Read
‘You have set your glory above the heavens’. (Psalm 8:1b)
Think
The sky, the stars, and the planets have always fascinated people. Personally, I am very ignorant about the names of the different heavenly bodies, but that does not detract from the wonder of looking at them.
When the recent eclipse occurred, something else caught my notice more than the remarkable effect of the sun being partly blotted out by the moon. On a ride in a wood, I saw a little deer. She was crouched down and was clearly bewildered by what was going on in the sky. She was not even frightened by my nearby presence, when normally she would have run away.
A little later, a buzzard was down on the ground. It was standing erect, like an owl on a telegraph pole, rather than in the more usual pose of a buzzard feeding. It too seemed to be affected by what was going on.
Human beings, too, have long looked upward with wonder. Ancient religions took the planets seriously. The sky goddess Nut was pictured arching over the heavens. She was considered to be the mother of several major deities. Nut was a feature of Egyptian cosmology. Similarly, Mesopotamian religions viewed heavenly bodies as deities.
The Bible also takes the heavens seriously, but in a very different way. The heavens are not divine. They are part of God’s creation. God’s glory is above the heavens. It transcends them, because God made them. Isaiah reflects this sense of creation filled with divine glory when he writes: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3).
Whatever your understanding of the sky above us, the stars, the planets, and everything else that is there, there is something supremely magnificent about a solar eclipse. Like the deer and the buzzard, my reaction is to be awestruck. Perhaps that is because the heavens reflect the glory of the God who made them, yet whose glory is above them.
Pray
Majestic God of creation, your glory is manifest all around and above us. We thank you for the grandeur of scenery and for the splendour of stars and planets.
We thank you for the privilege of our relationship with you in Jesus Christ. We pray that you will never cease to reveal more of yourself to us, whether in those around us or in the sky above us.
Amen.