Today's Scripture Reading (June 23, 2022): Psalm 19
The headline read that NASA
had discovered a mysterious doorway on Mars. Of course, headlines are intended
to pique our curiosity, and sometimes they give us a slanted view of the truth. NASA's Curiosity rover has traveled
around the red planet for the past ten years, taking many pictures that have grabbed our
attention. And then there was this doorway. The photo, taken by the rover, showed what looked like a doorway carved into the planet's rocky surface. It looked like a place where
ancient Martians might have escaped the
unforgiving surface of Mars to spend time in some kind of underground bunker or living space burrowed into the ground.
Of course, then NASA dropped
the other shoe. The doorway was only 45 cm high, a little less than eighteen
inches. Of course, there is nothing to say that the ancient Martians weren't exceedingly short. But the truth is that the
doorway was just an illusion. It did not lead into a cave; in fact, it didn't go anywhere. The Martian doorway joins the phenomenon of the Martian spoon and the cube and faces shaped into the Martian sand and all of those dragons and animals that we see in the summer sky. The doorway was nothing more than
just something that our mind makes us believe that we see but is not really there.
We have been trying to find the meaning of the stars in the sky as long as we have wandered the
earth beneath them. Ancient Sumerians looked up into the night sky and saw the planet Mars and believed that they were actually seeing Nergal, the god of war and plague. In
Mesopotamian texts, Mars is known as the star of judgment and the dead. For over 3500 years, we have
found meaning in the red planet's wandering nature as it strolls through the constellations. And we have worked hard
to discover whatever secrets it might be trying to tell us.
David looks up into the night
sky, and he too searches for meaning. But for David, the importance of the stars in the sky has nothing to do with gods of war or anything else. The stars in the night sky are God's attempt to let his creation know he is there. David says the
sky "pour[s] forth speech." The Hebrew here literally means that the sky gushes
out words for us to hear like a spring that never stops
but just keeps pouring its water over the land. If we want to see the evidence
of the God of Creation, all we have to do is to look up into the night sky and listen to what it is saying. Charles Spurgeon leaves us with this thought;
"Though all preachers on earth
should grow silent, and every human mouth cease from publishing the glory of
God, the heavens above will never cease to declare and proclaim his majesty and
glory. They are forever preaching; for, like an unbroken chain, their message
is delivered from day to day and from night to night." (Friedrich Tholuck,
cited in Spurgeon)
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading:
Psalms 20 & 21
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