Beyond Counting!
Sand and stars
by Janice Ross
Suitable for Key Stage 3
Aims
To consider that God keeps his promises.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the PowerPoint slides that accompany this assembly (Beyond Counting!) and the means to display them.
Assembly
- Point out that the days are getting shorter and that it is getting dark earlier in the evenings.
Ask the students if they have spent any time looking up at the night sky in the last few weeks.
Explain that in summer, we don’t see the stars as much because we are usually in bed before it gets totally dark. However, as the nights draw in during autumn and winter, we get more opportunities to see the stars in the night sky. - Ask the students how many stars they think there are in our universe.
Show Slide 1.
Point out that we can’t even count the stars in this image, never mind the stars in the universe! Even with the most powerful of telescopes, we can’t see them all, so we definitely couldn’t count them all.
According to astronomers, there are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. They estimate that if we look up at the night sky on a clear night, we can probably see about 6,000 stars. - Show Slide 2.
Point out that many of us enjoy time on the beach, especially during the summer holidays.
Show Slide 3.
Point out that it is impossible to count the number of grains of sand in this person’s hands. The magnified image shows the individual grains more clearly, but we still can’t count them! - Explain that we can find the story of a man called Abraham in the Old Testament part of the Bible. Abraham and his wife Sarah were very old and didn’t have any children. Then, God spoke to them and promised that they would have a son.
This must have seemed impossible to the couple, but then God went a step further and made an enormous promise. He told them that, rather than giving them just one son, Abraham’s descendants would be more numerous than all the sand on the beach and all the stars in the sky. - Imagine Abraham looking up into a cloudless night sky, unspoiled by street lights. How many stars did he think there might be? A hundred? A thousand perhaps?
Of course, there were no binoculars or telescopes in those days to see into the vast beyond. - Imagine Abraham picking up a handful of sand from the ground. How many grains of sand did he reckon there might be? A thousand or ten thousand?
Let’s remember that there were huge expanses of desert all around him. - Ask the students, ‘Do you think that Abraham believed God’s promise?’
Explain that Abraham believed that God was so great that he could do anything. - Abraham didn’t know how God would fulfil his promise, but he believed that he would keep it. Today, we can trace Abraham’s descendants back through history, and there are billions of them.
- Tell the students that Abraham didn’t know that there was a big world outside his country. He didn’t know that there were deserts that took hours to cross. He didn’t know the vastness of space.
However, despite all this, he believed that God would always keep his promise – and he did!
Time for reflection
There are many promises recorded in the Bible.
- God made us special.
- God made us unique.
- God knows our thoughts, so he understands us.
- God will never leave us.
- God loves us very much.
Encourage the students to take some time to look up at the sky on a clear night and think about God.
What do they believe? What would it mean to them to know that:
- God made them special
- God made them unique
- God knows their thoughts, so he understands them
- God will never leave them
- God loves them very much
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank you that you kept your promise to Abraham.
Thank you that we can trust you to keep your promises to us.
Thank you that you know the number of grains of sand and the number of stars in the sky, and that you even know us.
Please help us always to remember how huge your love is for us.
Amen.
Song/music
‘I am amazing’ by Philippa Hanna, available at: https://youtu.be/fVNKj0fbMiU (4.21 minutes long)
