The Heavens: God’s Universe Where We Live

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!