A Simple Message Worth Repeating--OVER AND OVER AND OVER

The verse that caught my eye today was Isaiah 40:12:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,

   or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?

Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,

   or weighed the mountains on the scales

   and the hills in a balance?

It's a common theme, best represented by God's response in Job 38-39, but it always bears repeating in my opinion, which is why I bring it up so much. Today, I'm going to do it pictorially.

This should be a familiar sight:

Yes, it is indeed the Grand Canyon, for those in any doubt, and anyone who's ever seen it will tell you that pictures don't even remotely do it justice. It is one of the most awe-inspiring sights anyone will ever see, and something that man, with all our technology, power and might, couldn't even come CLOSE to replicating no matter how long or how hard we tried.

Kind of like this next image:

The picture doesn't exist that can capture the awe and majesty that is Mt. Everest--it's a mountain over 29,000 feet high, or almost as high as commercial airliners fly. I just looked up the tallest skyscrapers on Earth (man, was my information out of date--what I thought were the tallest, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia are now 5th and 6th) and the tallest one is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and that tops out at an amazing 2,716 feet, but you would need ELEVEN of them stacked on each other to reach Everest's summit.

The next one doesn't have a picture, and I don't think one is possible. It's the Mariana Trench, the world's deepest point. It's located in the Pacific Ocean:

The trench is over 35,000 feet deep, so if Mt. Everest were dropped in it, it would be covered by over a MILE of ocean. Think we could dig a hole that deep in some inhospitable conditions (the pressure is over 1,000 times more the pressure at sea level--we'd collapse in no time)?

This last one will simply blow your mind. I ran across it in a recent issue of Sky and Telescope:

This is a view of the farthest object visible from Earth. Leave aside for the moment that just about EVERY SINGLE OBJECT in this picture is a galaxy, just as big or bigger than the 250 billion star Milky Way Galaxy we call home (I take that back--I think there's three stars in there--you can tell because they have the diffraction spikes on them--there's two smallish ones in the upper left corner and and a brighter one in the lower right corner). This object is approximately 13.2 billion light-years from us. By my (probably incorrect) math, that would be:

79,200,000,000,000,000,000 miles (give or take one or two zeroes)

I'd pack a lunch if you're making that trip, because at highway speeds, it's going to take you over 114 BILLION YEARS to get there.

And God, through Isaiah, is telling the people of Judah that he's bigger than all of this. He CREATED it all. Whenever we puny humans start thinking grandiose thoughts on our powers, consider these pictured items--they dwarf and overwhelm anything we'll ever do. We need to constantly remind ourselves just how small and insignificant we are, and unceasingly thank and praise God for caring so much for such an insignificant species. 

Scott