There was the grandest of all grand parades right down the middle of Glory Land! The endless crowd of the redeemed of the Lord were waving banners, people were jubilant and laughing, confetti of some sort filled the air, horns were blasting in one huge continuous celebration. Somewhere there was a brass band playing parade music. The light was just perfect… there were no shadows anywhere. Marching right down the middle of everything, were these glowing, shining individuals… some walking, some riding, some hovering… many in various types of clothing… everything from togas to 1700’s style jackets, stockings, and trousers, and more.
It was the “Day of Stars” when all the stars of the Heavens which guided sailors and adventurers across continents, and inspired mankind to dream, believe, and imagine where given special notice in Heaven. The “Day Of Stars” was the day all of Heaven gathered to honor the lights in the universe whom God had made and given them their place, gleaming night after night everywhere. The Lord gave it to me to see as a witness of the joy to come when we get home.
The vision happened during worship as i was looking out a window thinking about Jesus… the music had ebbed into a musical interlude, when suddenly i felt myself slip into an “between place” and i saw the scene as previously described. It was beyond words in that glorious moment of watching the Lord parade the stars done the streets of gold. i got to meet the north star, a portly fellow in Dickens’ style coat and tails with mutton chop sideburns and a round face which seemed to always be laughing. He was jolly and gracious and i thanked him for being such a central part of God’s plan. i met Casper, and Leo, the whole Aquarius crew, Rigel and others…all still glowing a ghostly glow with the star light God had given them. The only way to describe their voices is to say it was silver (i know that’s strange but the closest thing i can think of is sound that is a color), and when the bright ones spoke it was like a rang in my head.
Friends, the canopy over the earth is a sky of wonder, something to be marveled at, which lifts us above the gravity barrier of worldly preoccupation.
When righteousness and faithfulness come together in a summation, there is a God-powered inclination to bring something into being with the consequence that it’s existence is a certainty. The Lord, from the beginning, gave man the stars, born of righteousness and faithfulness, as a certainty that our way was not one of being aimless and lost, but as a sign He would not leave us directionless.
Gen1:16 says… out of God’s infinite imagination, He made the stars, the moon, the planets and all bodies in the heavens above us for our wonder and comfort. He saw the need in man’s heart for celestial beauty, like stars, so in His mercy He created them for us.
Ann Taylor wrote, “Then the trav’ller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often thro’ my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky.”
i’m Social Porter and this is Outposts, a semi-live broadcast from the deck area of a rural cafe overlooking the Ockluhwahhah River, where the trees gently lean over the river’s edge and every evening is pleasant. This evening’s topic is about an amazing vision i call the “Day of Stars”, what God has built into the idea of the stars, and where we are in it all.
On a side note as a companion to this evening’s topic, the general idea of beauty was another one of God’s incredible ideas… He has made beauty all around us if we’re interested enough to grasp it. i’d like to lose myself in God’s imagination and thinking… He is the very essence of beauty. The concept of beauty is studied in art and culture, we experience beauty in our perception of things which can rouse feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. Beauty is in the taste of a favorite food, the texture of silk, the smell of flowers, excellent music, the lingering kiss of a lover on a warm evening somewhere…it is in the sunrise, sunset or in the stars at night. It is all God’s idea in how to meet the needs of the heart of man. It is brilliant… just brilliant.
Dream, believe and imagine…the universe is indeed a vast place just waiting for us to let the Lord invigorate us to see His wonders in the landscape of Heaven. i’ll be right back.
Genesis 1:16-18, “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.”
Some of us get stars in our eyes, meaning we are mesmerized, excited or hopeful about the future and we imagine success and fame. To be star or moon struck means to show irrational behavior, especially of a romantic or sentimental nature, or to be made sick as if by the influence of the moon or the stars. In Greek, the word for “epileptic” or “lunatic” is from the word group in Matt 4:24 meaning “moonstruck”, because at that time, there were people who thought moon light and/or star light could influence someone so much they could possibly go crazy. Reading further in Matt4, we see that Jesus healed all those people, and it wasn’t the light of the moon or stars which made them ill after all.
Think about it… when you lie on your back and stare up into the night sky, you can’t help but be amazed. Hundreds of thousands of tiny pinpricks of light that are millions of miles away speckle the fabric of the canopy of Heaven over our heads. Each one placed in a precise spot by the hand of God… like a field of fragrant flowers given to the one He loves, God gave us the stars. The Big Dipper, The Little Dipper, Pleiades, The Southern Cross, each one at the precise location of His ordaining. The Lord put them there and said “this is your place, stay here until otherwise”, and they did. On the day God made the stars, He flicked His fingers and shook His hair, fire and sparks flew from Him to make the stars and planets… the smoke from His nostrils, more dense than the sun, ignited to help hide new born stars in a stellar nursery, cloaking parts of the Milky Way and Orion’s Belt.
