Psalm 33

Today we finally made it to church again! Yeah! The pastor began his sermon by telling us about Yemen. Yemen is a very hard country to live and work in. There are many people who feel called to live and serve God there. They have good friends who are from Singapore who live there as missionaries. Their 10 year-old daughter had an asthma attack a few days ago. On their way to get her treatment,she died. The question that her family is struggling with is, "How can this happen to a missionary Christian family?" We live in a world where pain and sufferent affect all people. Today's sermon was dedicated to her.

"By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, by the breath of his mouth all the heavenly hosts." We have a sovereign God. What we don't always appreciate is the sheer size of creation. The universe is a very, very big place. The sun's center is about 50 million C. If he could make the tip of his pencil 50 million C, Kuwait City would be incinerated. He used objects held by worshippers to model our solar system. A teacher doing this presentation to a class would need a football field, or two. Holding Pluto would require getting in your car and driving a km or two away. The next nearest sun, if doing this to scale, would be in Africa.

If we were to circle the Earth 7 times at the speed of light, it would take 1 second. The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy to us, is millions of light years away. Ursa Major is billions of light years away. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, by the breath of his mouth all the heavenly hosts." We worship a very big God.

Christians all over the world like to give advice to God. Tell Him what we think needs to be done. We like to try to bring Him down to our size. "Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all who dwell in the world stand in awe of Him." It is incredible that this God shows any interest at all in us. That we can live on this planet at all. If Earth were just 1 degree off its angle (or however exactly he phrased that), we wouldn't be able to exist. We are exactly the right distance from the sun. "But the Lord's will stands fast for ever, and the designs of His heart from age to age."

When he thinks of their friends' daughter who died in Yemen, a cyclone in Burma, and the earthquake in China, he thinks about the largeness of God. The Christian message is that God loves us and He has come down to our level in the person of Jesus Christ to suffer, die, and rise again, and through Jesus we can see hope for the future. He doesn't understand why his friends' daughter died or why thousands of parents in China experienced the same kind of loss, but God has seen that suffering and we can hold onto Him.

He and his wife discussed what they thought losing one of their children would do to their faith. They think it would drive them closer to God. He knows us by name and He's chosen us as His own.