The God Who Walks in the Garden

Back in 1995, some astronomers did something a lot of people thought was a waste of time. They pointed the Hubble telescope at a tiny, dark patch of sky. It looked empty. Nothing there.

They left it pointed at that spot for about ten days.

When the pictures came back, that "empty" patch was full of galaxies. Around 3,000 of them, and I mean galaxies, not stars. Each one with billions of stars in it. And that patch of sky was about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.

I've looked at that picture more times than I can count. It makes me feel small. Really small.

David felt it too.

Long before telescopes, David was out under the night sky, probably watching sheep, and he wrote this:

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them?" (Psalm 8:3-4)

Notice he says "the work of your fingers." He could have said hands or arms, but he said fingers. Like the whole universe was detail work.

And then David asks the question most of us ask at some point. With all of that out there, why would God care about me?

The Bible doesn't answer that question by making God smaller. It answers it by showing how close he wants to be.

Go back to the very beginning. Adam and Eve had just blown it. They were hiding in the bushes. And Genesis 3:8 says they heard God "walking in the garden in the cool of the day."

The God who hung the galaxies was taking an evening walk, looking for the two people who'd just let him down. The first question he asks in the Bible after sin shows up is, "Where are you?"

He already knew where they were. He wanted them to come out.

He's still asking.

Paul stood in Athens in front of a crowd full of smart people and told them God made the world and everything in it. Then he said this: "He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:27-28).

And Jesus took it even further. He didn't just walk in a garden. He moved into the neighborhood. He ate with people. He went to weddings. He touched sick people nobody else would touch. Right before he went to the cross, he said, "I have called you friends" (John 15:15).

He didn't call them servants or employees. He called them friends.

I think a lot of us live like God is either huge and far away, or close and kind of small. Like he's either running the universe or paying attention to us, but not both.

He's both. He's big enough that 3,000 galaxies fit in a speck of sky. And he's close enough to notice when you're hiding in the bushes.

Psalm 147:3-4 puts the two right next to each other. "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name."

It's the same God who counts the stars and sits with the brokenhearted.

Try this this week: Go outside one night and look up. Don't rush it. Let yourself feel small for a minute. Then talk to him like you'd talk to a friend sitting next to you. Because he is.

"Come near to God and he will come near to you." — James 4:8

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