Psalm 8:3-4, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him….?” Let’s not forget the wonders above us. Scripture gives us a vision of the vastness, variety, and mystery of the universe and the Lord. One writer said the stars and night sky bear down upon our heads with power, calling the stars “God’s faithful splendors at midnight.”
In the book of Sirach, written by a Jewish scribe, Yeshua Ben Eliezer Ben Sira, describing the beauty of the Heavens, he wrote, “Great indeed is the LORD who made it, at whose orders it urges on its steeds. It is the moon that marks the changing seasons, governing the times, their lasting sign. By it we know the sacred seasons and pilgrimage feasts, a light which wanes in its course: The new moon like its name renews itself; how wondrous it is when it changes: A military signal for the waterskins on high, it paves the firmament with its brilliance, The beauty of the heavens and the glory of the stars, a shining ornament in the heights of God. By the LORD’s command the moon keeps its appointed place, and does not fade as the stars keep watch.”
God put the stars in the sky to be beautiful and to please us, his beloved children. In His wisdom, He saw the need in the heart of man for beauty and wonder…. marvelous things He created… imparting Himself into all of them for us to discover. i can’t imagine, nor has God revealed to me the secrets of the Aurora Borealis, but if He appointed me to know and i could get close enough, He would reveal to me the unimaginable wonders of His heart hidden there. i believe He hides His character and intentions in all things He has created. Why? Because the true heart of love desires to be involved with the object of its affection. Many of the hidden things of the Lord aren’t hidden because we’re too small to know, but because it is the hope of the Lord that we will go and search for them, to know Him.
Psalm 19:1-4, “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world.”
Here is the word of the Lord, listen: He says, I love you on days when you are perfect in My eyes, and on days when you wonder why you do the things you do. I love you when you are the strong center that calms others, and when you want to rest in the comfort of My embrace. I love you when you are confident and proud of everything you stand for, and when you need Me to remind you how far you’ve come, and that there’s no limit to how far you can go. I love you now and forever, come what may, just as you are.
i am forever amazed at anyone who says there is no God in Heaven. Every night, the Lord hands us an amazing masterpiece called the night sky. It’s dotted with winking stars, glimmering planets, dark clouds moving silently and ominously across the sky, declaring the glory of the Lord… a testimony of not only His existence, but a testimony to us, the object of His affection. Anywhere on earth, we can stare upward into the night sky and see the evidence. i think our personal agendas, bitterness, disappointment, broken promises and crumbled dreams cloud our view, but it doesn’t detract from the evidence.
When i was young, my dad pointed to a deer standing in the edge of the woods. He told me it was there and i believed him. No matter how long my eyes searched those woods though, i could not see the deer. The longer i looked without seeing, the less i believed what i was told was true. In my sheer arrogance, believing only my eyes, i declared there was no deer there and that he was playing a joke on me. As the last words left my lips, the deer walked off… and i saw. Just because we don’t see the Lord in our lives doesn’t mean He isn’t there, and because nothing has changed with our situation yet, doesn’t mean God isn’t working behind the scenes.
Sometimes we need to just wait, “put a pin in it” so to speak, maybe even unplug from the roar in our heads, look up and listen to the voice of God which comes on the whisper of the wind in the tree tops proclaiming the wonder of the night sky.
When the Lord created everything we know of as creation, He imparted His attributes into those things… which says to me that the heart of God is discoverable in all things on this planet and of the universe….in His heart they were all conceived, implemented, and made sure in their place. Sure, sin has corrupted creation and possibly cloaked things, but that doesn’t mean the Lord’s attributes are not findable if we’ll look for Him. The goodness of God cuts through sin like a knife. It is the Lord’s heart that we would know Him and He would be known.
When Jesus came, God gave us His face for the first time, He got eye to eye with the object of His affection. Everything He has done has been for our benefit, the sun, the moon, the stars and all the canopy of Heaven over the earth, which we call the sky….it is for our benefit.
The first letter of Genesis is about God’s house and the family, and the word for stars ends with a reference to His house and family… from the beginning to the end, the Heart of God is about His people. Ancient scholars considered the sky to be like the Palms of God over us, like a cap… Friends, He seeks our heart more than gold and incense.
On a more technical side, stars is a simple word but is created from two other words, one which paints a picture of rolling or heaping up and the other the sense of blazing… when they are put together it brings to mind the idea of rolling fire… or a star. The heavens are like the closed Palms of God which hold the beauty, and when the stars twinkle and spark, they are like the open Palms of God releasing the flashes of His treasures.
Stars are a blaze of glory in the night sky, and if we look to His heart deeply, the gleaming glory in the infinite deep dark blue of the night sky uncovers his face. If we look for Him, He will find us. When the moon and stars are bright after the sun has done its work, the heavenly lights are a brilliant shining sea where living wonders find their footing. My eyes see star after star, some steady, others slowly pulse, holding their ground as our perspective changes on a turning earth.
