The Astronomy of the Bible; or, God Among the Stars -3

Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832 – 1902)

He who builds His layers in the sky, And has founded His strata in the earth; Who calls for the waters of the sea, And pours them out on the face of the earth— The LORD is His name (Amos 9:6).

It is he that buildeth his stories in the heaven, And hath founded his troop in the earth; He that calleth for the waters of the sea, And poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name (Amos 9:6 KJV, emphasis added).

Read on in your Bible, and after a while the Bible flashes with the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, that strange illumination, as mysterious and undefined now as when, in the book of Job, it was written: “Even now men cannot look at the light when it is bright in the skies, When the wind has passed and cleared them. He comes from the north as golden splendor; With God is awesome majesty” (Job 37:21-22). While all the nations supposed that the earth was built on a foundation of some sort, and many supposed that it stood on a huge turtle, or some great marine creature, Job knew enough of astronomy to say it had no foundation, but was suspended on the invisible arm of the Almighty, declaring that “He hangs the earth on nothing” (Job 26:7). While all nations thought the earth was level, the sky spread over it like a tent over a flat surface, Isaiah declared the world to be globular—circular—saying of God: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22). See them glitter in this scriptural sky—Arcturus, Orion, the Pleiades, and the “Bear with her young.”

While running your fingers among the leaves of your Bible with the astronomical thought in your mind, you see two worlds stop—the sun and the moon. But what does that Christian know about that miracle who does not understand something of those two luminaries? Unless you watch modern astronomy put those two worlds in its steelyards and weigh them, you are as ignorant as a Hottentot about the stupendousness of that scene in the life of Joshua. The sun over three hundred thousand times as heavy as our earth and going thousands of miles the hour. Think of stopping that and starting it again without the shipwreck of the universe!

But I can easily believe it. What confounds me is not that He could stop and start again those two worlds in Joshua’s time, but that He could have made the wheel of worlds of which the sun and moon are only cogs, and kept that wheel rolling for thousands of years—the flywheel of all eternity. If an engineer can start a long train, it is not surprising that he can stop it. If God could make and move the universe, which is an express train drawn by an omnipotent engine, I am not surprised that for a part of a day He could put down the brakes on two pieces of the rotating machinery. Infidelity is hard up for ground of complaint against the Scriptures when it finds fault with that cessation of solar and lunar travel.

To Be Continued

T. De Witt Talmage, 500 Selected Sermons vol. 1. Public Domain.
Adapted and modified in some places to modern English usage.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture updated with the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Where the author quoted the main text, it is listed as KJV. Public Domain. All others changed to NKJV.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.