The Hand Span of God: Isaiah 40:12 Run as Math

1 min read

If the whole universe fit in one hand span, how small would you be?

The verse

Isaiah 40:12 asks who has “measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span.”

What a span is

A span is the width of a spread hand, thumb to little finger, about 9 inches or 22.86 cm. In the Bible it is half a cubit.

Run the math

Shrink the 93-billion-light-year universe to 22.86 cm. Everything scales down by about 3.8 × 10^27.

The galaxy

The Milky Way, about 100,000 light-years wide, becomes about 0.25 micrometers, the size of a large virus.

The Earth

Earth becomes about 3.3 × 10^-21 meters, hundreds of thousands of times smaller than a proton.

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You

A person 1.7 meters tall becomes about 4.4 × 10^-28 meters, nearly two trillion times smaller than a proton.

Grasshoppers

Isaiah 40:22 says the inhabitants of the earth are “as grasshoppers.” The math says the poet was generous.

Anthony’s point

The scale is humbling, not crushing. If you are that small, the only thing that grows you is what you build and who carries your name.

Sources

• Isaiah 40:12 and 40:22, Bible Gateway (KJV).
• Wikipedia, “Span (unit).”
• Wikipedia, “Observable universe” and “Milky Way.”
• CODATA proton charge radius, about 0.84 femtometers.

Part of Is There Room for You? The Heaven Room series.

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Anthony Perlas · nightlifereport.app

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