Why Study the Stars?
God’s plan to provide
His creation with a body that will live forever shows the depth of His love. He so longs for His creation to understand
this that He pictures it over and over again – it is seen everywhere.
Why should one study
the stars? Surely the Bible is all we
need to know God? Does the word of God
teach that we are not to study the zodiac?
Are astrology and the zodiac part of the occult and in opposition to the
gospel of Christ?
These are reasonable
questions.
God’s word clearly
states that He condemns the worship of
the host of heaven. Man is to reverence,
honor and give homage to God who is
sacred and is not to reverence, honor and give homage to his creation of
luminaries. The message of the luminaries is sacred not the stars themselves. Any attempt, therefore, to associate the teaching
of astrology with the gospel is heresy.
Connecting the two is
error and man is willfully deceived if he thinks that his personality and
future are predicted by the position of the planets in relation to the sign of
the zodiac under which he was born.
To combine the
thinking that the heavenly bodies have influence on human affairs with God’s
message of life everlasting in the stars is a lie and strictly forbidden by God.
This thinking and
teaching is enmity to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The thinking and teaching are either the truth
or the perversion of the truth. That is
all there is, one or the other, the truth or the perversion.
To
reverence the stellar signs rather
than the Creator who designed them to declare the glory of God is to hold the
truth in unrighteousness (Genesis 1:14, Psalm 19, Romans 1).
Some of the words associated
with the stars and the gospel of Jesus Christ are these:
Astrology - is the study that assumes and attempts to
interpret the influence of the heavenly bodies on human affairs. Today we call this “study” the reading of the
horoscope.
The horoscope is an
astrologer’s description of the personality and future of a person based on the
position of the planets in relation to the sign of the zodiac under which the
person was born.
Constellations – are the twelve segments – signs in the
Zodiac.
Decan – means “a part.”
Each constellation has three decans.
The message of each decan is a part of that constellation’s
message.
Faith - “… is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is believing God and trusting that what
He says is true. Faith assures us
that the things hoped for are real. Faith substantiates through evidence and
convicts the heart of the reality of the evidence and faith obeys the truth –
the evidence.
The Faith - is the testimony of the Son of God, the good
news of the gospel of life everlasting. “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the
world: and this is the victory that
overcometh the world, even our faith. And
this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in
His Son. He that hath the Son hath life;
he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:4, 11-12).
Fight of The
Faith is the fight against the enmity of the mind.
Occult – is supernatural forces, events and beings
collectively and pertains to magic, astrology, or any system claiming use or
knowledge of secret or supernatural powers or agencies. It is beyond the range of ordinary knowledge
or understanding, mysterious. There is
the spirit of this world and the Spirit of God.
The source of the spirit is the difference between mysticism, the
occult, and things of the Spirit of God.
Zodiac – means a circle and comes from the Greek
word zodiakos. The root meaning comes
from a primitive root, zoad, and
denotes “a way or a path or going by
steps.” The sun travels the ecliptic
path of the zodiac or appears to move through the stars in twelve months. This path repeats every year as the apparent
position of the sun returns to almost the exact spot that it occupied on the
same date the previous year.
God declares His plan
in the heavens and carries out His plan through men of faith, true worshipers
who receive, believe and obey the testimony of the Witness of the hoped-for
events planned by God but yet unseen. The
author to the Hebrews writes, through faith, we understand that the ages of
these hoped-for things were framed by the word of God (Hebrews 11:1, 3). The Greek verb “to frame” means to set in
order, to adjust, to fit or finish. In
English, a framework is an established order or a planned system, the way a thing
is put together. The frame is the border
in which a thing is set, a support on which something is stretched.
In Scripture, the
true and living God is the Creator of his creation and believing it requires
faith (Hebrews 11:6). Scripture does not
speak of a creation that speaks of a Creator.
Rather, scripture speaks of a Creator, who makes Himself known through
His creation. God says in Colossians
1:16-17 that He is the Creator - the Originator
of all things, “For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and
that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or
dominions, or principalities, or powers:
all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all
things consist.”
His word does not
argue the facts to prove He exists. God’s
character, His views, His actions require no explanation. He is a spirit being of Deity who is higher
than our thoughts. “For the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). If
our ways are to become His ways, then His thoughts must become our
thoughts.
The difference
between reasoning within ourselves and reasoning together with God is faith.
Through an act of the mind, we receive
the truth revealed to us; through faith, we understand. Reasoning with Him brings different
conclusions than the conclusions that come independently from gathering the facts.
God created the light
holders (the sun moon and stars) and named them to declare His glory (Psalm 147:4, Psalm 19:1). The Lord God set His plan within a frame laid
out in His heaven as a blueprint to follow.
