Humankind needs to learn humility when gazing at the stars and planets. It is clear that mankind was not their maker. What man can make is insignificant, even in relation to our own home.
But I disagree with those that say the Stars and Planets do not have significance. They speak for the Great Creator and Information Giver who first designed and then made them all.
The Earth is full of intricate living organisms from bacteria to massive creatures like whales and elephants. Finely balanced physical planetary characteristics are necessary to maintain them. Earth was made for humankind. The environment is finely shaped to sustain him and also provide teachings of the Creator who made all things.
But when it comes to wider universe, many of the humans who benefit from the wisdom and construction of the planet fail to see the same hand in the stars and galaxies. That is a big mistake. The Creator who finely tuned all the constants of the laws of physics and life, did not throw the stars out at random.
Here are some reasons to believe otherwise.
Stars as Witness
There are many references to stars and the heavens in the Bible. From its first words of Genesis, the Bible confronted to nonsense of the pagans in their errors, errors that were maintained into the twentieth century.
In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth implies that at a certain moment the entire universe was created. The pagans like Aristotle believed that the universe had always existed. Scientists up to the middle of the 1900s also thought this. Why? Because the dominant materialist philosophy wanted to deny a creation because logically a creation must involve a Creator. That was well known even in ancient Greek logics and philosophy.
Scientific advance showed that this fallacy of an eternal universe could not be maintained. The stars were moving away from us. And logically, at one time they must have all come together at the beginning. The sceptical materialists tried to downplay this fact that bust their materialism apart by calling it the Big Bang.
The Bible shows these materialist/ atheists have much more to learn.
Take the movement of the stars mentioned in the book of Job as some examples. Learn some lessons from the Creation.
Pleiades
Let us go to one of the signs of the Hebrew zodiac: the Pleiades, Hebrew Kimah.
The Eternal God asked Job out of a whirlwind, Job 38:31:
Can you fasten the harness of Pleiades? (New Jerusalem)
Can you bind fast the cluster Pleiades? (Bullinger)
Can you bind the sweet influences of Pleiades? (KJV)
The Pleiades are known as the Seven Sisters. What does it mean fastening or binding them? Only recently the most powerful telescopes make it clear. Imperceptibly to the naked eye they are moving closer together. This data was collected from massive earth telescopes in Australia and elsewhere and combined with recent data from the Gaia space satellite launched in 2013.
Careful measurements with the Gaia space telescope and others show the stars of the Pleiades are slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to the star Atlas they look like a single star to the naked eye.
But if we take what we know about the movement of the stars and rewind 100,000 years, Pleione was further from Atlas and would have been easily visible to the naked eye.
The writer of the book of Job had magnificent eyes or maybe, as the book says, someone listened to the Great Information Giver who made the stars.
Orion
What about the other part of the verse about Orion, Hebrew Kesil:
Can you loosen great Orion's bands?
The three stars of Orion's belt are a line-of-sight constellation. Two stars may now be shown to look like they are approaching each other while the third is drifting out of the arrangement and may eventually break up the three-star line-up completely.
Arcturus
Next verse:
Can you guide Arcturus and his sons?
Highly unusually Arcturus, Hebrew Aysh, has a stream of 52 stars connected to it. That was discovered in 1971. Equally unusually Arcturus, one of the greatest stars in the universe, is a runaway. It has a speed of 257 miles a second. That compares with the normal under 25 miles per second and our own sun's 12 1/2 miles a second.
Arcturus and his sons are all on their own course at rip-neck speed.
Can the movement of Planets, Stars and Constellations predict the future? Can they show events of the past?
Humans have no ability to move stars. Their course can be worked out by the eternal laws of mathematics and physics. We have a sure means to see how their position predicted events before, when and after such notable events happened. Humans have no excuse for not paying attention.
Eternal God, creator of the Universe
Humans are subject to error and tempted by deliberate deceit. Humans cannot muck with movement of the planets, comets and stars. That was the reason that Kepler, Newton, Whiston and other believing scientists tried to determine what, when and where was the Star of Bethlehem.The heavens have an extraordinary, clear and unambiguous message. But what is it? We should not seek it in pagan, Chaldean astrology.
What does the Bible say? What is the configuration of the heavens in the autumn of 3/2 BCE?Astronomers in the past could work this out. Many people in the early centuries were far more skilled and literate in astronomy and its real significance than people today -- in spite of so-called popular astrologers.
They looked at the sky at night and knew the stars and the movements.
But how do you see what was happening way back in the past?
You can also this ancient stellar display in the heavens at a planetarium when they set the mechanism back 2000 years.
Now with the help of the computer and software it is possible for anyone at home to see exactly the movement of the planets back into the distant past.
What did the night sky look like in 3/2 BCE?
It is an extraordinary fact, as Dr Ernest L Martin points out, that
- on only one day in 3 BCE was the moon under the feet of the constellation of Virgo, the virgin and the sun 'clothed' her.
- It was when it was the first crescent of the New Moon.
- It occurred on 11 September.
- It remained there for only a few hours.
'And there appeared a great wonder in the heaven; a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.'
This year is also confirmed by Luke's statement that Jesus was 'about thirty years old' when he began his work as chief priest and teacher in the Temple. This has to be understood in relation to the Hebrew inclusive arithmetic system and the Jewish secular new year (common through the eastern Roman Empire). It is also defined by the known dates for the reconstruction of the Temple by Simon Boethus under Herod the Great.
The date of the birth of Jesus is 1st Tishrei in year 3 BCE in the autumn.
This fits all the criteria of
- historical events in the NT and Josephus
- Hebrew chronology
- Hebrew festivals
- Hebrew interpretation of the movement of the planets in 3 BCE,
- The near unanimous report of nearly all early writers of the first centuries.
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