Imagine for a moment, that you are planning to go see a 3-D movie. You have heard so much about it, all the special effects and pop-ups that have made this movie a must-see. However, once you come to the cinema, you choose to watch the film without the 3-D glasses. Much of the dazzling effects will be missed and you will leave the theatre disappointed, cross and cross-eyed! Similarly, we as believers stand to lose out from seeing the marvelous and awesome wonders of God when we forget to see Him through the wonder of His love. This is so vital, since all the wonders that the Lord does for us and through us cannot be fully appropriated and appreciated unless we understand His wonder-filled love that forms the root of His every work. Missing out on that may leave us dry and once again disappointed.
The Wonder of God’s Love
Have we forgotten what that word wonder means? Have we forgotten that childlike sense of awe when a new discovery is made? Think about the joy of accomplishment, the wonder and the marvel a young toddler experiences when he or she, for the first time, finds a piece of a puzzle that fits perfectly in its place. In studying wonder, we ask: What is the purpose or chief end of man? It is to worship God and enjoy Him. And if we have lost the wonder of the One Who was, Who is and Who is to come, then we have removed from our worshipping heart the very ingredient that keeps our worship pure.
You see, our wonder of Him will keep us humble and lowly, allowing us the same mindset that Messiah had for His heavenly Father while He was yet on this earth.Wonder has been defined as something that causes astonishment and admiration; marvel, an awe that is aroused by something unexpected and incredible, and often miraculous. We have many natural wonders in this world that have grabbed our attention that have made us stand in adoration and adulation. Natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon, Mount Everest, or Aurora have captivated our imagination.
We have dived into the underwater world and have seen an incredible display of animal and plant life. And thanks to astrophysics, cosmology and the incredible pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we have seen galaxies and the universe millions of miles away. We are, according to NASA one planet in one galaxy among countless billions of galaxies. In fact in 1999 the HST estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe.
Drawing the curtains
Some of us think that the sky is just plain old blue in the day time and black at night. But as the night sky’s curtains are drawn, and the heavens are put on full display, what we see is just a drop, a microscopic picture of something so vast and incredibly wondrous. In fact, it is what we cannot see with the naked eye that really speaks volumes concerning the magnitude of this universe; hence the magnitude of God, for even the heavens of heavens cannot contain the Lord.
Just Google your way onto the NASA site and you will be absolutely amazed by celestial photographs which highlight dazzling colors and shapes of the many galaxies, leaving us speechless. In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way contains 100 billion stars. If there are approximately 125 billion galaxies, can you even fathom, the size of this universe? NASA says that it would take 13 billion years to cross the universe, from one end to the other, and that, at the speed of light. Thirteen billion years is, for our finite minds, an incredible amount of time, giving credence to the concept of an almost infinite timeline…. hence a glimpse of the reality of eternity.
There is a great lesson to be learned from the heavens which declare God’s glory and the work of His hands. As immense as the universe is, God took only one day to create it (day 2, Genesis 1:7). Compare that to 40 days God took to explain to Moses how we are to live and worship Him. He took more time explaining the way man should live (40 days) than He did for making even the whole of creation itself (6 days). Is man not the centre of His passion, the focus of His attention? While He created the world in 6 days, He spent the next 5000 years or more caring for us, in a most intimate way. Psalm 139 declares how intimately God knows us, for from the very point of our conception, He takes notice of such minute details as the number of hairs on our head and exercises total omniscience in knowing our words before we even speak them.
Knowledge of the immense size of this universe helps us to understand God’s infinite love for us. How vast is the love of God? Psalm 103:12 says: As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. Do we set the limits of God’s love for us as bounded by the earth’s east and west compass, that is, from the rising of the sun to the setting of it? Or can we instead even imagine that His love extends from the east to the west of this immense universe? And can we then understand that God took this love, so vast and incomprehensible, and in the embodiment of Himself, in clothing Himself with flesh, He demonstrated the magnitude of that love by covering our sins (1Peter 4:8).
His eternal and enduring love, 13 billion years in size came packaged to this earth as a gift, in His Son Yeshua, Who is the exact representation of His godly attributes and the incarnation of His boundless love. Only a love of this magnitude can erase the penalty of sin and provide the ticket that permits us to one day enjoy the marvels of this universe with Him forever.
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