In a biblical worldview, everything begins and ends with God. This is His universe, and His will is going to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Therefore, the supreme devotion of those who serve God should be to know His will.

         God’s ultimate will is that His entire creation be in unity and harmony with Him. In the whole creation, the earth is the only place where there is rebellion against God. Those who fell in the spiritual realm, Satan and those who sided with him, have been cast down to the earth. Therefore, all evil in creation, both the physical and spiritual creation, is now found on the earth. Earth is the front line in the battle between good and evil, between those who love and serve God and those who rebel against Him.

         When some of the ancients speculated about whether there were other planets such as earth with life and intelligent beings such as man, they considered that Jesus addressed this in the Parable of the Good Shepherd. They speculated that the Good Shepherd, who left the ninety-nine to go after the one that was lost, was the Lord coming to Earth to recover the one planet that was lost. This cannot be verified by Scripture, but it is an interesting point. 

         The vast size of the universe is hard to get our minds around. It is approximately eleven to fourteen billion light years across. Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, this is how far it would travel in more than eleven billion years. That is big! Even so, in Scripture we are told that this physical universe is but a “shadow” of the spiritual realm. That means the entire substance of the physical universe compares to the spiritual realm in the same way that our shadow does to us. That’s impressive, but we are also told that God stretched out the heavens like a tent curtain! God is big!

         The earth is barely a speck of dust compared to the physical universe, yet God so loved this little speck of dust that He sent His Son to redeem the earth with His own life. All of the beings in heaven must have marveled at this. One thing it establishes is that size may have little to do with importance. It also establishes that God is the Good Shepherd who does not want even one to perish.

         This is a love so deep and unfathomable that we will likely be spending eternity comprehending it. It is also a revelation of how God considers the lowly, the seemingly insignificant, and can give infinite importance and value to even the lowest. Our goal as disciples is to have His worldview because we have His nature. Learning what this means and how to apply it can be one of the most important issues we settle. To do this we obviously must consider the lowly.