I made my first trip to deep west Texas this weekend. We took our son & his wife to the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory for solar & star parties. We have always been fascinated by the stars. Much of my childhood was spent on my grandparents’ farm just outside of Hico, TX. I remember going out into the night sky as a teenager and realizing that the nearest light (singular) was over a mile away, and the nearest town was 9 miles away. It was what the McDonald’s astronomers would classify as “dark sky” territory! I climbed up in the bed of the pickup and gazed skyward for an hour, overwhelmed by the immensity of the starfield. As dusk gave way to genuine darkness on the peak of the Davis Mountains, the 6,500 feet of altitude and the distance from any major city created a dark sky, revealing the majesty of the Milky Way. (And the half-dozen javelinas that were foraging under the cedars were oblivious to the glory above them!)

Just as I had felt when I was a teenager lying in the back of the truck that night so long ago, I felt swept up in the stars at the McDonald Observatory and couldn’t help but think of King David penning one of my favorite Psalms, the 8th:

³ When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—
the moon and the stars you set in place—
⁴ what are mere mortals that you should think about them,
human beings that you should care for them?

I felt so small looking into the dazzling display of galaxies in the night sky. How small must David have felt in the fields with his sheep each night? Yet he went on to talk about God’s gift to us, that we were created to know Him. The one who spun the stars into existence so distant from us that it would require many lifetimes travelling at the speed of light to reach them–this One made US and gave us the capacity to know Him, love Him, and praise Him.

It’s for that reason that the Psalmist speaks frequently of the “fear of the Lord,” or “reverence” for the Lord. How can we even think of “editing” His commands to fit OUR preset desires? How can we think we can dictate to Him? It awes me to think that He came to us, that He loved us, that He took on the experience of human death for us, for the creatures that are so small in comparison to what He made by His word of commandment.

Sitting in the darkness of that Davis Mountain peak, I was in awe. And that awe clings to me even today, hundreds of miles from that experience, yet NEAR to the heart of God because He is near to us by HIS choice. That’s why David called Him “majestic!”