Genesis 1:14-19 And the Stars

Intro

This morning we are going to round out day 4 of creation by taking a look at one small phrase in this text from Genesis 1:14-19, the phrase “and the stars.”

I have been looking forward to this message since we started into Genesis 1-11. The stars are one of my favorite things. There is just something so magnificent and wonderful about the heavens and the lights that God has placed there and we live in such a privileged day where we now know so much more about the vastness and variety of these heavenly bodies.

It is no wonder that David proclaimed in Psalm 8:1-4

Psalm 8:1–4 ESV

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

And also Psalm 19:1

Psalm 19:1 ESV

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

In our last time together we talked about the purpose of these heavenly bodies as markers for signs and seasons and saw how it is that the sun and the moon are markers for time and work to provide the seasons of the earth and also how these heavenly bodies enable navigation and have been used in the past in very specific ways to provide signs of significant events on earth, notably the star that guided the wisemen to the young Jesus. However we also noted that one of the primary signs that has been assigned to these heavenly bodies is the sign or signature of their maker. The heavens stand over the earth as a glaring neon sign that proclaims that there is a great God of glory who has made all of these things. The vastness of the universe confounds explination appart from the creative mind and power of an omnipotent craftsman who could make them all. As we will see today there are countless places where the devotion to long age time frames and materialism cause otherwise brilliant minds to resort to fudge factors and special pleading to avoid the conclusion that these objects that we are looking at could not have come into being appart from the hand of a creator, the heavens declare the glory and might and power of their Creator and leave man without and excuse. God truly as established these things to confound the wisdom of the wise even as the seek to deny Him and suppress the truth they know about Him in their unrighteousness!

So lets take a moment to pray and then we will begin our gazing out into the vastness of the heavens and the far reaches of the universe!

PRAY & READ

Now the first thing that we need to do this morning is to look at the text itself. I know its brief but we need to understand what is going on here before we jump out and look up into the stars.

I mentioned last time that there is a tendency to say that this text makes the stars an afterthought. This I believe is a tremendous mistake. As we will see there are at least two reasons for the text making only a brief mention of the stars, however none of these mean that the stars are an after thought.

The first reason for the brevity on the stars here is one that we ought to now be quite familiar with. The creation narrative that we find in Genesis 1 and 2 is focused on the earth. Now there are untold billions and trillions of stars in the sky. More stars that we can possibly see and count even with the advancements in technology that we have made today. In fact our own galaxy obscures our vision of space along its own plane so that there is a vast swath of the universe that we are totally incapable of imaging at all and the distances are so great that we will never be able to get a ship out far enough to image that region for us and so while we can make extrapolations and estimates we truly will never be able to number the stars.

There are only about 3000 stars that you can see at any given time from a given location on earth with just your unaided eye assuming that the sky is clear and there is no light pollution affecting your view. And while there are vastly larger stars out there than our sun as we will see in a bit yet due to its relative proximity to us it is clearly the greater light.

For these reasons, from the perspective of earth, the stars are small, not insignificant but when we are considering the heavens they truly are ruled, for us, by the sun and the moon and so the narrative simply tells us that God also created the rest of the heavenly bodies in addition to the sun and the moon, our primary lights. Not an after thought just not the main focus of the text.

Now, as we saw from the Psalms, the writers of scripture clearly acknowledge the stars as glorious signs of the majesty of God declaring His creative power and wisdom as they twinkle away in the night sky. Scripturally there are even passages like those in Job that focus on particular groups of stars in recounting the rule and power of God over the heavenly bodies.

Job 38:31–33 ESV

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?

As God challenges Job He makes mention of His precise control over the courses of these stars across the night sky. Again all of this shows us that the stars were not an after thought, they just are not the primary focus of the creation narrative and so they get this brief mention, enough for us to say that these as well were formed by the power of God’s word. It is not just earth and the life on it that was brought forth by the creative power of God, as the Author of this Story God ensures that we know all heavenly bodies were also His creation.

Now there is at least one other reason that the text makes so little mention of the stars. In these ancient societies the stars were worshiped quite often as deities. In some societies the stars were even more important than the sun and the moon. This text places the emphasis in the right spot. The emphasis here is not on the lights themselves but rather on the One who is creating the light. This is perhaps the primary reason for the minimum emphasis placed on the stars; the disproportionate propensity for these ancient peoples to worship them.

In fact, we see this propensity guarded against specifically in the Law that God gives to Israel.

Deuteronomy 4:19 ESV

And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

The people didn't heed these laws though and we read during the religious reforms of Josiah king of Judah in 2 Kings 23:5

2 Kings 23:5 ESV

And he deposed the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon and the constellations and all the host of the heavens.

