The Hubble telescope has seen a star so distant from us that its light took 9 billion years to get here. Nine billion years, traveling at the speed of light. It’s an unimaginable distance, yet God put that star there, and about 200 billion trillion others, all for one reason.
I used to think God created the universe, maybe even spending a lot of time on it, designing galaxies and stars and planets just to keep himself busy and fulfil what must be an enormous creative impulse. Sling a star here, plop a planet there, different colors, different sizes, different designs. Who knows. Maybe he even created other beings on other planets, then one day decided, “Hey let’s try this again. I have some ideas for a place called Earth.”
Well it didn’t happen that way. Not according to the bible. This is what the bible says in Genesis chapter 1:
God made two great lights – the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also. God placed the lights in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth,
Even if you take the creation story as allegorical, surely you must at least accept the reasons for God’s actions as given in the bible as truth. Otherwise why would you believe the reason for Jesus any more so than any other story in the bible? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” Is that allegorical too?
It’s true. God gave his son as a sacrifice for our sin because he loves us. And he made a universe of 200 billion trillion stars, just to shine on the earth. So next time you are out on a dark clear night, look up. All those stars in that unimaginably immense universe were put there by a loving God for one simple reason. To shine for you.