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Today's Little Lift
by Jim Bullington
Many things which Solomon saw “under the sun” were things that were derived of his own experiences and were, in fact, flawed. Contrary to the axiom, “Experience is the best teacher,” Solomon found out that experience was sometimes deceitful and wrong conclusions could be easily drawn. However, not all his conclusions were flawed even when experience was his teacher. Today's devotional will view one such conclusion and explore the reasons why it was, and still is, true.
Solomon wrote, “When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it; moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it.” (Ecclesiastes 8.16-17). Solomon did not deny that man can know some things of God, or even some of God's works; he simply denied that man could know all the work of God.
Let's take a simple statement from the Bible; our point is not to discover the meaning of the verse nor its context, but simply to glean from it the truthfulness of the Bible and the inability of man to understand the work of God apart from God's revelation. Here is the statement we will consider: “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David My servant and the Levites who minister to Me.” (Jeremiah 33.22). The particular phrase in which we are interested is noted in bold text (above). God pledged the truthfulness of one of His promises on the truthfulness of the fact that the host of heaven could not be numbered. Continue to reason with me.
Recently at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney, Australia, one Dr. Simon Driver postulated that there were about 70,000 sextillion visible stars in the universe. Note that he said visible stars because modern science tells us that there are many stars that are not presently visible by any means. This gigantic number 70,000 sextillion is written 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 if one just has to know! By the way, these scientists arrived at this number by attempting to “count” the number of stars in a small strip of the visible sky by estimating the number of stars in the strip and by calculating the amount of light in the strip and then dividing that figure by the average amount of light emitted by one star. This gave them an approximate number of stars in the strip and them they multiplied that number by the approximate number of strips of like size it would take to represent the entire sky!
Why don't they just count the stars?” someone asks. Simple – they can't! If a person counted stars at the rate of one every second and did this nonstop 24/7, it would take over 10 days just to count a million stars. So by dividing 70 sextillion by a million and multiplying by 10, we can approximate the number of days it would take to number the visible stars. The math is easy, but the feat is impossible. At the stated rate, it would take 700 quadrillion days or just under 2 quadrillion years to complete the task! Methuselah would be a mere baby when compared to the man who could complete this task!
Dr. Driver also stated in the referenced meeting of astronomers, that the number of stars may be infinite! Although Solomon did not use the word infinite, he reached the same conclusion about the work of God; it is infinite! Given the fact that the stars are but a single evidence of God and His majesty, and the fact that we cannot even know the number of them, man simply cannot know all the work of God!
Questions:
1. Why can we not know about some stars in our universe
2. How certain is it that we cannot number the stars? How certain are God's promises?
3. If man cannot know the work of God by experimentation, is there another way? How about revelation? Is that a viable way to know God?
4. Can man know everything about God even by revelation? Why or why not? Read Deuteronomy 29.29 in the context of this question and then respond to it again?
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