“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God 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,” (Genesis 1:1-5 ESV).
In 2003, the Hubble Telescope focused its camera on a seemingly blank section of the night sky. Scientists were not expecting to see much in the images captured, but they were greatly surprised. Below is quite possibly the most important image ever taken.
This is a higher resolution image of the section of sky photographed in 2003. Every time I see this pop up in science books or on Wikipedia, I stop and soak it in. Every star or swirly thing you see on this image is an entire galaxy composed of a trillion stars each. To put things in perspective, every star visible in the night sky is only in the milky way galaxy; our galaxy. So each of the items in this image are the same size or bigger than our own milky way. That’s insane!! Guess what else is insane? If anything in this universe was slightly different, if the gravity constant was any higher or any lower, if the charge of an electron was even slightly different, if the distances in our universe were not just so, then life could not exist. You wouldn’t be reading this right now. Everything is exactly where it needs to be. It is almost too perfect. The chances of such an occurrence are so small that it’s not even funny. It happened though, and that’s pretty awesome.
Look at the image again. The galaxies represented in the picture are insanely massive. It would take millions of years going far past the speed of light to reach the edges of even the “closest” galaxy in this image. The God who created every one of us, also created the entire universe. All the galaxies, nebulas, planets, etc. were his handiwork. What’s even crazier is He is far bigger, and far greater than anything in the heavens and on earth. Far bigger and far greater than all the galaxies combined in the picture, and then some. This is the same God who freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, and parted the Red Sea. The same God who made Esther (pretty much a nobody in her society) queen and used her to save many Jewish lives. The same God who gave David the power to beat the odds and defeat Goliath the giant with nothing more than a slingshot and some rocks. The same God who defeated death once and for all in the person of Jesus, so that whoever may believe in Him will have eternal life.
All of these things come to mind when I see the Hubble Deep Field image. I encourage you to do the same, and thank the God of the universe for the many blessings He has poured out on us. Also thank Him for His wondrous creation.
