118 - Stars

Wording of this Handout:

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118
How many stars are there?

When the book of Genesis was written people did not have telescopes (as far as we know!) so when they looked at the sky at night, all they ever saw was a few thousand stars. Try it yourself.

But today, thanks to huge, modern telescopes, and the Hubble orbiting telescope, we have pictures of vast numbers of stars. Galaxies, and super-galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, on and on, billions and billions of them.

If the Bible was NOT the word of God, we would expect any mention of stars to be limited to what people can see without a telescope. The Bible would talk about a few thousand stars.

But once again the Bible proves itself to be inspired, because in Genesis 22:17 we are told that the number of stars in the sky is equal in number to the grains of sand on the sea shore. As a general comparison this is quite accurate, in fact a modern astronomer has likened the stars to the sand as a way of expressing how many stars there are.

Oh look! There's some stars I've never seen before!

The Bible says "In blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply you descendants...." (New King James Version)