If these people had only paid attention to their own sacred scriptures! When you read this creation narrative the last thing that you would think to do is to worship these things that God described in such sparse detail. This is the primary reason for the lack of detail in the text. The focus of the narrative is not on the celestial bodies and the text is meant to guard agains the propensity to worship these things.

Stars in the Bible

Now we do need to understand as we have seen already that though the stars are not given a place of priority in this creation narrative, the Bible and these ancient people did understand that there was a vastness and a glory to the stars.

We have seen the proclamations of the Psalmists that the heavenly bodies declare the glory of God. We saw God using His control over the stars as a way to humble Job and His friends who thought they had things figured out.

We see Paul in the NT show that he has some understanding that there are different types of stars in the sky. Some stars are brighter some vary in color. Each heavenly body has its own type of glory.

1 Corinthians 15:40–41 ESV

There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

Paul understood a small measure of what there is to be known about the glory of the stars!

It would be hard for us to understand how magnificent the stars would have appeared to folks in ancient times. We don’t tend to realize how much the light pollution in our world affects our view of the sky. We deal with cloudy skies here a lot and so our view is naturally pretty obscured but there are actually maps you can get for night sky viewing and astrophotography that show the light pollution on earth and the best places you can go to see truly dark skies. When you look up into a sky that is perfectly dark and unobstructed by man made light it is an amazing thing and these people would have understood this glory, at least to the naked eye, in a way that most of us never will, and so again, the effort here in Genesis is not to say the stars are an after thought, they are minimized for a purpose though the Scriptures as a whole do not minimize them in every place in fact they are clearly shown to be great examples of the wisdom, wonder, and glory of God!

What is a Star?

This is bringing us close to spending some time looking at this glory but there is one last important point that needs to be clarified from the text. I think it is pretty obvious but it needs to be clarified.

When the text says stars it is referencing all of the heavenly bodes. Comets, asteroids., the planets, nebulas, and of course galaxies that are comprised of billion of stars. These are all included in this phrase, “and the stars.”

Everything outside of the sun and the moon was created when the stars were made. There wasn't anything in the heavens and then there was.

Stars

Now, lets take a bit of time here just to consider the immensity of these things that we find out in space. I shared a video yesterday in the messenger group that looked like it might have been from the creation museum. I thought about showing something like that this morning but we will hold off on that.

However, it probably wouldn't hurt to just mention some of the stars out there and their size to help gain an appreciation of the power and wisdom of God as their maker. You see while the text doesn't view the stars as an afterthought it is quite amazing when you consider the vastness of what we know to be out in the universe that God tells of their creation with that simple and the stars! Not an afterthought but also not a hard thing for God, the vastness of the universe doesn't need some long explanatory process it only needs its creator to speak it into existence.

Now we have said there are an innumerable number of stars in the universe, in fact that number is something like a trillion times a trillion. These numbers are beyond our ability to really grasp but as CMI points out if you were to have every one of the 8 billion people on the earth count one star per second it would take well over 4 million years to count all of the estimated stars in the universe. And our understanding continues to grown. I believe I mentioned it last time but each time astronomers point their ever larger more powerful telescopes toward previously thought dark regions in space they always seem to find more galaxies, not more stars, more galaxies each with billions of stars within them.

Stars like the largest currently known star UY Scuti (probably butchered that name) which has a radius that is 1700 times that of our sun. Where 1.3 million earths could fit in our sun approximately 5 billion, yes that is billion with a B, of our suns could fit in UY Scuti. If you were to place this star into our solar system it would reach beyond the orbit of Juipter! Just one star!

Stars like this are called red giants and super giants and are in the process of dying out as they expand to the point where they will eventually explode in a super nova. One of the stars that scientists keep waiting to explode is the well known super giant Betelgeuse which forms the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. This star seems to be getting close to going supernova as it recently ejected a large amount of gas, so much that the star dimmed as its light was blocked by this matter. If this star which is 700 times larger than the sun were to explode in our lifetimes the light show in the sky would be truly amazing and while it would pose no danger to life on earht it would become one of the brightest objects in the night sky.

These stars exists in a relatively small area of the known universe, in fact these are stars that exist in our own galaxy. Betelgeuse is over 400 light years away. A light year is a measurement of distance that corresponds to the distance that light would travel in one year at the standard rate. This would put Betelgeuse at 2400 trillion miles from earth!

In comparison to these distances our Milky Way galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This makes Betelgeuse a cosmological neighbor.

Once we step outside of the Milky Way things get even larger. The andromeda galaxy, one that I hope to photograph some day with my camera if we can ever get a night clear enough to do it with no wind so my camera can hold still, this galaxy is our nearest galactic neighbor and it resides 2.5 million light years from earth.

