Gospel in the Stars

Joseph A. Seiss

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839743771
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Written in 1882 by one of the most popular Lutheran preachers of the day, this book draws on scientific, historical, and biblical sources. It shows that not astrology, but rather the gospel of Jesus can be seen in the stars. Seiss believed that the heavens revealed God's glory and his plan of salvation. Seiss was convinced that God had etched His good news in the heavens, that people in darkness might see and gain hope.—Print ed.

1 THE STARRY WORLDS

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years.

—Genesis 1:14

THE sublimest visible objects of human contemplation are the Starry Heavens. The beholder is awed at every thoughtful look upon them. And when viewed in the light of astronomical science the mind is overwhelmed and lost amid the vastness and magnificence of worlds and systems which roll and shine above, around and beneath us.

THE SUN

The most conspicuous, to us, of these wonderful orbs is the Sun. Seemingly, it is not as large as the wheel of a wagon, but when we learn that we see it only at the distance of more than ninety-one millions of miles, and consider how the apparent size of objects diminishes in proportion to their remoteness, we justly conclude that it must be of enormous magnitude to be so conspicuous across a gulf so vast. Our earth is a large body; it takes long and toilsome journeying for a man to make his way around it. But the Sun fills more than a million times the cubic space filled by the earth. A railway-train running thirty miles an hour, and never stopping, could not go around it in less than eleven years, nor run the distance from the earth to the Sun in less than three hundred and sixty years. If we were to take a string long enough to reach the moon, and draw a circle with it at its utmost stretch, the Sun would still be six times larger than that circle. Belonging to the system of which it is the centre there are eight primary planets, some of them more than a thousand times larger than our earth, besides eighty-five asteroids, twenty-one satellites or moons, and several hundred comets. But the Sun itself is six hundred times greater than all these planets and their satellites put together. The greatest of them might be thrown into it, and would be to it no more than a drop to a bucket, a birdshot to a cannonball, or an infant’s handful to a bushel measure.

THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE

But, great and glorious as the Sun is, and seemingly so much greater than every other object in the sky, it is really only a tiny fragment, a mere speck, in the magnificent starry empire of which it is a part. It is less to the material universe at large than a globule to our globe. With all its retinue of ponderous orbs, it is only one of innumerable hosts of such suns and systems. There are myriads of stars in space immeasurably greater than it. They look very diminutive in comparison with it, but they are hundreds of thousands of times farther off. A ball shot from a cannon and moving at the rate of five hundred miles an hour could not reach the nearest of them in less than thirteen millions of years. Light is the rapidest of known travellers. A ray from the Sun reaches us in about eight and a quarter minutes. But there are some stars in these heavens known to be so remote that if a ray of light had started from them direct for our world when Adam drew his first breath, it would hardly yet have reached the earth. Sirius alone gives out nearly four hundred times as much light as the Sun, and yet Sirius is a star of moderate size among the stars. The Sun is no more to many other stars than one of our smaller planets is to it. We know that the Sun turns on its axis as the earth turns, and that it is ever moving on a journey around some transcendently greater centre, just as the earth and other planets revolve around it as their centre. It takes the earth one year to complete its revolution around the Sun, but it takes the Sun eighteen millions of our years to make its revolution around the centre which it obeys.

We are amazed and overwhelmed in the contemplation of worlds and systems so vast. But there is solid reason for believing that all these tremendous systems, in which uncounted suns take the place of planets, are themselves but satellites of still immeasurably sublimer orbs, and thus on upward, through systems on systems, to some supreme physical Omnipotent, where the unsearchable JEHOVAH has His throne, and whence He gives forth His invincible laws to the immensity of His glorious realm.

These are the “lights,” light-bearers, or luminaries to which the text refers, and which the potent creative Word has brought into being and placed in the firmament of the heaven.

OBJECTS OF THESE MATERIAL CREATIONS

Such wonderful creations of almighty power and wisdom were not without a purpose. It was the will of the eternal God to be known—to have creatures to understand and enjoy His glory—to provide for them suitable homes—to acquaint them with His intelligence, power, and perfections—to fill them with a sense of the existence and potent presence of an infinite creative Mind, from which all things proceed and on which all creatures depend.