He wrote His testimony in the
heavens as a witness to the good news of His Anointed Son, the power of God
unto salvation (Romans 1:16).
Understanding this
covenant gives man a rightly directed reverence for God and a true
understanding of His purpose as a creation of God. In the stretched out firmament, the heavenly
luminaries bear witness to the unseen future hoped-for realities (Psalm
19:1-6).
We believe the truth
- not as a deduction of reasoning - but as declared and revealed to us by a
loving caring Creator God. God gives the
facts; we receive the facts on the evidence of the testimony of God’s
Word. We receive the facts as truth
revealed, declared and attested to by the infallible word of the living God.
Everything changes when we look at creation from God’s
point of view.
The created things
unfold and expand the God of our
creation. The invisible things of God
are clearly seen when they are understood by the things that are made (Romans
1:20). Understanding comes through
faith. Believing God brings
understanding in our very being; we understand who He is, what He has done, and
why He did it the way He did.
With understanding
comes a reverence for His majesty. With
a reverence of His majesty, we take our proper place as a creation in
humility. In humility, we submissively
learn of Him.
Before we consider
our study of the stars, we are going to begin with the Creator of the luminaires.
In the record of the creation (Genesis
1), God Himself appears and tells us authoritatively who He is, what He has
done, and why He did it.
Moses used the Hebrew
word Elohim which translates into God in English. Elohim is a generic term for Deity. Deity is different from humanity. Humanity is created; Deity is eternal. Deity is pre-existent and self-existent,
uncreated Being. Deity is Spirit; Deity
is Righteous.
Elohim is a plural noun
– “im” is a plural ending; and “us” and “our” are plural. The Hebrew language has singular – one, dual –
two, and plural more than two, nouns and verbs. The English language does not distinguish this
plurality. The word created is a
singular verb.
Because Elohim is a plural
noun, we know there are more than
two persons who are Deity; because created is a singular verb, we understand
there is one Creator God and more than two persons in the One Creator God.
Elohim speaks of a
mighty, all-powerful Sovereign Ruler of the universe - a universe He created. In the Genesis record, we see One God in three
Persons:
God the Speaker,
His Word in whom is
Life and that Life is the Light of men, and
The Spirit of God.
Elohim is one God of
Spirit being of Deity with three personal beings. Each being is God – each has a mind, will and
emotions - as one – all of the same Spirit of Deity. The Personal beings are not yet Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. The blueprint for the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit was accomplished before God entered time; but the
realization will occur in the fullness of time.
The stellar signs are
pictorials. A picture is the most vivid
way to express a truth. Even children
comprehend pictures. Clustered in easily
recognized groupings the stellar signs are pictorials of the good news of the
Anointed Son of God. Add names to the
pictures, along with colors and numbers and the imprint is stamped in the mind
like an engraving. It is etched in the
brain so that the man is without excuse in his knowledge of God.
Information in a
message and the understanding of the message are different. The pictorial and the star names express the
knowledge of the message. Through faith,
we understand the message. Through faith,
we apprehend the understanding of the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God.
The ways of
God are mysterious, but the works of God are not. God is neither mystical nor magical. There is the spirit of this world and the
Spirit of God. The difference between
mysticism and spiritual is the spirit in which it is sourced. Sometimes people interchange the term
spiritual with mystical, thinking they are the same; and they are not.
The singular purpose
of the twelve stellar luminary signs placed in the heavens is to know God and
His Christ. Best of all, God’s written
word not only confirms the truth revealed in the stars, numerous star
references are in the word of God.
Many of the
scriptures that refer to the message of the stars are not recognized because the
relevancy of the stars has been lost; however, just as the luminaries are
scattered in the heavens so the message of the stars is scattered throughout
scripture from Genesis to Revelation.
Thus, in our study of
the stellar signs, we will consider scriptures that support the “reading of the
signs,” and we will lay out the plan of God’s Eternal Covenant of Life
Everlasting as it is revealed in the luminaries.
God never does
anything without design or purpose. He
loves symmetry and everything about Him speaks of order. In fact, God numerically arranges the
creation and scripture. God divides and
characterizes both according to the principles of His numerical structure.
Verse two of Genesis
1 tells us how the One God called the universe into being and the remainder of
the chapter is a pictorial of the prophetic account of the covenant of
everlasting life displayed in the stars.
God is faithful in
His attention to detail and although men can and have perverted the message of
the stars, the stars remain unchanged; they will abide forever (Jeremiah 31:35-36).
God also pictures the
prophetic covenant of everlasting life within the seven days of creation. Those pictures will be looked at in the next
lesson.
Glossary
for Why Study the Stars
See
pages 1 and 2 of the Chapter
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