Every Story at Once

Eight Billion Stories at Once

Picture a mother in Kano at three in the morning. Her child has a fever, the clinic wants money she won’t have until Thursday, and she is praying a prayer she doesn’t know how to finish. Somewhere in Ogun State an old man sits in a plastic chair outside his house while the light goes, smiling at a memory from 1987 that died with the only other person who was there. Neither of them will be on anyone’s screen. Neither will make a history book.

Now add the rest. The latest United Nations based estimates put the world at about 8.3 billion people, and every one of them is living something like that right now. Not a headline, a whole inner life. The thought that formed this morning and got swallowed before it reached the mouth. The argument with yourself in the dark, when you weren’t sure the ceiling was listening either. The decision made last Thursday that will bend the next twenty years.

The Bible says that none of this is hidden from God, and that he isn’t skimming it. He knows it in detail, all of it at once. Most of us have heard that so often it has gone flat, like a hymn sung at so many funerals that nobody hears the words any more. Slow it down and it turns out to be very nearly impossible to believe.

What Psalm 139 Says God Knows

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.”

— Psalm 139:1 to 4 (ESV)

David wrote that in the first person, and we read it that way, as one man and his God. Fair enough. But nothing in the psalm says he is an exception. A shepherd who became a king is describing what it is to be a person standing in front of the One who made him, and if it is true of David it is true of the mother in Kano.

Look at the verbs. The one the ESV renders “search out” in verse 3 belongs to the farm. The lexicons give its sense as to toss about, to winnow, which is what you do with a handful of grain on a windy day, throwing it up to see what is wheat and what is chaff. Translators fuss over how to put it in English (the old King James has “compassest”), and I wouldn’t build a doctrine on one verb. But the picture fits the rest of the passage. “Acquainted” is the word for knowing something because you have handled it for years. God is not watching your life from a respectable distance. He has had his hands in it.

Hold that against 8.3 billion and see what happens. I can’t. Nobody can. That is the first honest thing to say about divine knowledge: it isn’t ours made bigger.

And it can sound frightening. Anyone who has lived beside a neighbour who knows everybody’s business will understand why a God who knows everything strikes some people as surveillance and not comfort. David feels that too. Later in the psalm he asks where he could run from such a presence. Hold onto the fact that he doesn’t leave it there.

The Stranger at the Fuel Queue

“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”

— Acts 17:26 (ESV)

Paul says this in Athens to a room of philosophers who prided themselves on knowing how the world worked. The word translated “boundaries” is the language of surveyors and border markers. The when and the where of a human life, the family, the town, the decade, were set by someone who knew what he was doing. You did not arrive by accident of delivery.

If that is so, the points where lives cross are not accidents either. Anyone who has spent two hours in a fuel queue in Nigeria has shared a stretch of road with people whose names they’ll never learn. One of them may be a hinge in somebody’s story, perhaps yours. I can’t tell you which. Scripture doesn’t promise the particulars. It says no meeting happens outside his sight.

Paul goes further, and I think he meant it plainly. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28, ESV). The space where those billions of stories unfold isn’t neutral ground with God watching from outside. It rests on him, and Colossians says as much: “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17, ESV).

Why Nobody Is a Background Character

There is a particular loneliness in believing your story is small. Every child who grew up in a small town and watched Lagos on someone else’s television knows it. The real events seem to be happening up there, on stages and screens, and you are down here in the margin of somebody else’s plot.

The Bible keeps ruining that assumption, and one example will do.

“Now the Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little girl from the land of Israel, and she worked in the service of Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, ‘Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’”

— 2 Kings 5:2 to 3 (ESV)

She has no name. She was taken in a raid and put to work in the house of the enemy’s commander. Her whole recorded speech is nineteen words. And a powerful man travelled to another country because of them. Nobody in that house would have called her the main character, and the writer did not bother to give her a name. Yet the story turns on her.

