Psalm 19:1-4 (MSG)

God’s glory is on tour in the skies,
    God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.
Madame Day holds classes every morning,
    Professor Night lectures each evening.

Their words aren’t heard,
    their voices aren’t recorded,
But their silence fills the earth:
    unspoken truth is spoken everywhere.

I’m going to ask you to do something that may seem a little odd, but I ask that you just go with it.

Imagine it’s night (if it’s not already). Take your left hand and hold it at arm’s length towards the just left of the moon. Find a part of the sky that seems mostly void of any light. Now raise your pinky finger. Focus in on your pinky-nail, notice it’s size as you hold it at arm’s length towards that empty spot of sky.

Got the size in your mind’s eye? Once you do, look at this image from the Hubble telescope (Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project).

This picture is displaying approximately what you would find in a dark part of the sky about the size of your pinky nail held at arms length.

All these points of light are galaxies or clusters of galaxies. Within this picture are (at least) ten-thousand galaxies. Now, each galaxy contains millions of stars, most of which have asteroids, planets or other stars orbiting around them.

In a part of the sky no bigger than your pinky nail held at arm’s length are tens of thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars. These are all in a universe that is always expanding, stars and planets always moving in the direction of creating new stars and planets. Always creating – ever expanding.

Most of the galaxies and stars in the sky will never be seen by the human eye (at least while we’re limited to this finite life). So, why would God create the universe in such a way? Why would God create such inexplicable beauty that cannot be beholden by those He created?

Very simply, God seems to love to create. He seems to love beauty for the sake of beauty. Like an artist who paints, sings or writes because they can’t not do it, He created a universe that will forever be creating, displaying a magnitude of His glory that we can’t even begin to estimate.

Do you feel small yet? You, a person who lives approximately 80 years within a 24 hour day, are infinitely small in our vast universe.

And yet, in Psalm 8 David pens this:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
    and crowned him with glory and honor.

You are remarkably small in a vast universe, and yet inestimably valuable.

I’ll leave you with this thought to consider and contemplate.

If God created a universe that contains more beauty than you can imagine or ever even see, and yet crowns you, who were made in His likeness, with glory and honor, what must He really think about you?