CONSIDER THE STARS

Consider the Stars

Is it just me, or do you too get the impression that God wants us to consider His starry handiwork? The Bible opens with a God’s-eye view of how He made creation in the beginning. God spoke His Word and by the power of His Spirit things that were not became things that are. Thus the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, the eternal Triune God, i.e., the Creator transcends His creation.

              When He spoke to Job about the wonders of what He had done, among other things, He asked Job rhetorically and somewhat poetically, ‘Can you bind the cluster of Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion? Can you bring out the Mazzaroth in its season? Or can you guide the Great Bear with its cubs? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you set their dominion over the earth?’ Job 38:31-33. God is in control of all the stars – from supernovas to the course of Halley’s Comet – yet man cannot even control the climate or the weather on one speck of dust called earth!

              Our awe of the starry firmament was expressed some three thousand years ago by David, the sweet psalmist of Israel, when he said ‘When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You should visit him?’ Psalm 8:3&4.

We are each but a handful of dust. So why would the great Creator even bother with us? Conversely, why do some handfuls of dust not bother with God? Isn’t it the height of arrogance for us not to consider the God who made the stars? For isn’t it so that we will consider the creator of the stars that God invites us to consider them in the first place?

After He converts the Christian one of the lessons that God teaches him or her every day is that it’s not all about ‘me’! Each day the Christian rises to be taught afresh that it is all about God! God is our reason for being. That’s what the starry night sky teaches us. On account of our forefather Adam’s rebellion against our Creator in the Garden of Eden each of his offspring (including you and me) is born with a bias away from God. Though God created us upright (Eccl. 7:29), because of the Fall, each of us is born as a ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa’, i.e., sloping away from God and toward sin. Self-centred self-ism is included in this sinful disposition.

One of the first words we learn to say as children (right up there with ‘momma’ and ‘dadda’) is ‘mine!’ When fallen humanity collectively considers the stars it says, ‘mine!’ But the ‘finders keepers, loser weepers’ rule does not apply to the stars. The universe is not some cosmic fairytale fender-bender that once upon a time ‘Big Banged’ itself into being. The stars belong to the Triune God. For ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Genesis 1:1. Why the rush to keep God out of mind when fallen man considers the stars? Behold! Man, the Leaning Tower of Pisa! Who needs God when a fertile imagination will do! Thus we selfishly freeze God out of the picture. For in this world it’s all about me: ‘Mine!’

And doesn’t fallen man think that outer space is a vast waste of space? Why would God waste all that space? Again, this question is an expression of selfish self-centredness. But it’s not all about me. It’s all about God! When God spoke the stars into the sky He said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years…’ Genesis 1:14.

Some four thousand years ago Abraham was very old when God promised him a son from his own loins. So Abraham asked God for a sign. ‘Then He brought Him outside and said, “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.” And He said, “So shall your descendants be.”’ Genesis 15:5. Abraham is the father of all believers. And Abraham’s greatest Son is Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the World, the Word become also flesh. Jesus is God and man in one Divine Person forever. Abraham Kuyper said of Jesus, ‘No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”’

Christ selfish? Dear reader, consider the stars again.