Opening the Curtains

“Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22 It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”
(Isaiah 40:21-22)

“Beside our sun, the nearest star is 4.3 light years away,”[i] John Bevere shares in his book The Fear of the Lord. To break that down into everyday language, light travels at the speed of 186,282 miles per second – not per hour but per second. That is roughly 670,000,000 miles per hour. Our airplanes fly approximately 500 miles per hour. Bevere continues,

If we built a scale model of the earth, sun, and nearest star, it would be as follows. In proportion, the earth would reduce to the size of a peppercorn, and the sun would become the size of an eight-inch-diameter ball. According to this size scale, the distance from the earth to the sun would be twenty-six yards, which is only a quarter the length of a football field. Yet remember, for a scale airplane to span that twenty-six-yard distance, it would take more than twenty-one years.

So if this is the earth’s and sun’s ratio, can you guess how far the nearest star would be to our peppercorn earth? Would you think a thousand yards, two thousand, or maybe a mile? Not even close. Our nearest star would be placed four thousand miles away from the peppercorn! That means if you put the peppercorn earth in San Diego, California, the nearest star on our scale model would be positioned past New York City and into the Atlantic Ocean a thousand miles out to sea!

To reach this closest star by airplane would take approximately fifty-one billion years, non-stop! That’s 51,000,000,000 years! Yet light from this star travels to earth in only 4.3 years.
Or, to put it another way. Imagine that the thickness of this page which you are reading is the distance from earth to sun (93 million miles). The distance to the nearest star (4.5 light years) would be a 71-feet high shelf of paper. And the diameter of our own galaxy (100,000 light years) is a 310-mile stack of paper, while the edge of the known universe is a pile of paper one-third of the way to the sun (31 million miles).[ii]

Let’s expand further. The stars you see at night with the naked eye are one hundred to one thousand light years away. However, there are a few stars you can see with the naked eye that are four thousand light years away. I wouldn’t even attempt to calculate the amount of time it would take for a plane to reach just one of these stars. But, think of it; light travels at 186,282 miles per second, and it still takes four thousand years to reach the earth. That means that light of these stars were first released before Moses parted the Read Sea, and has traveled a distance of six hundred seventy million miles every hour without slowing down or ceasing since, and is just now reaching the earth!

But these are only the stars in our galaxy a galaxy is a vast gathering of usually billions of stars. The galaxy in which we live is called the Milky Way. So let’s expound further.

The closest galaxy to ours is the Andromeda Galaxy. Its distance from us is approximately 2.31 million light years away. Imagine, over two million light years away.

Scientists estimate there are billions of galaxies, each of them loaded with billions of stars. Galaxies tend to group together. Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way are part of a cluster of at least thirty galaxies. Other clusters could contain as many as thousands of galaxies.

The Guinness Book of World Records states that in June 1994 a new group of cocoon-shaped clusters of galaxies was discovered. The distance across this group of galaxies was calculated at six hundred fifty million light years.

The Guinness Book of World Records also states that the most remote object ever seen by man appears to be over 13.2 billion light years away. Our finite minds cannot even begin to comprehend distances this immense. We’ve yet to glimpse the ends of the galaxy clusters let alone the end of the universe.

Yet, Scripture says that God,

“He stretched out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”
(Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; Psalm 104:2; Jeremiah 10:12)

Pondering...

How much effort does it take to draw back your curtains in the morning?




If your curtains are like mine, it hardly takes any effort at all. Imagine, God stretched out the heavens, more than 13.2 billion light years (that’s roughly 836,160,000,000 miles x 13.2 billion). And this is just Him opening the curtains into the vastness of who He is!




“Anybody who still thinks the sky is the limit has no imagination.” [iii]
—Saturday Evening Post




[i] John Bev.ere, The Fear of the Lord, Lake Mary, Florida: Creation House, 1997, 25-27
[ii] Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979.
[iii] Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979.