THE SUN, THE MOON, AND THE STARS ALSO

God gave us three kinds of "heavenly bodies," not just two. In Genesis 1:14-19, He tells us that on day four, He created the sun, the moon, and the stars also, that is, in addition to the sun. There are twelve verses in the Bible that list the sun separately from the stars: (Gen. 1:16; Deut. 4:19; Ps. 136:8-9; 148:3; Eccl. 12:2; Jer. 31:35; Ezek. 32:7; Joel 2:10; 3:15; Lk. 21:25; 1 Cor. 1541; Rev. 8:12). Our sun may in fact be a star, but it is "our star," and it has a name: the sun.

Scientists tell us that stars have a specific lifespan which can be divided up into stages. Unfortunately, no two websites I looked at had the same list of stages. Basically, they appear to go from being a gas cloud called a Nebula, to being a star, to being a super-nova, and ultimately, to becoming a black hole. Most of my sources had at least seven stages, but they are so varied that I am not sure scientists ever talk with one another. But for the purposes of this edition of Skip's Lighthouse, I will simply say that there are stages similar to those of every other created thing.

My pastor and I recently had a discussion about the Law of Relativity, and how scientists believe that time varies according to how fast something is traveling through space. I have no clue what he was trying to explain, and I am not altogether certain that he understood it either. The question I had asked him was concerning the time it takes for a star to go through all of its stages. We both agreed that it was way longer than the latest estimate of when the "big bang" supposedly occurred.

Since man has observed stars in all of the stages at the same time, does that mean that stars are still being created, or that the universe is evolving? I have a theory. When God created Adam, no one saw him grow from an infant to a man, because God made him mature. When God created trees and bushes, they were already producing fruit (there wasn't even time for them to be pollinated, and yet pollination was occurring at the same time). When He created the earth, it also was a mature planet. It had stars that were still in the nebula stage, stars that were mature, and others which were close to becoming a nova. How hard would it be for Him to place stars of varying stages in the universe? That is why man can observe all the stages at one time.

When I first accepted Christ as my Savior, I called my dad and shared my salvation experience with him. When I had finished, he said, "Let me ask you a question. How does the light from stars reach the Earth if the world is only about six thousand years old?" Without hesitating, I told him the same God who created the star, created the beam of light. After all, since the stars were placed in the universe for man's benefit, the beam had to arrive for man to see it.

My belief may not be scientifically correct, but science, for the most part, doesn't even acknowledge that God exists; why then should we act as though what they say is "gospel?" Let God be true, and every man a liar (Rom. 3:4)!