Have you ever had one of those Bible verses that just caught your attention? One that seemed to have something more, just waiting to be discovered? God’s Word is written in such a way that, although even a child can understand it, the depth of it is greater than we can comprehend. And yet, when one takes the time to dig deeper, there is a wondrous excitement in the treasures we find. Psalm 139:17-18 did that for me a while back, and what a real gem it turned out to be!
In this Psalm of David, we are continually reminded of the comprehensiveness of God’s knowledge and His care for us. Then in verses 17-18, David says something fascinating: “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.” The number of God’s thoughts toward me is more than the number of the sand? How much is God thinking about me?
There is some variety of opinion as to how much sand is on planet earth, but I averaged out my findings to four sextillion grains of sand, excluding ocean bottoms. Okay, this probably needs some explaining. To illustrate, if you earned $1 million, and did this one million times, you would have $1 trillion. Further, if you earned that trillion dollars a million more times, you would have $1 quintillion— and you would still have to reach that number four thousand more times to equal the number of grains of sand on earth. Four sextillion looks like this: 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Think about that for a bit.
Certainly, that is a lot of thoughts for God to think about you, but let’s look at it a slightly different way. Let’s limit these four sextillion thoughts only to the 6,000 years of earth history, and find out how often God has thought about you since the creation of the world.1 If we multiply 60 seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours times 365 days times 6,000 years (60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 6,000), we get a total of 189,216,000,000 seconds since the creation of the world. Now, dividing our sand grains by all the seconds of history, we get 21,139,861,323. That’s right, over 21 billion thoughts of God about you every second for the entire history of the world. Think about that. But remember, Psalm 139 says more than the sand. More than the sand! Can we even begin to comprehend the vastness of His love and care for us?
As we contemplate the greatness of His world and the riches of His Word, let’s recall the abundance of God’s thoughts toward us. The One that thinks about us like that surely has a love that fits it. So, that’s how much God has been thinking about you… How much have you been thinking about Him?
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Everyone has a worldview, and every worldview has questions that it must answer. The truth will naturally produce the best and most sensible answers, and the Bible does just that.
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