Saying Yes to Life by Ruth Valerio

Author:Ruth Valerio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2020-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

They say that once, almost before time,

the stars with shining voices

serenaded

the new born world.

The night could not contain their boundless praise.

We thought that just a poem –

until the night

a song of solar glory,

unutterable, unearthly,

eclipsed the luminaries of the night,

as though the world were exorcised of dark

and, coming to itself, began again.

Bauckham reflects passages we have already looked at (Job 38.4, 7; Ps. 19.1–2) and shows the shepherds in a moment of illumination, seeing the truth of those scriptures as the Light of the World is born and the world comes to itself and begins again.20

Sun, moon, stars and the end of the world?

The Bible is full of references to the heavenly bodies created on Day Four, reminding us again that the story of salvation unfolds within the physical world: a world of day and night; sunrises and sunsets; starry nights, and the ever continuing rhythm of the seasons. Through it all is the recognition that these daily and yearly patterns come from God and are part of how he has ordained the world to be: ‘The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the sun and the moon. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you who made both summer and winter’ (Ps. 74.16–17); and it is God who ‘causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Matt. 5.45). The astronomical bodies both praise God themselves through the very wonder of their existence, and inspire our praise of him too, as we marvel at the enormity of what lies beyond us. But there is one particular way in which the sun, moon and stars are used in the Bible that we need to spend some time considering, and that is their use in texts that take us into the area of eschatology, or talk about the ‘end times’ (coming from the words eschatos: ‘last’, and logos: ‘word’).

When I was a young pre-teenager, I loved a Christian band called The Reps. One of my favourite songs on my cassette tape had the chorus, ‘And the Moon shines red in the sky, And we can’t change a thing, however we try. The trumpet sounds and the people run, but they cannot hide, Jesus Christ has come’. Some of those words from Scripture, with the trumpet sound a reference from 1 Cor. 15.52. In particular, the moon shining red comes from Joel’s prophecy about ‘the last days’ when God will pour out his Spirit on all people, which Peter also uses in his speech at Pentecost. God says:

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