Jesus says something similar about creatures lower down the ladder than a slave girl.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

— Matthew 10:29 to 31 (ESV)

Two things about it. The verb for “numbered” is in the perfect tense in the Greek, which means the counting is already done, finished and on file. And the sparrows still fall. Jesus says this to disciples he has just warned will be dragged before courts, so the verse is not a promise that nothing bad happens. I read it as a promise that nothing bad happens unseen, and that the one it happens to is never alone in it. None of that explains the fever in Kano. It does mean the mother is not a footnote.

The Objection from the Size of the Sky

There is a serious argument against all of this, and it is not a stupid one. Put as well as a sceptic would put it, it runs like this. We now know the observable universe is about 93 billion light years across. The Milky Way alone holds somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars, and astronomers still argue over how many galaxies there are. In 2016 a team led by Christopher Conselice put the figure around two trillion. In 2021 a study using New Horizons, the probe that flew past Pluto, measured the faint glow of the whole sky and found far too little light for that many, closer to the hundreds of billions. Either figure is past imagining. Against that, says the sceptic, the idea that whoever made it keeps count of the hairs on one head in Kano is vanity, a small species flattering itself.

The Bible knows this feeling and doesn’t wait for the telescope to feel it. The opening verse of this essay is David’s version of the objection, asked with the naked eye. What is man?

The reply starts with a concession. The scale is real, and Scripture does not shrink it. Isaiah, who had no photographs of anything, asks who has measured the heavens.

“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”

— Isaiah 40:12 (ESV)

A span is the stretch of an open hand, roughly nine inches. Whatever the true number of galaxies, the prophet’s answer is that the heavens are handled like a tailor handles cloth. Job gets the same treatment when God answers him out of the storm: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:4, ESV). Earlier Job himself had conceded that these things are “but the outskirts of his ways” and that “how small a whisper do we hear of him” (Job 26:14, ESV).

The second part of the reply is about a hidden assumption. The argument from size assumes that God’s attention works like ours, as a limited supply that has to be rationed, so that more stars must mean less for any one person. That is how finite creatures work. A teacher with sixty pupils in a Nigerian classroom really does have less for each one. But nothing in the argument shows that infinite knowledge runs on a budget, and everything in Scripture says it doesn’t.

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, thought about this in notes he left unfinished when he died in 1662. He described the human being as “A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything” (Pascal, Pensées, in the Trotter edition). He was not calculating galaxies. He was holding two truths and refusing to drop either one.

The Author Who Walked In

Telling the sceptic that God is bigger than his question gives him a good sentence and no reason to change his mind. Here is where I think he goes wrong. He is right about the scale, and wrong about what we should expect God to do with it. If the God of Isaiah 40 simply watched, if he sat at the top of eight billion stories and kept perfect records, the sceptic’s picture of a distant, magnificent, indifferent power would be close enough to the truth. The Christian claim is stranger than that.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

— John 1:14 (ESV)

Authors don’t usually appear in their own books. This one did. He took a body in a particular year, in an occupied province at the edge of an empire, and grew up in a village so slight that a man who would later follow him could ask, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46, ESV). He spent about thirty years as the kind of person nobody would put on a poster. He sat tired beside a well. He cried at a friend’s grave. He knew what it was to have a story that looks, from the inside and from the outside, impossibly small.

Then he was put to death on a cross outside Jerusalem, and the church has always said that what he carried there was the weight of everything that had gone wrong in those billions of stories: the secret that turned to shame, the choice that knocked a life off course, the wound someone else inflicted. A love that sees every story and does nothing is not a love the New Testament recognises. The one who counted the hairs came to the head they grew on, and was crowned with thorns.

Notice what this does and doesn’t answer. It doesn’t tell the mother in Kano why her child has a fever. It does mean that the one who sees the fever has himself stood at a graveside and has been poor in an occupied country. When she prays the prayer she can’t finish, she is not addressing a power that has only ever watched.

That changes what the size of the sky means. The sceptic read the stars as proof that we are too small to matter. The gospel reads the stars as proof that whoever came for us did not have to. It was never a matter of whether the numbers allowed it. It was a matter of whether he would.

