Since moving to the country, one of the things that I have not yet gotten used to, and I hope that I never do, is the brightness of the stars. The other night was clear and cold and we went out onto the front lawn to view the eclipse of the moon. The moon, dimmed in earth’s shadow, was muted but still dominant. Not so much though, that the stars didn’t explode forth from the blackness. We could see the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and Cassiopeia. The broad band of the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon, and I realized that what I was seeing was virtually the same as that seen by Jesus and Isaiah and Joseph and Moses and even Adam. There is precious little on the face of the earth today that any of these would recognize, but look up and the view is the same.
Over the millennia, countless billions have looked up to the stars and, while the view has been the same, their perceptions have been different. God beckoned Abram to look up into the night sky and he saw there the number of his descendants (Genesis 15). Eliphaz the Temanite looked up and saw the unknowable majesty of God (Job 22). The Psalmist looked upon the heavenly host and saw the love and blessing of God upon his creatures (Psalm 136). The prophets Isaiah, Joel, and Jesus taught that we should look up to find the signs of God’s plan for the earth (Isaiah 34; Joel 3; Luke 21). The apostle Paul tells us that when we look up to the stars we can view an eternal parable of the nature of resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). Simply put, the stars above have been a part of God’s incessant conversation with his people from the very day that he called us forth from the dust of the ground.
But, despite the majestic beauty of the stars, there were some distractions. Some of those “stars” were blinking red and moving at a pretty fast clip. In one glance, I counted two, three, five, six, seven! aircraft racing across the night sky, ferrying their passengers to far away destinations. And there was one more pinprick of light, serenely floating through the deep heavens–a satellite circling the earth in its relentless, man-made orbit. And it struck me, there is so much that God desires to tell us but cannot because we throw up so many obstacles to his communication that we can no longer hear. It made me wonder: how many of us really take time any more to gaze up into the night sky and see there the majestic hand of God? Or do we just count the planes and satellites, amazed at what the hand of man has wrought before heading back into our heated houses escaping the cold of night? Sometimes, I think that humanity has done a fine job of filling up God’s world, His skies, and are starting work on filling up His heavens with our “stuff,” but haven’t done a very good job of filling up our hearts with his Word.
In his poem Auguries of Innocence, William Blake wrote:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of you hand, And Eternity in an hour.”Wouldn’t it be joyous to recapture that poet’s sense of awe and wonder at the world our God has made?
Pastor Will
