Last week during Bible study Charlie Meier showed a video by evangelist Louie Giglio called “Indescribable”. The video contained many stunningly beautiful pictures of space, most reconstructed from images taken by the orbiting Hubble telescope. I’ve appended one of our galaxy, the Milky Way; the arrow points to where our solar system is located. If you would like to see more such pictures, the video is available on YouTube. You also might enjoy a recent Nova broadcast, also available on YouTube, about the Hubble telescope and what we have learned during its twenty-five years in space.

Giglio’s commentary contained many interesting scientific facts and statistics. For example, our Milky Way galaxy contains billions and billions of stars, and in even a small window of visible space, there are billions and billions of galaxies. I’m a math-science nerd so I found it all very intriguing. It also caused me to chuckle a little bit, for it reminded me of the times Johnny Carson had the astronomer Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show. He would poke fun at Sagan by saying things like, “You say that there are Zeeellions and Zeeellions of stars, just in our Milky Way.” It doesn’t look so funny typed; I guess you had to hear it for yourself.

Giglio’s first point was that this part of the universe that we can see, called the observable universe, is completely awesome. Our creator God is even greater, which makes Him truly indescribable. This is capsulized in Isaiah 40:25-26: “`To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens; Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.” His second point is that in comparison we as small humans are insignificant. Nevertheless, remember that even though we are little specks in the universe, God loves me and YOU unconditionally.

Jim