All the purposes of creation we cannot begin to fathom or comprehend. No plummetline of human understanding can reach the bottom of such depths. We stand on solid ground, however, when we say and believe that the intent of the physical universe is to declare and display the majesty and glory of its Creator. Hence the apostolic assertion: “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.” But the particular ends and objects included in this grand purpose are as multitudinous and diverse as the things themselves. Among the rest, there is one specially expressed and emphasized in the text. When God created these heavenly worlds He said, “And let them be for SIGNS.”

THE STARS AS SIGNS

A sign is something arbitrarily selected and appointed to represent some other thing. The letters of the alphabet are “signs”—signs of sounds and numbers. The notes on a clef of musical writing are “signs”—signs of the pitch and value of certain tones of voice or instrument. There is no relation whatever between these “signs” and the things they signify, except that men have agreed to employ them for these purposes. “Their whole meaning as “signs” is purely conventional and arbitrary—something quite beyond and above what pertains to their nature. And so with all “signs.”

When Moses said that the swarm of flies should be a “sign” to the Egyptians, there was nothing in the nature of the thing to show what was thereby signified. When the prophet told Hezekiah that the going back of the shadow on the dial should be a “sign” that he would recover from his sickness, live yet fifteen years, and see Jerusalem delivered out of the hand of the Syrian invader, there was nothing in the nature of the thing to express this gracious meaning. Isaiah’s walking barefoot had no natural connection with the Syrian conquest of Egypt, and yet this was “for a sign” of that fact. And thus when God said of the celestial luminaries, “and let them be for signs,” He meant that they should be used to signify something beyond and additional to what they evidence and express in their nature and natural offices. Nor can any sense be attached to the words, consistent with the dignity of the record, without admitting that God intended from the beginning that these orbs of light should be made to bear, express, record, and convey some special teaching different from what is naturally deducible from them.

What the stars were thus meant to signify, over and above what is evidenced by their own nature, interpreters have been at a loss to tell us. And yet there should not be such a total blank on the subject. Light has been at hand all the while. For ages this whole field has been almost entirely left to a superstitious and idolatrous astrology, which has befouled a noble and divine science and done immeasurable damage to the souls of men. But we here find it claimed to be a sacred domain laid out of God in the original intent of creation itself. And when I look at the deep and almost universal hold which a spurious and wicked treatment of this field has so long had upon mankind, I have been the more led to suspect the existence of some original, true, and sacred thing back of it, out of which all this false science and base superstition has grown, and of which it is the perversion. There is no potent system of credulity in the world which has not had some great truth at the root of it. Evil is always perverted good, as dirt is simply matter out of place. It is the spoliation of some better thing going before it. And so there is reason to think that there is, after all, some great, original, divine science connected with the stars, which astrology has prostituted to its own base ends and which it is our duty to search out and turn to its proper evangelic use.

“As from the oldest times the suns and other worlds have been arranged into groups, is it not allowable to inquire whether there was not a unity of purpose and connected meaning in them, though these grotesque figures are represented as hieroglyphs which we trace to the Chaldeans and Phoenicians?” is a question which Ingemann, the distinguished Danish author, puts, and who was by far more persuaded of their probable reference to divine revelations than of their origin as more commonly explained.

Richer, a French writer, has repeatedly asserted that the whole primitive revelation may be traced in the constellations.

Albumazer describes the various constellations as known over all the world from the beginning, and says, “Many attributed to them a divine and prophetic virtue.”

Cicero, in translating the account of the constellations by Aratus, says, “The signs are measured out, that in so many descriptions divine wisdom might appear.”

Roberts, in his Letters to Volney, accepts it as a truth that the emblems in the stars refer to the primeval promise of the Messiah and His work of conquering the Serpent through His sufferings, and traces out some of the particular instances.

Dupuis, in L’Origine des Cultes, has collected a vast number of traditions prevalent in all nations of a divine person, born of a woman, suffering in conflict with a serpent, but triumphing over him at last, and finds the same reflected in the figures of the ancient constellations.

Dr. Adam Clarke says of the ancient Egyptians that they held the stars to be symbols of sacred things. Lucian and Dupuis assert the same, and say that “astronomy was the soul of the Egyptian religious system.” The same is equally true of the Chaldeans and Assyrians.

