The Lord Of The Universe

In your walk with Him, don’t lose the deep wonder that is fitting for such an incredible God.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.

– Psalm 147:3-5

My wife and I traveled to the ocean because we both knew we needed to mourn. When you have several miscarriages, despair wants to be your closest friend and distracts you from God’s goodness in the midst of sorrow. We needed a change of scenery to process the tremendous ache of disappointment.

Life can be headed one way with profound excitement, and then another direction when you realize a door is closed and dreams are crushed. The thrilling anticipation we felt from a positive pregnancy test and then the grief we felt months later when the doctor looked us in the eyes to tell us that the baby had no pulse threw us into an emotional crevasse. It is at those times that we find solace not in our feelings of misery, but in the One who receives our tears and gives us a greater perspective and perseverance.

The ocean and the sky pointed us to God who is compassionate and yet eternal. The Psalmist writes that no one has power and strength like our God. He is able to gather the exiles, heal the brokenhearted, determine the name and location of the stars, and has no limit to His understanding. Look to God as you appreciate what He has made in creation.

In your walk with  Him, don’t lose the deep wonder that is fitting for such an incredible God. The transcendent God above us is also the immanent God who embraces us in our pain. Jesus is a man of many sorrows and is well acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). Stars are not scattered throughout the universe randomly. God cares for the stars, and He knows them each by name. They are arranged in galaxies. The earth is part of the Milky Way galaxy. Stars are just one part of the vast work of God’s hand in creation.

There are billions of stars in our galaxy-the sun is just one of those stars. We share the same purpose as each of these stars: to bring God glory. Even though the sun moves at an estimated 150 miles per second,2 it would still take the sun hundreds of millions of years to travel across the entire galaxy.

That is one big galaxy! Our minds can barely comprehend the size of our own galaxy, but scientists teach that billions of galaxies exist, and they are finding new galaxies all of the time. In a similar way, we are constantly discovering new aspects of the expansive grace of God. Only God could design and sustain such a universe, and at the same time, only God could offer this amount of grace!

Excerpt republished with permission from Rooted in Grace by Jesse Bradley c. 2012.