As I have mentioned everywhere that astronomers point their telescopes they seem to find more and more galaxies, again, not just more stars, more galaxies, more star systems with vastly more stars that we could ever count and yet the Bible tells us that God leads these stars out and that he calls them all by name!

Psalm 147:4–5 ESV

He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.

The amazing thing is that as we see more and learn more and gaze farther out into this vast universe our appreciation for the power and understanding of God ought to be multiplied exponentially, each time a telescope snaps a picture of a new celestial structure we see more and more of this might and power. He determines their number and calls them all by name.

We have a creator God who is truly great in wisdom and power!

Light Travel

Now though I would like to address a cosmological problem that is often trotted out against those who remain faithful to the Biblical account of creation as a literal 6 day creation event around 6000 years ago. At first glance this challenge sounds formidable and so it is good to know of it and how to respond.

The challenge is called the distant starlight dilemma. In short the challenge is that we know the speed of light. The speed of light is just over 186,000 miles per second. Yes, miles per second! That is crazy!

Now the problem as stated is that if these stars and galaxies are set in the universe at these great distances then there can be no way that the light from these stars could have reached earth and be visible to us in the 6000 years since God created the earth. So then anything beyond 6000 light years away from the earth should be invisible because the light would not ave made it here yet.

As we said, our own galaxy is over 100,000 light years across and so we shouldn't even be able to see all the stars in our own galaxy not to mention the galaxies beyond our own. And yet we do see these things. Therefore the skeptic will challenge that this proves that the universe is vastly older than 6000 years.

Well, how do we respond to this?

Thankfully there are several creation science models that have been proposed to solve the distant starlight dilemma. Now I am not a mathematician or an astrophysicist. I am not going to do a super deep dive into these options and I will share a few videos to the church message group for those who are interested in exploring these further. I will just do a layman's (at best) run through of these responses.

Now these are options and there are multiple options because there are challenges in all of them that need to be solved and answered. It could be that God has so created the universe that it is imposable for us to pin down for sure how it happened.

One of the points that will come up quickly as you dig into these is that it is very important to remember that the creation event is an unobserved and unrepeatable event. Therefore we cant recreate the generation of a universe in a lab and study how it happened. This is not observational science and therefore we have to make observations about present conditions and see how those observations can enable mathematical models of universe creation that produce results similar to what we see in actuality.

One of my favorite aspects of this whole thing is that you will hear about these creation science models making predictions and then secular science makes nearly the opposite prediction and when the discovery is verified it turns out that the creation model correctly predicted what was discovered. For example Dr Russell Humphreys predicted the decaying magnetic fields of plants in the 80s and science has been able to verify that many of the planets do indeed have decaying magnetic fields, a prediction that flies in the face of long-agers who assumed stable magnetic fields because if the fields are decaying and the planets are billions of years old the magnetic fields should have long ago decayed and yet we still detect them.

So how do we address this distant starlight dilemma?

ASC

We the first option that I will share is one proposed by Dr. Jason Lisle. I love Dr. Lisle for his work in cosmology and will share at least one of his videos because he does such a great job of showing the glory of God in the stars. While I don’t think that I would personally run with his approach it does seem to have merit and is worth continued study.

His approach is called: Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, ASC. You don’t have to remember that at all but basically his proposal is that it is quite possible that light does not travel the same speed in all directions. That it is totally possible that light could, for example, travel toward you nearly instantaneously and then away from you more slowly. This is because it is impossible to measure, what science terms, the one way speed of light. We always measure light by bouncing it of of a mirror and then back to us specifically because of this impossibility.

As a result it is possible that when light leaves the star it arrives on earth instantaneously. Now this answer is more philosophical then scientific specifically because it proposes altering the conventional speed of light for a different convention, IE that light travels one way instantaneously and then returns at half that speed.

It does seem that some work has been done lately to possibly measure the one way speed of light though and I couldn't find any responses by Dr. Lisle to these. Maybe there are there but, at any rate, it is a proposed model that would certainly allow for light to arrive within the time frame.

Dr. Humphrey

The second proposed model that I will mention is that of Dr. Russel Humphrey. Dr. Humphrey uses gravitational time dilation to show how this light could have reached the earth in time.

Again, I will share a video for those interested in learning more but in short his model relies on the known fact that gravity affects the flow of time. That a clock at sea level and a clock on Everest will not run at the same speed. The one at sea level will run slower! The stronger the gravitational field the slower time passes.

