How vast is our universe? The distances in space are so great that we can only use the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) traveling for one whole year (a light year, about 5,879,000,000,000 miles) to measure them!

Robert Jastrow, a former head of NASA's Goddard Center, once used a clever comparison to help us grasp the immensity of the universe.

"An analogy," he says, "will help to clarify the meaning of these enormous distances. Let the sun be the size of an orange; on that scale of sizes the earth is a grain of sand circling in orbit around the sun at a distance of 30 feet; the giant planet Jupiter, 11 times larger than the earth, is a cherry pit revolving at a distance of . . . one city block; Saturn is another cherry pit two blocks from the sun; and Pluto, the outermost planet, is still another sand grain at a distance of ten city blocks from the sun.

"On the same scale the average distance between the stars is 2000 miles. The sun's nearest neighbor, a star called Alpha Centauri, is 1300 miles away. In the space between the sun and its neighbors there is nothing but a thin distribution of hydrogen atoms, forming a vacuum far better than any ever achieved on earth. The galaxy, on this scale, is a cluster of oranges separated by an average distance of 2000 miles, the entire cluster being 20 million miles in diameter.

"An orange, a few grains of sand some feet away, and then some cherry pits circling slowly around the orange at a distance of a city block. Two thousand miles away is another orange, perhaps with a few specks of planetary matter circling around it. That is the void of space" (Red Giants and White Dwarfs, 1990, p. 15). And this is nothing compared to the space between galaxies!

Yet to God, the entire universe is not that impressive. He says He stretches the entire heavens "like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in" (Isaiah 40:22). So as vast as the universe appears to be, it's not nearly as awesome as our great God, who created it for His own pleasure and purpose.