Awestruck beyond despair to worship

David's famous exclamation in Psalm 8:3-4 teaches us about the purpose for God's creation of moons and planets: a staggering recognition of our smallness and frailty and God's condescending care designed to increase our trust and worship of Him.

When I look at your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

Perhaps the same logic compelled God to put creativity and engineering know-how into the minds of our world's great builders. Though their creations make us feel safer and travel farther, they equally display our innate inabilities and human limitations in a way designed to force us back to the only One in Whom there is no limitation. Unexpectedly, this insight is teased out by a very perceptive unbeliever who's books are more than worth reading: Alain De Botton. He writes,

"We see beauty in thick slate roofs that challenge hailstones to do their worst, in sea defences that shrug off the waves which batter them, and in bolts, rivets, cables, beams and buttresses. We feel moved by edifices - cathedral, skyscrapers, hangars, tunnels and pylons - which compensate for our inadequacies, our inability to cross mountains or carry cables between cities. We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths."

- The Architecture of Happiness, p. 204

If bridges, buildings, trains and communication devices do all this for us to our good to make up for our inadequacies, how much more sufficient is our God Who rules the universe and spoke it into being with a word? Can He not care for us today? Yes, He can and He will.