So let’s take a glimpse at His great power as revealed through creation.
The earth that He made by speaking it into being is 24,000 miles in circumference. We may feel that we are not currently travelling anywhere, but right now the earth is spinning around at 1000 mph, obviously making one complete turn in 24 hours. We are speeding through space at 67,000 miles per hour, travelling over 1.3 million miles a day!
And then, when we look up at the sky, consider the one star in our solar system - the sun, which is 10,000 degrees fahrenheit on the surface. The sun is 93 million miles away, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and so it takes 8 minutes for light to get here….
If the earth was the size of a golfball, the sun would be 15 feet in diameter….we could fit around a million earths inside the sun!
The largest known star used to be Canus Majoris - ‘the big dog star’
If the earth were a golf ball, Canus Majorus would be the height of Mount Everest in comparison. We could fit 7,0000 trillion earths inside it!
A bigger star has been found now, known as Stephenson 2:18. If we could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles a second) it would take just 19,000 years to get there!
Our great God, Jonah’s great God started all this with just four words;
.What should our response be to His greatness?
We worship!
Neh 9:5–6
You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.
We Trust:
Isaiah 55:9
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways.
We affirm that He is not just ‘out there’ but right here, close.
In his stunning book The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard writes:
“Some think that God is a Wizard of Oz type being sitting in a location very remote from us. The universe is then presented to us chiefly as a vast empty space with a humanoid God and a few angels rattling around in it…..of such a “god” we can only say good riddance. It seems that when many people pray they do have such an image of God in their minds. They therefore find praying psychologically impossible or extremely difficult. No wonder.”
Psalm 36:5-6 (The Message)
God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost; Not a man, not a mouse, slips through the cracks.
We worship a great God - the One and Only God!