Smith and Sayce, in The Chaldean Account of Genesis, say: “It is evident, from the opening of the inscription on the first tablet of the great Chaldean work on astrology and astronomy, that the functions of the stars were, according to the Babylonians, to act not only as regulators of the seasons of the year, but also used as signs; for in those ages it was generally believed that the heavenly bodies gave, by their appearance and positions, signs of events which were coming on the earth.”

The learned G. Stanley Faber admits the connection between the starry emblems and the myths and mysteries of the ancients. He thinks “the forms of men and women, beasts and birds, monsters and reptiles, with which the whole face of heaven has been disguised, are not without their signification,” and allows that the reference, in parts at least, is to the Seed of the woman, and His bruising of the Serpent.

It is furthermore a matter of inspired New Testament record that certain wise men from among the Gentile peoples not only looked to the stars as by some means made to refer to and represent a coming Saviour, even the Lord Jesus himself, but were so moved and persuaded by their observations of the stars, from what they saw there signified, that they set out under the guidance of those starry indications to find Him whom they thus perceived to have been born in Judea, in order that they might greet Him as their Lord and honor Him by their adoration and their gifts (Matt. 2:1-11). All that entered into this case we may not now be able to determine, but the fact remains that these wise men of the Gentiles did actually come to Jerusalem, and thence to Bethlehem, to find and worship the new-born Saviour, moved and led by astronomic signs, which they never could have understood as they did if there had not been associated with the stars some definite evangelic prophecies and promises which they could read, and believed to be from God.

And since these starry emblems are invariably connected with the most striking and sublime appearances in the visible creation, seen in all climates, accompanying the outwandering tribes of man in all their migrations, why should we not expect to find among the names and figures annexed to them some memorial of great and universal importance to the whole human race? Certainly, if we could find connected with every constellation and each remarkable star some divine truth, some prophetic annunciation, some important revelation or fact, there would be opened to us a field of grand contemplations and of sublime memorializations which we may well suppose the infinite Mind of God would neither overlook nor leave unutilized.

For my own part, having investigated the subject with such aids as have been within my reach, I am quite convinced, as much from the internal evidences as the external, that the learned authoress of Mazzaroth was correct in saying that from the latent significance of the names and emblems of the ancient astronomy “we may learn the all-important fact that God has spoken—that He gave to the earliest of mankind a revelation, equally important to the latest, even of those very truths afterward written for our admonition on whom the ends of the world are come.” Taken along with the myths and traditions which have been lodged among all the nations, I am quite sure that we have here a glorious record of primeval faith and hope, furnishing a sublime testimony to the anticipations of the first believers, and at the same time an invincible attestation to the blessed Gospel on which our expectations of eternal life are built. Not to the being and attributes of an eternal Creator alone, but, above all, to the specific and peculiar work of our redemption, and to Him in whom standeth our salvation, are these “lights in the firmament” the witnesses and “signs”

THE GLORY OF GOD

One of the sublimest of the Psalms, which celebrates the twofold world of Nature and Revelation, begins with the ever-memorable assertion, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” What the heavens are thus said to declare certainly includes more than the celestial bodies naturally tell concerning their Creator. “Their showing forth of His “handiwork,” His wisdom and power, is the subject of a separate and distinct part of the grand sentence—

The chief “glory of God” cannot be learned from Nature alone, simply as Nature. The moral attributes of Deity, and His manifestations in moral government, are pre-eminently His glory—In the sending, incarnation, person, revelations, offices, and achievements of Jesus Christ, above all, has God shown forth His glory—We are told in so many words that Christ is “the image and glory of God;” nay, “the brightness—the very outbeaming of His glory.” The glory of God is “in the face of Jesus Christ.” There can therefore be no full and right declaring of “the glory of God” which does not reach and embrace Christ, and the story of redemption through Him. But the starry worlds, simply as such, do not and cannot declare or show forth Christ as the Redeemer, or the glory of God in Him. If they do it at all, they must do it as “signs,” arbitrarily used for that purpose. Yet the Psalmist affirms that these heavens do “declare the glory of God—” Are we not therefore to infer that the story of Christ and redemption is somehow expressed by the stars? David may or may not have so understood it, but the Holy Ghost, speaking through him, knew the implication of the words, which, in such a case, must not be stinted, but accepted in the fu...