Sunday, December 13, 2020

How Powerful is the Omnipotent One?

 While doing some research on the scientific basis for the existence of God, I came across a document originally written by Peter W. Stoner some time ago (Science Speaks, Online Edition), and has been revised since it's original publication. In the article, Stoner explains the mathematical likelihood of the 13 events of Creation being correctly recorded in the right order and explains the importance of this sequence being in the correct order, and how it confirms what scientists have since discovered. (I find the latter rather humorous) 

He then goes on to explain the power that is in the suns of the universe and it really stopped me dead in my tracks to reconsider my opinion of God, and ask- "Just HOW powerful is He?"

All believers probably say much the same thing that He is all powerful, knowing, present etc. He knows the stars by name (Psalm 147:4) and the hairs on my head are numbered (Matthew 10:30).  These are concepts that we are familiar with and are not hard to appreciate, that is, until you start to try to appreciate just what these passages imply. Have we actually thought about how much power there must be in our God? 

But now, let me share what Stoner wrote about the power of a sun:

    "The sun is a great power plant. If you were to mark off one square yard on the sun you would find it is giving off 70,000 horsepower of energy continuously. There are 10,000 times the square yards of the Earth on the sun. (For comparison's sake, the sun releases the equivalent of 2,700 Little Boy atomic bombs of 15 kt of TNT every second.)

This is a tremendous amount of energy, and "there is still enough energy for the sun to continue to burn for another 5 billion years." Is that power? Indeed, but consider now, there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Multiply our impression of God by 100 billion. But how many is 100 billion? "If you were to count 250 stars a minute, day and night, it would only take you 1,000 years to reach this number." Now that's power.

Lest we forget, the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies. How many? Perhaps a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) galaxies to consider. And there will be a host of planets in each of those solar systems represented by a star, each with mass and velocity, traveling through space at fantastic speeds. All this motion and mass contains kinetic energy which had to be created and set in motion somehow.

I think this properly, or at least minimally, begins to put into perspective the words of Jesus in Matthew 28:18 ".. all power is given unto me."



No comments: