#6 The heavens declare the glory of God … not
our destiny.
“The heavens declare the glory of God”[1]
In the movie, Joe versus the Volcano,
Joe the hero, played by Tom Hanks, wakes up on his life raft made up of four
huge suitcases adrift in the middle of the vast ocean just as the moon rises
into the starry sky, filling up the horizon with its radiant glory. He gets to
his feet to behold this glorious wonder, and then sinks to his knees as he says
“God, I had forgotten how big you
are!” This is what David was speaking about in Psalm 19, that God’s
glory (His character) is manifested in His creation to everyone. We are made to
search out our creator, not worship the creation itself..
How subtly we change this scripture to make
us think that the heavens declare our
glory (not God’s) and our destiny. Astrology
(literally ‘the stars speak’ in Greek) is as old as written history can attest,
attempting to determine how the impersonal cosmos shapes our lives. Astrology
is an extremely fatalistic view of life, which says that at best we can only
tell what will befall us in an impersonal universe. Our newspapers for years
have carried horoscopes and vague references to our future based upon our
astrological sign. There’s even an app for that! Isaiah 47:10-15 gives a
scathing rebuke to sorcerers and astrologers, mocking their magic spells and
predictions. Leviticus specifically warns: “Do not
practice divination or sorcery.”[2]
I had a good friend in the days of the Jesus
movement who had been heavily into astrology before becoming a Christian. She
would then witness with street people on Hollywood Boulevard, who would
inevitably ask her under what sign was she born. She would reply that they
would never guess – and they never could. When they finally gave up, she said
that she had been reborn under the sign of the cross, and that erased all the
superstition of astrological signs such as Leo or Taurus, and that they should
consider being reborn too. She remembered her old feelings of fear and being lost
which resulted from consulting her horoscope and fortune tellers, feeling so
alone amidst the crowd on the streets of Hollywood, and she wanted people to
know that there was hope for them.
The Magi who sought the new born king understood
correctly that this one star was pointing to the baby Jesus, God in the flesh[3],
the shekinah glory of God. They were directed to the Son of God, not their
fate. Herod too understood that the heavens addressed all of God’s creation and
took this sign seriously from these non-Jews, so he directed the Magi to come
back with details of where to find the child. But when God wanted to give
direction to the wise men, He did so in a dream, not by sky writing, and warned
them not to return to Herod but to go home another way.
When we read further on in Psalm 19, verses
7-9, we see the mention of God’s law,
statutes, precepts, commands and ordinances, which has been revealed for
us to get to know Him, not the stars. These revelations of God’s character are given
to the Jews and finally through the Messiah, Jesus, to all the world. Jesus is
the living Word, who encapsulates a personal and moral relationship with a
living God, rather than an impersonal and amoral cosmos that is capricious at
best. This revelation requires a response to either kneel and obey, or to go
our own way without God.
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