How Many Stars?

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." - Psalm 19:1

"He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names." - Psalm 147:4

"Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth." - Isiah 40:26

Recently I explored a small part of the universe - via Google Earth. The new version of Google Earth allows you to search the stars much the same way you would explore New York City.

I had always read about how little of the universe we can see with the naked eye, but with Google Earth I had an opportunity to try it for myself.

If you were to sit outside at night and systematically count the stars you would see around 3000. With an average telescope that apparently increases to around 10,000.

What blows my mind is to look into the darkest part of the night sky and know that beyond that darkness you can find tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of stars millions and billions of light years away.

We really have no idea how many stars are in God's universe but it is an awesome number! Some estimates put the number of known stars at 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is ten billion trillion stars! Can your mind grasp that? I know mine cannot.

I cannot fathom where all the matter and energy that makes up the universe came from if not from a Creator God. Did all this come from nothing? If the quantity of the mass and energy in the universe does not blow your mind then what about the complexity?

Lastly, God not only made all of the stars, He also has a name for them all. If God has a name for all ten billion trillion stars, then knowing the names of a few billion here on earth is not that hard is it?