"Raise Your Eyes High Up And See"

As you may know, our sun is a star. It appears larger than the stars we see at night because, compared with them, it is quite close. How powerful is it? At its core, the sun is about 27,000,000 degrees fahrenheit. If you could take a pinhead -sized piece of the sun's core and put it here on the earth, you could not safely stand within 90 miles of that tiny heat source! Every second, the sun emits energy equivalent to the explosion of may hundreds of miles of nuclear bombs.

The sun is so huge that over 1,300,000 of our earths could fit inside it. Is the sun an unusually large star? No, astronomers call it a yellow dwarf. The apostle Paul wrote that "star differs from the star in glory." 9 1 Corinthians 15:41) He could not have known how true those inspired words are. There is a star so huge that if it were placed right where the sun is, our earth would be inside it. Another giant star so place would reach all the way out to Saturn - although that planet is so far from the earth that it took a spacecraft four years to get there, traveling over 40 times faster than a bullet fired from a powerful handgun!

Even more awesome than the size of the stars is their number. In fact, the Bible suggests that the stars are virtually innumerable, as difficult to count as "the sand of the sea." (Jeremiah 33:22) This statement implies that there are far more stars than the naked eyes can see. After all, if a Bible writer, such as Jeremiah, had looked up at the night sky and had tried to count the visible stars, he would have counted only three thousand or so, for that is how many the unaided human eye can detect on a clear night. That number might be comparable to the number of grains in a mere handful of sand. In reality, though, the number of stars is overwhelming, like the sand of the sea. Who could count such a number?

Next time: Conclusion of "Raise Your Eyes High Up And See"

Draw Close To Jehovah, 2002