The Heavens: God’s Universe Where We Live 8-16-15 by Kelly Durant
Daniel 12:3 And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.
2. How many of you have ever spent a long time admiring and gazing at the stars or the moon? The heavens are fascinating, don’t’ you agree? On a clear night you could stare for hours and be marveled at all of what you see! We perceive that these mysterious luminous bodies seem to communicate something. It’s mystifying! They remind us we are little nobodies on a tiny planet. God has a purpose for them and that purpose serves within physical and spiritual attributes.
Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. 3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. 4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
From this Psalm the obvious is stated, God made the universe and all things in it to declare His glory! The stars, the sun, and all the paths (line in vs 4) of the celestial bodies speak to all people of all generations in a celestial language. It communicates that there is exists a Creator far more superior than you or I that put it all in motion. Our earth spins over 1,000 miles per hour! Mega-stars mega billions of light years away are beyond our comprehension! God is amazing! We only see the stars in our immediate Milky Way galaxy yet the vastness of space contains billions of galaxies!
3. First let’s explore the correlation of the stars and outer space as it relates to the events that will occur within our Biblical faith. We studied about God’s heaven recently, and that unseen dimension is always on our minds when a loved one passes on to glory. Heaven, the spirit world where God’s Kingdom exists, has always been imagined to be somewhere out there in space. Why? Because there is the fact that Jesus ascended up into heaven’s space, and because his angels said He would return from Heaven to earth, angels in heaven praised His birth; so logically we conclude the heavens contain a mysterious connection to God through which He uses to communicate and announce events of our future.
Revelation 1:7 “Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him:”, we relate this to mean that the heavens or space are intertwined with God’s Heavenly Kingdom as portal or gate through which one passes.
Another verse referring to ourselves going up into space is: I Thessalonians 4: 16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 17 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord 18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words.
4. And then we have the mysterious verse of today in Daniel that compares our spiritual faithfulness to the brightness of the stars. “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”
What is the God inspired interpretation of this? That the people who are the most faithful to God will shine bright! The obvious is some will be dim and others will be bright depending upon how much faith they had in God. Is this only symbolic or does it have another possible application? Reviewing Revelation chapter 1 Jesus is described as being extremely bright 1:16b “and his countenance was as the sun shining in his strength” In other words, he is blindingly powerful!
If we relate the brightness of light to heavenly glory and power, this verse implies we will be granted by God an immense amount of energy to affirm our heavenly glory. I speculate that possibly every person or celestial being whoever was or will be, has a correlated star somewhere in space. Jesus is identified with the “morning star”! Revelation 22:16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. This postulation creates a curiosity and sparks the desire for an in depth study at a future time.
5. Another correlation to the stars, God told Abraham Genesis 22:17 “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;” When you look at the sky with the naked human eye can see only about 5,000 stars, which is very deceiving to the reality of God’s universe. What is amazing is to realize that Abraham’s descendants will be mega trillions upon trillions more than our little cluster of stars. There are trillions of stars present in each of the estimated 125 billion existing galaxies that Hubble and other space probes calculate! And the grains of sand? These numbers imply trillions multiplied by mega quadrillions, which might as well be infinity! That is a mind boggling amount of created beings that will blessed and honor God!
The heavens, which refers to the universe, or universes, is a space dimension that we have barely begun to explore and mostly only theories explain its mechanics. From the beginning of man’s creation, people have felt mysterious things affecting them from the signs and events in the heavens. Genesis begins answering the question where it all came from, that God brought light and the heavens and the earth into existence.
6. A curious recent explanation of the mechanics of the universe, of space & time, is the string theory. It is the most recent and accepted idea that it is the existence of vibrations that maintains the forces of the energies of matter running in a diversity of motion. This contains a truth in a certain way when you consider that God’s spoken Word is in effect a sound and light vibration expression. John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God 2 The same was in the beginning with God 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
Referring to how it all came into existence, the very first culture we know about that kept recorded cuneiform records were the Sumerians who studied the stars intensely. It is curious how the earth’s ancient cultures seemed to have an advanced knowledge of the stars as if they observed them from space. One might conclude that God taught Adam about the celestial bodies and this information was passed down, but later, as a broken telephone, it suffered distortions and perversions due to sin and cultures drifting away from the worship of God.
