The Speck God Sees

The Speck God Sees
By Brenda Black


I'm just a speck. No, I'm a speck on a speck! We're all just itty bitty, teeny, tiny flecks of humanity in the big picture. If ever we begin to think too highly of ourselves, consider a down-to-earth illustration that lends perspective to the vastness of our universe. It comes from former head of NASA's Goddard Center, Robert Jastrow, who attempts to explain the great distance in space that demands description in light years.

"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 2,000 miles. The sun's nearest neighbor, a star called Alpha Centauri, is 1,300 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 2,000 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”.

Yet to God, the entire universe is just “Home, Sweet Home,” decorated by the Deity. 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. And all of us specks are of special interest!

God sees, God sends and God supplies for the sake of us specks. Take the miniscule Moses for example. In the middle of a rugged desert, among a herd of stinky sheep, God saw Moses and God saw the pains of his people.

“The Lord said, 'I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them...'” (Exodus 3:7-8a)

God saw and he had a plan, but the scheme required a speck of a man to be obedient. “'So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.'” (vs. 10)

Who, me? Debated the speck with the Supreme. God saw. God had a plan to use mere man. And God supplied all that fleck of flesh would need to carry out the duty. “'I will be with you.'” (vs. 12b)

If ever we begin to think too lowly of ourselves, consider a heavenly illustration that lends perspective to the vastness of God's ever-present help in this universe.

“'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.'” (John 3:16-21)

At the speed of Light, God sees our sin, sends his Son, and supplies salvation to specks on planet earth. His love is vast, his mercy enormous and his judgment solid. Thank God for dwelling among the specks and in their tiny, fickle hearts. O, how he must love us to constrain himself so.