Dr. Humprhrey’s model can be pictured if you imagine a trampoline. If you place a bowling ball in the middle of the trampoline it cause the trampoline to sag down in the middle. This is a picture o gravitational force. Well at some point if I apply enough gravity then time comes to a stop. Well according to Humphrey when on day 4 God created all of this celestial matter it added to the gravity of the system, think piling more bowling balls and pool balls on our trampoline, it sags down farther and farther. And so on day 4 from the position of earth there is so much gravitational force that the trampoline sinks below, I believe its called the horizon, that time would stop entirely.

We then we read in Isaiah 40: 22 about God stretching out the heavens.

Isaiah 40:22 ESV

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

Dr. Humphrey proposes that if you take the edges of that trampoline and begin to stretch them out just as God may have stretched out the fabric of space; that as you pull, those items below the horizon would come above the horizon and time would begin to tick again. In this ay time, even long ages of time could pass in the universe where for an observer on earth no time has passed at all and when earth finally popped above the horizon line all that light was there to meet it.

As we have said often now the account of creation is told from the perspective of an observer on earth and so there is not issue here from a Biblical timeline and there is no room created in this scenario for long ages and evolution of life from non life here on the earth.

Now I am partial to Humphrey but the important thing to realize is that there are creationists models that help to understand the data, there are others that you will find of you look into it further but we are running out of time for today.

Don’t Use This

Before we close though I want to look at one answer that Christians should not use and then have us see that the long age secularists have their own problem with distant starlight.

One of the more common responses the the DSP is to say that perhaps God could have simply created the light on its way to earth. That he created the star and the light at the same time and that He created the entire light beam stretching from the star to the earth.

The problem with this is that we can see and have record of stars for example that are farther than 6000 light years from earth that have blown up. In this instance the star no longer exists and yet we have recorded in the light that has come to earth this event, the supernova of a star that in actuality never happened.

We covered this a bit on day 3 with the creation of the plants and functional maturity and said that God created a mature universe but that God would not and I would say could not have created records of events that never happened. So Adam and Eve did not have belly buttons, trees likely did not have rings and stars the never existed would not have light beams. If stars were functionally stable things and never changed then maybe this culd happen but they are not, the grow and collapse and explode and so this is a bad proposal because it would make God the author of a lie, creating the story of an event that never happened.

CMBR

Lastly we need to see that YEC’s aren’t the only ones with challenges from deep space time and distances. For big bang cosmology there is an equally perplexing problem.

We don't have much time but big bang advocates propose that everything in the universe was compressed into a point less than the size of an atom and then it exploded in the big bang and expanded through inflation, in a fraction of second so small that we cant even measure it, to be billions and billions of light years across.

Well as fanciful and magical as that sounds this rapid expansion leaves them with a very big problem. You see if you had a rapid explosion like that you would expect to find countless hot spots around the edge of the blast radius. However when we look at the edges of the universe and measure what is called the cosmic microwave background radiation we find that the temperature differences in this area are very minimal. Not regions of extremely hot and cold as the big bang model would predict.

For the big bang there is too much space between these proposed areas of hot and cold for the heat from the hot areas to have dissipated through the cold bringing the whole area toward equilibrium. There isn't enough time, even in the proposed billions of years of secular cosmology for the heat to have dissipated so evenly. Therefore the secular cosmologist has their own problem very similar to the problem they throw at us and yet they do not have the causal power behind their model with the explanatory power for why there is something rather than nothing in the first place! Their model doesn't work from its inception to its predictions and secular cosmology is rife with dark matter and other unobservable fudge factors to prop up their excuse used to suppress the truth about Gods existence and creation of the universe.

Closing

As we close this morning I want to remind us that as we think of the vastness of the universe, the distances and numbers and the scale of these features we have talked about this morning. One response to these things is to believe that we are either quite insignificant or that there must be more life out there somewhere because in the vastness of all this how could we be it. Doesn't there have to be something more?

The answer to that is no, as the creation story shows the earth is a privileged piece of cosmic real-estate where God has chosen to create and sustain life. And not just that it is here that God has chosen to place us, His image bearers that we might reflect His glory in this world. It is here, to this relatively tiny plante, atleast from a cosmological perspective, that God chose to send His One and onle Son that He might redeme His fallen creatures and restore them to fellowship with Him and it is here that there are the promises of a coming restoration of all things and I for one can not waut for the day when we will be able to see and experience the glory and wonder of this creation with eyes set free from the results of sin, with minds unhindered with the results of sin and with hearts fully set free from our coruted flesh, if this universe so magnificantly shines forth the glory of God now I can only Imagine what it will be like when we can see it then in that day when we will not only see the universe with eyes made new but we will be able to see, face to face the very One who made it all!