Farther Than the Stars
Have you ever felt like God’s love towards you has limits? For example, is God’s love towards us like a battery? Perhaps the Father creates it, Jesus installs it, and the Spirit is the current of electricity flowing into our dead hearts… but eventually, the corrosion and decay in our lives drains that battery. Eventually, it runs out, right?
No! You say. God’s love is far more powerful than that. It doesn’t run out like some AA battery.
Perhaps God’s love is like the engine of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. That baby will send you to low-earth orbit with 27 gigawatts of power, nine million times more powerful than that AA battery. Surely that’s a better depiction of the upper limits of God’s love for us, right?
Thousands of years before batteries and rockets, David wrote in Psalm 103 about the limits of God’s love especially in light of our flaws and failings,
“He does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve. For his unfailing love toward those who fear him is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.”
His unfailing, never-ending love is as great and expansive as the height of the heavens themselves compared to where we stand looking up at them from earth. Here’s the amazing thing about that: We now know that the heavens, the very galaxies above, are expanding continually. They are constantly getting farther apart, as if they were flung out, stretched out. In fact, that’s what David says in the very next Psalm, Psalm 104,
“You stretch out the starry curtain of the heavens.”
So back to our question… What is the limit on the power of God’s love towards us, even in our constant errors and faithlessness?
Well, let’s measure it, as high as the stars are above the earth… getting farther, and farther, higher and higher every day. His love, dear friends, will never, ever end towards his children — those redeemed from death by His Son. In fact, it expands every day. And what does he do with our sin? When we confess it, he chucks it with that same infinite, never-ending thunder-beam laser power, which David says”has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.” Because of Jesus, our sins are blasted into infinite galaxies beyond. And this stupendously incredible, gracious power reminds us of our need to confess our sins to Him.
