Then God said: “Lights, come out!
Shine in the vast expanse of heavens’ sky dividing day from night
to mark the seasons, days, and years.
Lights, warm the earth with your light.
It happened just as God said.
God fashioned the two great lights – the brighter to mark the course of day,
the dimmer to mark the course of night – and the Divine needled night with stars.
God set them in heaven’s sky to cast warm light on the earth.”
Genesis 1:14-17, VOICE
Reading these three short Bible verses takes so little time. We’ve heard the Creation story so often we may no longer become breathless at the sheer magnitude of these simple words. But imagine the giddiness of our Creator as He sat back in His Adirondack chair on His back deck and surveyed his multitudinous luminous handiwork! I’ll bet He had to get back up again and dance for glee! No surprise that He found it all stunningly beautiful, this brilliant, glinting addition to His work. Maybe He’s still dancing. (And to think we ooh and aah at the sight of a few hundred stars!)
Now we go from telescopic to microscopic, way out there, beyond our external field of vision and comprehension to our invisible, inward ‘seeing’ and knowing. Both are extremely limited, the one because of our physical eyesight, the other because the Lord says: ‘the human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?’ Jer. 17:9, NLT. As we attempt to look inside at the contents of our hearts, our motives, our attitudes, our judgments, our desires, it’s like viewing a cityscape through dense fog. But! ‘I, the Lord, search all hearts and examine secret motives.’ Jer. 17:10a, NLT. Yes! He Who designed and lit innumerable stars throughout the cosmos also sees and cares about the minutest details of our hearts, the condition of our souls.
I remember, as a young person sitting in church, hearing about God seeing everything, knowing everything, and hearing the ominous tone of the preacher as he delivered the news of God’s divine displeasure. I would inwardly shrink from the force of those dark words. It seemed such a paradox! ‘God is love!’ we would read and sing. But as a holy and pure God He was going to hold me in judgment on that ‘great and terrible Day of the Lord.’ Every detail of my life! I didn’t know then that there was another message, this one more Biblically sound. I think the Creator God of this vast universe achingly wished it was being communicated.
Isaiah quotes God in chapter 43:1,4 TPT: ‘Do not fear, for I, your Kinsman-Redeemer, will rescue you. I have called you by name, and you are mine. . . you are cherished and precious in my eyes, . . . I love you dearly and want to honor you . . .’ The God of stars and souls is One. ‘God was delighted to give us birth by the truth of his infallible Word so that we would fulfill his chosen destiny for us and become the favorite ones out of all his creation!’ James 1:18, TPT. AMEN! PD
