Universal Facts

If you could count all the stars just in our galaxy alone at the rate of 125 stars every minute, it would take over 3,000 years to count them. There are a great number of galaxies and a vast amount of space between them. The closest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda, and to reach there traveling at the speed of light would take you 2.3 million years. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars—some with as many as 1 trillion stars.

The most distant galaxy ever observed is estimated to be around 13,000,000,000 light-years away. Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004, it is located behind the galactic cluster Abell 2218, which bends the object’s light. It is a small, energetic galaxy whose light that is seen on Earth now would have set out when the universe was just 750 million years old. This is the most distant object that can be observed consistently; some ephemeral gamma-ray bursts have been observed that are slightly more distant than this object.

And man has only begun to explore outer space with our modern telescopes today. Conservative estimates of the known universe’s size place it at over 20 thousand million light years (the distance light travels in one year at a velocity of about 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres) wide. That is about 120 million million million million miles. The number of galaxies is estimated to be a few trillion. If we use the figure 3 trillion, and estimate that each galaxy has about 100 billion stars, that means that the known universe has stars that number over 30 with 23 zeros behind it, or 300 thousand million million million million individual stars. That figure is virtually impossible to comprehend.

Yet even this does not tell the real size. With all those bodies crowding the space up there, you would think it would get a little clustered. Not so! The universe is so vast in relation to the matter it contains that it can be compared in the following way: A building 20 miles long, 20 miles wide and 20 miles high that contains 1 grain of sand.

Only God knows the size of the universe. And get this, God says that He has named and numbered each one of those innumerable (to us) heavenly bodies (Ps. 147:4). Why did God create so many stars? Was it for no reason at all? Or was it for an incredible reason? When I read Rom. 8:17, it seems to me that man has an awesome potential that is almost beyond words to describe.

Paul wrote in Romans 11:26 that all Israel shall eventually be saved. That’s quite a lot of people. It has been estimated that since Adam and Eve there have been 25 to 50 billion people who have lived on this planet. It is almost mind boggling to think what God has in mind for puny human beings.  He says He will resurrect all to (spiritual) “glory.”

If all these people make it, and become spirit-born God beings, where would we all fit? Would there be enough “space” to go around? Certainly! There is a good possibility that some day we could rule over an entire galaxy. Just think: God created a universe so huge that He could actually give you an entire galaxy to manage and rule over, along with its millions or billions of stars and its orbiting planets around each of these stars.

If an estimated 200 billion sons of God is taken as a possibility, that means each would be responsible for maintaining and developing 50 billion stars and their attendant planets—enough to form an entire galaxy.” Now that’s a potential worth debating with those who believe the evolution hoax.