“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; what is man, that You take thought of him?  And the son of man, that You care for him?”  From the time David wrote those words until the invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century, only a few thousand stars were visible to the unaided eye, and the universe appeared far less impressive than we now know it to be.  Even until the second decade of our century, it was thought that the Milky Way galaxy was synonymous with the universe.  Now this alone would be awesome in its scope, since our spiral galaxy contains over two hundred billion stars and extends to a diameter of 100,000 light years (remember that a light second is over 186,000 miles; light from the sun to the earth traverses a distance of about 93 million miles in eight seconds).  But more recent developments in astronomy have revealed that our galaxy is a member of a local cluster of some twenty galaxies, and that this local cluster is but one member of a massive supercluster of thousands of galaxies.  So many of these superclusters are known to exist that the number of galaxies is etimated to be in the hundreds of billions.  What is man, indeed!  The God who created these stars and calls them all by name (Isa. 40:26) is unimaginably awesome; His wisdom, beauty, power, and dominion are beyond human comprehension.  And yet He has deigned to seek intimacy with the people on this puny planet and has given them great dignity and destiny: “Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and crown him with glory and majesty” (Psalm 8:5).  While these words are applicable to all people, they find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:6-8).

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