Source: Insight for Living daily broadcast, message titled "The Futility of Unscrewing the Inscrutable" (Part 1)
Speaker: Chuck Swindoll
Website: insight.org
Copyright: © 2002, 2004, 2025 Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
Context
This illustration appears in the middle of a message on Job 25, where Swindoll is making the point that God is fundamentally beyond human comprehension — "inscrutable." Right before turning to astronomy, he argues that people tend to imagine God as simply an idealized, more powerful version of a human being, when in reality God’s nature is categorically different from ours. He then says an illustration from astronomy can help convey that vastness.
The Illustration (Summary)
Swindoll builds the picture in two stages:
1. Light speed and the nearest star
He notes that traveling at the speed of light, a straight trip to the moon would take about a second and a third — but reaching even the very first star beyond our own solar system would take roughly four years, and that’s just one star in our own galaxy.
2. The Hayden Planetarium model
He references a scale model of the solar system on display at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, pointing out that the model is so large relative to its scale that the three outermost planets (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) don’t fit inside the building — Uranus would sit in an outer corridor, Neptune around 8th Avenue, and Pluto three avenues further at 5th Avenue. No stars are shown at all, because on that same scale, the nearest star would fall all the way out in Cleveland, Ohio.
3. A second, more detailed scale analogy
He then shares an analogy (attributed simply to "a scientist") that shrinks the sun to a two-foot ball placed on a smooth, open surface, and paces off the planets proportionally from there:
- Sun: a 2-foot orange ball
- Mercury: a mustard seed, 82 paces out
- Venus: a BB, 60 more paces
- Earth: a green pea, 78 more paces
- Mars: a pinhead, 108 more paces (with fine dust scattered around for the asteroids)
- Jupiter: an orange, 7,788 more steps out
- Saturn: a golf ball, 934 more steps
- Uranus: a marble, 2,086 more steps
- Neptune: a cherry, 2,322 more steps (bringing the model to about two and a half miles across)
- Pluto isn’t even factored in at this point
On this scale, the whole solar system spans a surface five miles across — and the nearest star beyond it would require going out another 6,720 miles to place a second two-foot ball.
The Takeaway
Swindoll uses these images to argue that if the physical universe is this incomprehensibly vast, it should not surprise us that God — who made it — is even further beyond our ability to fully grasp or explain. He connects this to Psalm 139, where David says of God, "it is high, I cannot attain to it," reading that as David’s way of saying the reality of God is mind-blowing, and that human beings — especially, he jokes, Americans who "like to run things" — are uncomfortable with a God who can’t be managed or fully explained.
This is a paraphrased summary of the illustration for personal reference. The full message, along with related Bible study resources, is available at insight.org.