THE STARS
Did you ever fall or get hit in the head and “see stars”? You felt dizzy and saw flashing lights in your head. Those are not the kinds of stars that I am writing about.
I once took an airplane trip to northern California with a pilot friend of mine. We were in a small single engine aircraft and at night we opened our sleeping bags and slept out under one of the wings of the plane. It was dark, but the sky was filled with stars, millions of them. I remember the immense amazement, incredulity, and joy I had as I looked at them.
When we lived in a remote village in Papua New Guinea, on a clear night the sky seemed to be filled with stars. Sometimes we would see a “shooting star,” a meteor (a piece of space rock) shoot across the sky and although it was not a star, it was fascinating.
I read that astronomers estimate there are roughly “200 billion trillion (2 x 10^23) stars in the observable universe, a number often compared to more grains of sand on Earth, but it's a massive, ongoing calculation based on estimating stars in galaxies like our Milky Way (100-400 billion stars) and the sheer number of galaxies (trillions).” In other words, the number of stars is impossible to comprehend.
Stars reveal the incredible knowledge and creativity of God. They can’t be counted accurately by humans and yet God names them. We read in Psalm 147.4 that “He [God] has decided the number of the stars and calls each one by name.”When God wanted to impress Abraham with his power to the future, he “took him outside and said, ‘Look at the sky and try to count the stars; you will have as many descendants as that.’”
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a town in Judea, some Magi from the east followed a star to the location. Herod wanted to know the exact time the star appeared. It was a special star because it rose ahead of the men and sopped at the place where Jesus was born.
Astronomers have a naturalistic definition for a star: “a massive, luminous sphere of plasma, which is held together by its own gravity,” They “form within dense regions of cold interstellar gas and dust—known as molecular clouds or nebulae—when gravity causes these regions to collapse and heat up.”
However, scientific observations do not provide any reference to God or how the first star appeared. In their analysis, “One of the oldest known stars ever observed is a subgiant star in the Milky Way, just 190 light-years from Earth. The star, known as HD 140283 or the Methuselah star, appears to be almost as old as the universe. However, we know it is not one of the first stars because of it contains metals that must have formed in the core or during the explosion of even earlier stars.”
There is no way to describe accurately the absolute beginning of a star, unless we know when it started and how it was made. Christians claim that the beginning of the earth is summed up in Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1.1, NIV).
The leading scientific explanation of the beginning of everything is “The Big Bang.” It is the leading theory on the origin and evolution of our universe, with claims that “it began 13.8 billion years ago as a hot, dense point that rapidly expanded.” By this theory everything began everywhere at once, like a bomb going off.
In 1927, the astronomer Georges Lemaître had a big idea and said that the universe (undefined) stretched and expanded and could keep on stretching. Later Edwin Hubble, another astronomer and a “rising star,” said that galaxies (“giant systems in space made of billions of stars, gas, dust and dark matter, held together by gravity”) were moving away from us, some faster than the others, but a long time ago everything had been together.
For me, I could as easily count the stars as understand the astronomical theories (no pun intended) of how the universe began. However, I believe simply that “In the beginning, when God created the universe, the earth was formless and desolate.” No “big bang,” just God at work in creation. The stars are one of the most obvious results of God’s “hands.” Billions of them, created on the fourth “day,” the same time as the sun and moon.
The astronomers are “reaching for the stars“ and they try to help us understand the universe in which we live, and far beyond it. I thank “my lucky stars” (if there are such things) that I can trust God for what he has done.
When the stars form a pattern in the sky, they are called constellations and astronomers have named 88 official ones. The Māori of New Zealand interpret the constellation Orion as three brothers in a celestial canoe; the Inca see the Milky Way and other stars around it as the ”Llama in the sky” to guard crops and produce harvests; some tribes in South Africa see the Pleiades cluster as the wives of other bright stars; ancient Greece viewed the Orion as a supernatural hunter; the Kewa of PNG call the morning star the “cousin of the moon.”
I could go on, but you would soon have “stars in your eyes” and think they are aligned to give you luck, perhaps even a “gold star.” That will be better than “Star Wars.”
A final thought:
“Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.” (Philippians 2.14-15 NIV)
Karl Franklin