How does one explain that the Babylonians knew so much about the stars? In Daniel the Babylonians are considered to be a great superior culture, as the head of gold on the image in chapter 2. In Daniel 1, however, Daniel and his friends proved brighter that the Babylonian astrologers; 20 And in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king enquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.
7. All ancient cultures show evidence of having been obsessed with their connectedness to the heavens. It is that they marveled at God’s precision which we can experience through celestial bodies? The Babylonians (which created the zodiac), left knowledge for the Greeks and Romans, yet these fell into celestial worship. Astrology and worship of the stars still persists today and it is obviously sinful to be idolizing the created as more important than the worship of the Creator. It is an abomination to worship anything but God. (see Romans 1)
The influences of the stars on the earth today serve mostly as markers for navigation but they have other influences as well. Job 38:31 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? This verse implies that the ancients (Job lived in 2,200 BC) had names for each of the stars and they knew of their power of influence being good or bad by their name and brightness. (The 3 great pyramids of Egypt were originally lined up to Orion’s belt)
Psalm 147:4 He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. This verse confirms that God is not just involved in each of our individual lives (which is a micro universe of trillions of cells in itself!) knowing each of us by our names even counting how many hairs we have, but God also controls heavenly bodies as well (a macro universe). Because of astrology and the zodiac modern day Christians have shied away from learning much about the stars and learning them by name, but we need a balance; we actually should appreciate the images of the heavens and be awestruck at the wonders of the vast, mysterious power of God’s celestial creation. Imagine; a name exists for each of the stars and for each person, which when fully manifested, is trillions multiplied by trillions!
8. The wicked are condemned by God to be compared to wandering stars. Jude 1:13 Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. Could this be a reference to black hole suns that are illusive and erratic? A star that instead of providing precious energy and light is instead a massive heavenly anomaly consuming light and its own self due to its own exaggerated mass weight! It does the opposite of a light bearing star as it is consuming all the other stars and bodies in its path.
I have even imaged that a soul condemned to hell might be like one that is captured in the mass of a black hole. This would be a spirit trapped in an eternal black dense gravity shredder never escaping its own weight, energy destruction, and darkness. These wandering bodies are the most extreme black, dense and hot, altered matter terrors in the universe.
9. Currently in our degraded bodies we are comparable to ordinary worms, but one day, if we have been faithful to Jesus, we will transform into glow worms! Our human capabilities have been limited by God on purpose due to sin and the fall of man since Adam. The amazing thing is Jesus reconciled our sin with God and promised us a heavenly body to be resurrected. It will be a heavenly body that shines with light as Jesus shines.
Jesus became glowing after time with God on the mount close to heaven, so we must conclude that light, energy, and supernatural qualities will be a part of what we will share with Jesus as well. Matthew 17 And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, 2 And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.
10. Also, in the Old Testament, recall how Moses glowed after he came down the Mount of Sinai with a brightness so intense they had to cover his head! Our bodies when charged up by God will transform with a brightness that we cannot experience as of yet. Only the most holy experienced it, but we will too if faithful.
And finally, recall that Jesus birth was announced by a bright star! There are many mysteries about stars and the universe that we may never understand because we can only observe them through the human eye and through the limited lenses of telescopes. Only His spirit reveals the parable parallels of His truth!
The ultimate question is this…How bright do you want to shine after you are resurrected with Jesus? How pure are you right now so that the light of God beams out of you as it does with a diamond? If you are dirty, the light gets cancelled out by the darkness. If you are not living in holiness with God’s Holy Spirit making your face to shine now, how do you expect to shine when in heaven? Come pray, ask God to put your life on a path that will bring you more brightness in heaven, doing His work in the here and now! Shine for Jesus by letting Jesus shine through you!
