Indescribable: Encountering the Glory of God in the Beauty of the Universe by Louie Giglio and Matt Redman (2011)

Before jumping into the review, I need to make this note: I read this book on my Kindle Paperwhite and totally missed out on the full experience. The images the authors share throughout the book are (I can only imagine) shockingly beautiful when seen in full color, so if you ever read it, do so in print or on a color e-reader, not on a Paperwhite, photocopied or (Heaven forbid) on audio. This book is meant to be read in its full-color beauty.

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Some Clarity about the Authors

Although I listen to a wide range of Christian music (including Matt Redman), I’m not really into the “celebrity pastor” scene and genuinely don’t know many names in the industry. In fact, before first picking up this book a decade ago, I’d never even heard of “visionary pastor, Louie Giglio” or The Passion Movement.

The book’s title confused me at first too—after all, I know the song “Indescribable” through Chris Tomlin, though it’s written by Laura Story. So why is Matt Redman the co-author? Everything coalesced for me when I read that Tomlin became worship leader at Giglio’s Atlanta church in 2009, that Giglio had actually created a DVD series titled “Indescribable.” Matt Redman had also been involved in Atlanta nearly a decade before. So it seems these guys were all good friends, and their co-laboring through this project about God’s indescribable awesomeness makes total sense. It helped me too to learn that Giglio and Redman both share a common interest in Astronomy, so their book on worship through the stars is a perfect fit.

Quick Summary of Indescribable

As a “devotional journey that points us back to the Creator” (10), this book succeeds beautifully in its goal, and a Christian would be hard-pressed not to have his passion for and trust in God fanned back into flame after reading it. The statistics and details these authors share about the universe are mind-boggling and should convince even the most hard-hearted skeptic of the greatness of our indescribable God, but of course, we’ve had these statistics for a long time, and we’ve had the skeptics for even longer.

For whatever reason, God-deniers still choose to believe that TIME + CHANCE is a more plausible explanation for our universe’s natural impossibilities than that they are simply the creative works of a SUPERNATURAL GOD.

The statistical improbability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident is zero. — Ilya Prigogine Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (99)

And yet…

A Personal Relationship with the Moon and Stars

My wife came to faith in God one night as she sat beneath a starry sky, pondering the impossibilities of Evolution as a system and knowing that Someone greater than time and space must have Created it by design. You can read her amazing testimony here, of how this initial doubt led her to Christ.

As the years go by, my own faith is constantly buoyed by similar recognitions that nothing exists by chance—and nothing happens by chance. There is simply no natural explanation for the why-where-when-how of our universe (or of ourselves), and this forces us measly little humans to consider the Supernatural. And what a thing—what a God!—to ponder!

Some Favorite Mysteries

Several astronomical issues have always struck me as joyful mysteries to contemplate, for example, the distance of the stars from Earth and from each other and the infinitude that we’ve yet to uncover. The authors deal with each wonderful mystery in turn.

Distant Stars and Created History

I’ve particularly always been fascinated by the simple line in Genesis 1:16, “He made the stars also” (KJV). There’s an expanding infinity of space containing uncountable billions of trillions of stars, the vast majority of which we’re still unable to see, and yet the Bible says He made them in an instant by the word of His mouth. Unfathomable.

Billions of light years of moving history dashed together in an instant, by the Word of God our Supernatural Creator. Indescribable.

Have you ever tried to grasp the concept that God created the remnants of stars which never existed when he spoke them into Creation on that day? Remnants He knew we would see and study once we figured out glass and optics and telescopes and rockets and satellites and cameras?

Today on Earth we can witness the death of stars billions of light years away—meaning that they died billions of years ago—which is an incredibly long history of destruction that God created for his own glory and, if we search hard enough, for our viewing pleasure as well. Has your mind explored that yet? Has your mind exploded with the implications of that yet?

Read this about what’s “potentially the farthest object yet detected in space”:

While scientists haven’t determined precisely where this explosion happened, estimates place it at 13.14 billion light-years away…Observed by NASA’s Swift satellite in April 2009, this massive explosion was named GRB 090429B. Some believe the star that caused the explosion lives near the edge of the universe as we know it. (58)

God chose to create the light of an explosion that occurred 13.14 billion years ago for the sole purpose of proving His glory, greatness, and indescribability. That’s an awesome God.

Tiny Bugs and Things Never Seen

And while this concept of magnitude and distance just utterly blows my mind, so too does the nearness and smallness of things as simple as, say, mites livings in trees. I’m an amateur naturalist, and sometimes you’ll catch me just staring at a tree trunk, trying to find the mini-creatures that dwell there.

Whenever I do this, I can’t help but wonder about the tree mites in the forests of some far-flung place like the Canadian wilderness 15,000 years ago, long before any human being ever stepped foot in those woods and certainly long before anyone cared about the insects that dwelt there. And yet God created those wood lice to live in those trees, to propagate and eat and die. He created every microbe and germ and placed them where He wanted them, to serve the single purpose of bringing great glory to Himself in their own way.

God cares about the lily of the field that you sniff, but He also cared about the butterfly that beat its wings in Panama how-many-ever millennia before any human being ever walked there. To me, that’s an awesome mystery worth sitting with and pondering. In this vein, the authors write:

He does not cut corners or sweep things under the carpet. He has stretched out the universe, creating beauty in places our eyes—and even our telescopes—will likely never have the privilege of gazing upon. He is a God of extravagance—unimaginably glorious, completely off the charts of our understanding, and way beyond the powers of our description.

You know the old classic “conundrum”: When a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Absolutely it does, and that sound is praise and glory to God. The same is true of some random space rock in a galaxy a billion light years away that enters the atmosphere of an unknown planet and pulverizes its surface with a gigantic crater no human will ever see. We don’t need to see it—it’s God’s creation, it occurs for his glory, for even the stones will sing his praises (see Luke 19:40; Psalm 19:1-4; and Psalm 148, etc.).

Conclusion

Recalling the joys of this book has just got me fired up again to worship my Creator. These considerations of what we don’t know force us into worship of the God we do know, because He has made Himself known. The authors write that:

Worship has no room for “know-it-alls.” The soul who lives in the ordinary and the mundane will rarely aspire to climb higher in praise. And reverence for God will never flow freely from a heart that shrinks Him down to earthly proportions. God makes worshippers out of wonderers. If we will allow them, the beauty and vastness of the cosmos will help lead us to higher ground in worship. (39)

This reminds me that wonderful verse in Psalm 34:3,

Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!

I’m sure I’ll read this book again—especially whenever I inevitably get back onto my own astronomy kick. It’s a fantastic read, and I highly recommend it.

©2026 E.T.

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