Genesis 1:16 “ . . . and the stars.”

I have long found astronomy fascinating, especially when you see the pictures from deep space, and you realize how much color there is among the stars.  It’s not just these little white shining dots you see in the sky.

And then I saw these pictures once that showed a tiny sliver of the night sky and magnified it over and over.  If you could see every single star at one time, you might not see any dark places at all when you look up at the night sky.

Astronomy is also a perfect example of how two people can look at the same thing, have the same information, and reach entirely different conclusions.

Either our world and the entire human race has no significance in the overall picture, like one grain of sand out of all the beaches in the world, or they have infinite significance as the main focus of the infinite God of the universe.

Either we mean nothing or we mean everything.

I find the whole account of stars in the Bible humorous.

In creating the world, the Bible says: Genesis 1:14–16  ¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; ¹⁵ and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. ¹⁶ God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars.

Everything you see out there in the night sky, God made to give light on the earth.  Two of these lights are great.  The greater of them is the sun, and the lesser of the two is the moon.  And then at the very end, it says, oh, and the stars.  Some English Bibles say that God made the stars also, but in the original Hebrew text, it’s simply: and the stars. 

Like you buy a secluded ranch in Colorado, and the real estate agent throws in the Rocky Mountains for free.

Now nobody would ever know any of this unless God had specifically told us. 

This is one of the vast limitations of science.  It can describe things in enormous detail, it can predict things, sometimes with incredible accuracy, like what time the sun will rise anywhere in the world at any time in the future, but it often can’t tell you what something is or what it means.

Science can’t tell you what is more important: your neighbor or the Milky Way galaxy.

Science can’t even tell you what a human being is.  Because there are similarities with certain animals, science says that they must be related and somehow one derived from the other.  It can’t tell you that human beings are created in the image of God and are the true center of the universe.

No.  If there is a God, He has to tell us what He is like and what the world is all about.  And thank God, He has.  That is what the Bible is.  Without the Bible, we are like a blind person dropped off in a row boat in the middle of the ocean.