Closer Than the Stars

On the night of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei aimed a telescope he had built himself toward Jupiter from Padua, Italy. What he saw puzzled him — three small points of light hugging the planet's edge. He assumed they were ordinary stars. But Galileo kept looking. Night after night he trained his lens on the same patch of sky, and by January 13 he had counted four tiny bodies shifting positions around Jupiter. They were moons — worlds that had been circling that bright planet for millennia, completely unseen by human eyes.

What strikes me about Galileo's discovery is not just what he found, but how long it had been there. Those four moons — now called Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — had been faithfully orbiting Jupiter since creation. No one had built an instrument precise enough to reveal them. The discovery did not change the heavens. It changed the observer.

Acts 17:27 tells us that God arranged all things "so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us." The Almighty is not hiding. He is closer than Jupiter's moons were to every stargazer who ever looked up from Padua. The question was never whether those moons existed — it was whether someone would look carefully enough to see them.

What lens are you looking through today? God has not moved. He is near — waiting to be found by anyone willing to keep looking.