Did you ever stop to consider that we as humans are able to experience only a minute fraction of Creation? Only 6,000 stars (at best) are visible to the naked eye. There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and the Milky Way is only one of millions of galaxies. There are distant stars being formed whose light will not reach our planet for millions of years. Depending on your view on the age of the universe, there were stars burning, planets spinning, and countless creatures prowling the earth before we even arrived on the scene.

Reflecting on the existence of 17,000 known trilobite species that skittered beneath the surface of prehistoric waters, one of my professors once remarked that God must simply enjoy creating things and watching them, that the diversity and abundance of creation is a reflection of an endlessly productive God. Does it ever occur to us that, although we have been assigned as its temporary stewards, Creation was not ultimately created for us but for God–the only one capable of enjoying its full expanse?

As much as I love scholarly interpretation tools for the Bible, I’ve always contended that “Joe Sixpack” with a good cross-reference Bible (preferably an NASB) would come to the same conclusions 90 percent of the time as a Ph.D. with access to a seminary library. The scriptures interpret themselves, and the image below illustrates that.Cited by National Geographic in the Best Science Images of 2008, the computer-generated graph shows the arcs of biblical cross-references, from Genesis (on the left) to Revelation (on the right). ” ‘It almost looks like one monolithic volume,’ said Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Harrison, who–along with Christoph Romhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany–won an honorable mention for illustrations in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.”