A Sign In The Heavens

God uses all manner of things to communicate His message to us. The Lord gave the heavens to all humanity as a heritage (Deuteronomy 4:19) and knew that the Magi would be looking in the stars for a sign. So He arranged one--a planetary conjunction that would be recognized throughout the centuries to the present day.

And it was not a simple conjunction: Jupiter and Saturn would meet up with each other three times between May and December of 7 BC. And they met in the constellation Pisces, which was known as the House of the Jews in ancient Near Eastern astrology. God was aware of the conceptual frame of the Magi and spoke to them in a way they would understand.

This has further implications about the nature of God: He is eternal, and He is infinite. He planned the alignment of two motes of dust from the perspective of a much smaller mote of dust as a sign of His entry into our physical universe to redeem His children, a sign that would resonate for the next two thousand years and beyond.

A supernatural event, observable only in the immediate area of Bethlehem, would have been easily dismissed by skeptics even at the time (consider all of the people who've reported seeing UFOs!) And the other physical events that have been proposed over the centuries would have been:

• misinterpreted as an evil omen (a comet);
• too brief to be a meaningful sign (a meteor); or
• nearly impossible for humans to find hard evidence of for many centuries--long enough to be dismissed as a myth (a supernova).

But God knew some day we would demand hard evidence, so He provided it with an alignment of two bright planets that can be worked out with relatively simple mathematics backed up by centuries of careful observations.

God forbade His people to practice astrology (again in that same verse from Deuteronomy). But this isn't really isn't astrology, which is using the stars as an oracle to make predictions about the future. It's positional astronomy, or astrometry. Since ancient times, astrometry has aided humanity in timekeeping and navigation. It has also helped us unlock fundamental information about our universe and our place in it. And along the way we used astrometric data to improve our mathematics as well, which in turn advanced all of our other sciences. Truly the heavens have been a great heritage from God to us!

But all of this wasn't nearly as important as the true Gift we celebrate today. The gift of Jesus Christ, Who came to redeem humanity and defeat for all time the Enemy who seeks to keep us in his grasp.

Merry Christmas, my brothers and sisters! The Star of Bethlehem: Can science explain what it really was?