February 4, 2009
by J. R. Church
Alan M. MacRobert, senior editor for Sky & Telescope magazine put it this way: "The king of the gods is marching closer every day to the goddess of love, as anyone can plainly see in the western sky during twilight.
Photo: This image taken by my brother-in-law, Gordon Hill, while visiting in Montana. (Tom Fleming)
On December 1, 2008, the crescent moon joined the two brightest planets in a spectacular display (see photo at right). That night, the two planets were at their closest to each other.
In the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, Jupiter was known as the king of the gods and Venus was considered as the goddess of love. However, if we were to go back another thousand years into the past, we find that earlier civilizations considered Jupiter to be a sign of the messiah, and Venus was thought to be a symbol of His bride.
Now, we cannot tell you that this conjunction was a sign that the heavenly Bridegroom will come for His bride in the near future, but it would be nice if He did.
After all, in Genesis 1:14, "God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years."
God intended for the night sky to tell the story of the Gospel. It was His first Bible laid out for mankind. It tells the story of the seed of the woman, as seen in Virgo, defeating the seed of the serpent, as seen in Scorpio. The story begins in Virgo and ends in Leo, when her offspring, seen as the Lion of Judah, conquers Hydra, the many-headed serpent.
But, as we know, when the fallen angels came down to earth, they launched a new study of the stars -- a new version of that first Bible, and God called their perversion, "idolatry." There is nothing so insidious as a twisting of God’s Word, to make it mean the opposite of what our great Creator intended for mankind.
Alan MacRobert writes, "What are we to make of this event? Back when people thought the world was flat and humans were the center of everything, such heavenly doings certainly had to mean something. We were the crown of creation, and the universe literally revolved around us. So, was a prominent king going to take a wife on Nov. 30? Would power somehow combine with love? Back then, astrologers could game the equivalent of the stock market with such forecasts -- anyone could see the evidence right there in the sky! -- or spread fear into enemy armies or, especially, manipulate a gullible court.
"After all, the more self-important a person feels, the more he is liable to take seriously the premise of astrology, that the planets are all about him.
"They’re not. They’re inanimate, uncaring rocks and gasballs, less relevant to the events in your life than boulders lying in the woods miles away."
FEELING SMALLER AND SMALLER
MacRoberts continues: "The long story of scientific discovery for the last half millennium has one consistent theme running through it. We keep finding vast new expanses of reality that we didn’t know about before. And these discoveries keep making us and our wants and needs look smaller, more insignificant, and more irrelevant to the overall scheme of things.
"It’s not just that the universe has turned out to be inconceivably large and varied. It’s not just that quadrillions of planets are now known to exist. It’s also that the 5,000-year history of human civilization turns out to be just a tiny sliver of cosmic time. The age of the universe, astronomers have recently determined, is 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang. If you represent even just the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years) as the height of the Prudential Building, the length of all recorded human history is the thickness of the layer of paint on the ceiling of the top floor.
"And now, physicists are saying they have good reason to think that the Big Bang was one of countless other big bangs that are continuously happening in a much larger multiverse, in which our universe is an infinitesimal speck. There is no end in sight.
"It does, or should, make you feel a bit humble about what the cosmos thinks of us and our doings."
Alan M. MacRobert is a senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine in Cambridge (SkyandTelescope.com). His Star Watch column appears the first Saturday of every month. He writes from a view that God does not exist, and that we are only a hiccup in the vast scheme of things -- which, by the way, has no meaning or relevance.
I admit that the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter below the crescent moon may be nothing more than a cosmic light show. But, maybe, just maybe, they warm the heart and conscience of men to consider the magnificent design of it all.
Many years ago, as a Baptist college student looking for soul winning prospects, I met a young man who attended the Episcopal University at Sewanee, Tennessee. In the course of my trying to win him to Christ, he said that he had entered the university hoping to become an episcopal priest, but that his professors had convinced him that all had evolved over billions of years, and that there was no Creator God.
Trying to convince him otherwise, I pointed out that God had created the universe, including all things on earth. As our conversation ended and we parted, I felt like a failure. Who was I to convince a student who lived and worked on such a beautiful and ornate campus.
But the next week, I saw him again and asked if he had considered his need for receiving Christ as his Savior. He said, "Yes! I was lying on the grass, gazing at the stars the other night, when it hit me! I thought that there must be a God! Those stars and galaxies up there could not have gotten there by themselves. That is when I turned my life over to Jesus and asked Him to come into my life and save me!"
Well, the concept of "intelligent design" wins again! I was watching Ben Stein’s movie, "Expelled," the other day, and saw him interview one of the leading evolutionists, who despises any notion that somebody created the universe. Mr. Stein asked him how he could reject the concept of intelligent design, to which he replied that maybe some space voyagers had seeded our planet with plants, animals and people. It was a "gotcha" type of moment when Ben Stein said, "Could you maybe call them God?"
THE GREAT TOTAL ECLIPSE OF 2009
You may recall that when we interviewed Mark Biltz for our May 2008 issue of Prophecy in the News magazine, we noted that he had discovered three solar eclipses that would occur on the calendar days introducing the Jewish month of Av (Av 1) for 2008, 2009, and 2010. The first occurred on August 1, 2008. The second solar eclipse will happen on July 22, 2009, and the third will happen on July 11, 2010. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon travels across the face of the sun, thus blocking out its sunlight.
Though these dates vary in our calendar, they occur on the same calendar date in the Jewish calendar -- Av 1. Though I mistakenly reported them as partial eclipses in our magazine, they are, in fact, total eclipses in certain parts of the world.
The Solar eclipse this past August was total in the far north, in parts of the Arctic, Siberia, and central Asia.
The second of these three solar eclipses will be coming up on July 22. Sky & Telescope magazine (December 2008) had a story about this Solar eclipse (see illustration above), saying that it would be the longest eclipse of the century and would not be seen in this configuration again until 2132.
Fred Espenak and Jay Anderson, writers for Sky & Telescope said, "For the second time in a year, a total eclipse of the sun will cross China next summer. Unlike the eclipse last August, the one on July 22, 2009, will darken major cities, densely populated countryside, and a vast expanse of tropical ocean. And the eclipse itself will be a monster, with totality lasting more than 6.6 minutes at maximum."
"The following total solar eclipse happens on July 11, 2010, almost entirely over the South Pacific. Easter Island and southern Chile (at sunset) offer the only landfalls. The South Pacific is again the site of the next one, on November 13, 2012."
July 11, 2010 over Easter Island? Could that be why all those giant heads on Easter Island were made to gaze at the sun? And November 13, 2012 ... humm ... that’s in the fourth year of this Sabbatical cycle, near December 12, 2012, the final day in the Mayan calendar. Could these be signs?
http://www.prophecyinthenews.com/articledetail.asp?Article_ID=240