100 billion galaxies, and still expanding...

What human beings have been able to observe of God’s creation is already so vast and complex that it defies description. However, even so, scientists estimate that they have detected barely 4 percent of the universe - leaving a staggering 96 percent still to be discovered and observed.

Psalm 33:6 declares: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” The Hebrew word translated “heavens” here can also be translated “firmament.” In these two short phrases lie a demonstration of divine might and intelligence that are utterly beyond comprehension or imagination.

The most significant advances in the study of the universe are relatively recent. It is particularly striking, therefore, that the oldest recorded portion of God’s Word - the book of Job - contains some of the most up-to-date and accurate descriptions of the creation of the universe: “He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing” (Job 26:7). That fact is repeated in several other places including the book of Isaiah: “He... stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in” (Isa. 40:22). It is only in the last ninety years that the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, discovered that the universe has indeed been expanding - or stretching - since it was first created, and that it continues to expand and stretch to this very day.

It is God the Father who placed us in His Son: “of Him [God] you are in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:30) - the very Son through whom the Father created the universe and everything in it. Several scriptures testify to the fact that everything was made in and through Jesus Christ: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17, NIV). In John’s gospel, Jesus Christ is referred to as the Word through whom all things came into existence: “In the beginning was the Word... All things were made through Him” (John 1:1, 3).

Jesus Christ was the singular point at the time of creation. This is the first step in the Father’s movement toward self-expression in a three-dimensional form. It was from here that the quantum field emerged, providing the substance of three-dimensional creation. All the elements that were to constitute the entire human race, and everything else, were contained in Christ. Many, if not most, cosmologists now agree that the universe was created at a singular moment called the Big Bang. All that can be observed in the universe - the 100 billion galaxies and everything we see around us on our own planet earth - began as a miniscule point that was small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.

The universe emerged and rapidly spread out from that point. From the moment of creation and the expansion that followed, all that was to be required for human life (and everything else in the universe) was created. It is an astounding fact that all the subatomic particles and elements that now constitute you and me were already in existence from the creation of the world. To put it another way: The subatomic particles that now constitute you were already contained in Christ at the point of creation.