What to Do With Being Known

The hymn writers have been here before us. In 1934, as the story goes in the account Wycliffe Canada tells, an English missionary named Stuart Hine was crossing the Carpathian Mountains, handing out Bibles, when a storm rolled across the peaks. He had learned a Russian version of a Swedish poem that Carl Boberg wrote in 1885, and he set about writing English words for it. The thunder shaped the first verse. For fourteen years that version had only three verses, and the third turns away from the thunder and toward the cross. Hine was not doing systematic theology. He was doing what good theology is supposed to lead to, which is wonder with a destination.

I’d like to end with David instead, because Psalm 139 doesn’t stop where we left it. He has spent twenty two verses overwhelmed by being known, and then he does something I find remarkable. He opens the door himself.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”

— Psalm 139:23 to 24 (ESV)

He is asking for what has already happened. God did not need the invitation, and David knew it. Yet the asking turns knowledge that might feel like exposure into something closer to company.

So if you’ve been carrying a chapter you’re ashamed of, or a Tuesday that quietly changed everything, or a prayer you stopped praying because you had decided nobody was on the other end, try it tonight. Say the prayer, and say it badly if you must. The mother in Kano didn’t know how to finish hers either. You will not be telling him anything he hasn’t heard. Even before a word is on your tongue, he knows it altogether, and that is the best reason I know to start talking.

References

Biblical References

Psalm 8:3 to 4 (ESV). Epigraph. David’s question about human smallness under the heavens, which is the sceptic’s objection in its oldest form.
Psalm 139:1 to 4 (ESV). The central passage on God’s detailed, personal knowledge of every person.
Psalm 139:23 to 24 (ESV). David invites the searching he has already described; the closing invitation.
Acts 17:26 (ESV). Paul in Athens: God set the times and boundaries of every life.
Acts 17:28 (ESV). “In him we live and move and have our being”; the setting of all human stories rests on God.
Colossians 1:17 (ESV). All things hold together in Christ; the sustaining presence behind the interlocking of lives.
2 Kings 5:2 to 3 (ESV). The unnamed servant girl: a person with no apparent significance on whom the story turns.
Matthew 10:29 to 31 (ESV). The sparrows and the numbered hairs; God’s attention to the least, set in the context of persecution.
Isaiah 40:12 (ESV). The scale of creation measured in God’s hand; the first half of the answer to the size objection.
Job 38:4 (ESV). God’s reply from the storm, asking questions rather than giving explanations.
Job 26:14 (ESV). Job’s own admission that creation is only the outskirts of God’s ways.
John 1:14 (ESV). The Word becomes flesh; the turn of the essay.
John 1:46 (ESV). Nathanael’s question about Nazareth; the deliberate smallness of the place Jesus grew up.

Other Sources

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Observable universe. https://www.britannica.com/print/article/2215399
Howell, E. (2021, June 9). How many stars are in the Milky Way? Space.com. https://www.space.com/amp/25959-how-many-stars-are-in-the-milky-way.html
Pascal, B. (n.d.). Pensées (W. F. Trotter, Ed.) [Excerpt, Section 2, thought 72]. Hanover College, Department of History. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/212pasc.html
Scientific American. (2016, October 14). Universe has 10 times more galaxies than researchers thought. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/universe-has-10-times-more-galaxies-than-researchers-thought
Singularity Hub. (2021, January 15). How many galaxies are in the universe? A new answer emerges from the darkest sky ever observed. https://singularityhub.com/2021/01/15/how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-universe-a-new-answer-emerges-from-the-darkest-sky-ever-observed/
The King’s Bible. (n.d.). Strong’s H2219, zârâh. https://textusreceptus.thekingsbible.com/Strongs/19139003/H2219
Worldometer. (2026, October 18). World population. Based on United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2024 Revision. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Wycliffe Canada. (n.d.). The story of “How Great Thou Art”. https://www.wycliffe.ca/wordalivenow/the-story-of-how-great-thou-art

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.