The same hands that hold those stars in their exact place stretched out on a cross to take your place because he knows your worth. Jesus died for your sins and rose from the dead that you would have life, and have it more abundantly.
Amos 5:8, “He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the LORD is his name;” Pleiades is a cluster of stars to our scientific minds, but the Hebrew paints a picture of the the heaped up rolling blaze in the Palms of God connected to waves of purposeful grace, and Orion is the Palms of God leaning on His authority over creation… Orion is “the burly one”.
Exodus 28:2, “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.”
That is the scripture of first mention where glory and beauty are used in the same sentence, it’s important and we need to pay attention to such things. The Lord wants us all to search out His secrets. There is a difference between the two words, and i’m only making mention of that because in some places translators called beauty… glory and inversely so. God makes the distinction of many things which appear similar but truly are different, and many times the distinction is lost in translation. Glory is like the weight of splendor, and we usually associate glory with the presence of God….glory comes with His presence and His presence comes with glory… beauty is a gleaming embellishment, like a well-lit ornament. Glory is a masculine noun and beauty is a feminine noun, and when God uses them together in scripture, i think of them as going together like a husband and wife… they complement each other. The Lord is beautiful and He is glorious… as His glory is revealed the weight and beauty of His presence sets the universe on its knees.
Psalm 29:2, “Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.”
His name is due the full weight of honor, and we wear holiness as a gleaming embellishment in our worship of the Lord.
In the same sense, stars and all the heavenly host are beautiful and reflect the glory of God, the weight of His presence and the gleaming brightness of righteousness.
Our galaxy contains over 100 billion stars; the Bible says in Psalms147:4 that God calls them all by their names. Isaiah 40:26, “Lift up your eyes on high, And see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, By the greatness of His might And the strength of His power; Not one is missing.”
After thinking of that, i’m inclined to look again at how scripture describes the creation of all that’s in the universe. Genesis 1:16 states almost casually, God “also made the stars.” It is astonishing to me that the creation of the entire universe beyond earth is described by such a simple statement. The biblical description makes it sound like the creation of all the hundreds of billions of galaxies was so easy for God that it seems almost like an “oh by the way”. Truly, God is beyond my imagination, and if He did not open my eyes to see Him and what He has done, i would not see.
One time the Lord said to me, “Creating all there is, is one thing, but to change the heart of a man, ahhh, now THAT’S a big deal.”
Who would have thought from a casual glance at the night sky that all that is above the earth would be so majestic and enormous? The Lord our God infused Himself into all He created, not only was it good, but it was God. Take an “o” out of good and you get “God”. Assuredly, the night sky is incredibly beautiful, even to the naked eye. Who could have known that it would contain hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with millions to trillions of stars, along with countless clusters and nebulae of immense size and breathtaking beauty? Stars don’t have weight, they are measured in density.
God has constructed the universe to reflect His character. Romans 1:20 states, “… His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.” It shouldn’t surprise us that the universe is so incredible. Truly the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands! Think about it.
When i was much younger, in ignorance, i assumed the world around me was no more than it was, just the physical earth, trees, mountains, rivers, animals, and people… just being what they were, doing what they do. Then one day, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to see Jesus, glorious, beautiful Jesus… Jesus who ransomed me from death, Jesus, who paid the price for my sin, Jesus who gave me new thinking to strengthen righteous reasoning, Jesus who restored the tenderness of my conscience, Jesus who used death to defeat death that the power of my flesh would no longer rule over my spirit… giving me life, that i would no longer be a slave. In the days to follow, an idea crept into my head… all which my eyes beheld was more than what i saw. It wasn’t a world which only served to entertain me, in all my self-centered ways, but it all reflected the Heart of Love for whom so ever would know Him. He saw in the heart of man the need for beauty, and part of that are the stars and all the heavenly bodies in the night sky. It was for love the Lord made the universe, and we are the object of His never-ending affection.
This production has been brought to you by Living In His Name Ministries, The Mebane Freedom League with Alan, Kevin, and Tommy, the 20/20 Men’s Group for you fellas out there who can’t go to church anywhere else, and Trinity Bakers where there’s always something good in the oven.
You know, the days are going by. That may seem like a silly thing to say, but it means if you don’t take the time to see the beauty God has built into the world around you today, the moments will pass you by, gone forever and you didn’t see it. Take the time to look up, see the stars and dazzling lights in the heavens which the Lord has made, just for you, that you would think on His great name and know His great heart for you. The stars sang together before, and it is a distinct potential they’ll sing again… just imagine it all… we’ll get to sing praise and glory to our wonderful Jesus the Lord and God our Father together.
Be at peace as you go your way, turn your eyes to Heaven and your feet homeward. Be strong and courageous… and i’ll talk to you next time. Amen.