How does the universe look to God? That’s a question humans can never answer. No doubt our awesome Creator can zoom in to count the hairs on every individual’s head while simultaneously viewing the vastness of His entire creation. Humans can view hairs and even microscopic cells, but we can see only a fraction of the universe. As tiny as we are, it’s impossible to get a sense of its large-scale structure.

I used that same introduction 10 years ago in an article I wrote about the Laniakea Supercluster—a cluster of galaxies.

We used to think that the biggest large-scale structure we were part of was the Virgo Supercluster. At 110 million light-years across, it has over 100 galaxy groups and clusters. It is mind-bendingly huge. A beam of light that just finished crossing the supercluster would have begun its journey while dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Then in 2014, we discovered the Virgo Supercluster was just a small part of Laniakea, a Hawaiian word meaning “immeasurable heaven.” Around 100,000 galaxies all flow together, drawn slowly together by the pull of gravity. The Milky Way is on the edge of this flow.

Viewing the universe at a scale where each galaxy, with all its billions of stars, was just a speck of light captured my imagination. This zoomed-out perspective is a view only God could have. And yet there is still beauty, order and structure, with galaxies flowing together in gravitational rivers. We made Laniakea the subject of one of our early infographics.

Yet we now know that even Laniakea is too small.

A new study indicates that Laniakea itself is just a branch of a larger structure. As yet, it lacks a poetic name—being just the “basin of attraction,” boa or the Shapley Concentration, after Harlow Shapley who noticed back in the 1930s that a large number of galaxies congregated together. Now we know that our local supercluster and this Shapley Concentration all flow together. It’s a little like discovering that Laniakea is not a river that flows all the way to the sea but instead is a tributary of a much larger system.

Yet even this new basin of attraction doesn’t beat the largest large-scale subject we know about: the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, or just the Great Wall, discovered a year before Laniakea.

This wall of galaxies stretches one 10th the way across the entire observable universe. At 10 billion light-years across, it is impossibly big—literally. These large-scale structures are a problem for the standard version of the big-bang model.

If clusters of galaxies were formed, as cosmologists assume, by mere random fluctuations after a big bang, then on a large enough scale the universe should look the same. When tossing a coin, you wouldn’t be surprised to get three or four heads in a row. But do it 1,000 times and you’d expect the distribution of heads and tails to be almost identical. Finding this Great Wall is like getting 100 heads all in a row. It’s a massive signal that there’s something more than randomness and chance at work.

The second impossibility is its age. According to current theories, we are seeing what the Great Wall looked like when the universe was only 3.8 billion years old. In the current big-bang model, it is impossible for anything that big to form in such a “short” amount of time. Shortly after its discovery, Istvan Horvath, one of the scientists who discovered it, said he had “no idea” how it could have evolved.

Theories have been adjusted since then, but they still struggle to account for order and structure on this scale. “This discovery presents a challenge: Our cosmic surveys may not yet be large enough to map the full extent of these immense basins,” said Ehsan Kourkchi of the University of Hawaii. “We are still gazing through giant eyes, but even these eyes may not be big enough to capture the full picture of our universe.”

As we gather data and try to imagine that “giant eye” view of the universe, we get an epic vision.

“Our universe is like a giant web, with galaxies lying along filaments and clustering at nodes where gravitational forces pull them together,” said University of Hawaii’s R. Brent Tully, who led the group that made this discovery. “Just as water flows within watersheds, galaxies flow within cosmic basins of attraction. The discovery of these larger basins could fundamentally change our understanding of cosmic structure.”

The latest science agrees with the truth revealed in your Bible. The universe has a beginning, and it is full of an unusual level of order and structure. It is all subject to a uniform system of law. And it appears finely tuned so that life can exist.

It’s everything you would expect from a universe created by a divine God Being for a purpose. And it would have to be a spectacular purpose to require that much real estate.

The Bible reveals that purpose. God didn’t need a universe for Himself. He made it for man. God promises it as the inheritance of humanity. Hebrews 2:8 states that God has put “all things in subjection” under man. The Moffatt Bible translates “all things” as “the universe.” Verse 8 goes on to say that God has left “nothing that is not put under him.”

“In other words, for those willing to believe what God says, He says that He has decreed the entire universe—with all its galaxies, its countless suns and planets—everything—will be put under man’s subjection,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in his book The Incredible Human Potential. Of course, as the verse goes on to say, the endless universe has “not yet” been put under us—but it will be.

Hebrews 2:8 is not an isolated scripture. The Bible plainly reveals that God’s plan for mankind includes the whole universe. That cosmic web, if that is indeed the true structure of the universe, is our inheritance. No wonder the Apostle Paul wrote, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

Much of what the Trumpet warns about—race wars, child sexual abuse and nuclear war, for example—is deeply sobering. But this vision and hope puts all that suffering in context. The great God who created all this is preparing man for this inheritance.

“In this world full of terrorism, we need our universe dream,” wrote Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry. “We need to see the stupendous possibility and the eternal majesty. … Nothing can stimulate our imagination like comprehending our universe potential! Nothing” (Trumpet, February 2004).

Our free booklet Our Awesome Universe Potential helps bring that dream to life like nothing else. It looks at the latest discoveries of science, shows how they agree perfectly with the truth revealed in your Bible, and fires your imagination with vivid pictures of man’s awesome potential. You can read it online or order a free print copy.