Have you ever stood outside on a clear night and gazed at the sky — and wondered? Indeed, there is all the more to wonder at, now that man has begun to explore the depths of the universe.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second and the nearest star (other than the sun) is twenty-five light-years away. Yet modern telescopes can see galaxies millions of light years away.
Why did God make the stars? We might reply, ‘O Lord … thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created’ (Revelation 4:11). And indeed that would be enough, could we add no more. But we can add more, because he made the stars for us.
Life on other planets?
I reject out of hand the notion that there is life elsewhere in the universe. The godless evolutionist says, ‘there must be life on other planets because in an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of chances that the conditions which produced life on earth also exist elsewhere’. Not so. There were no ‘chances’ at all. God made the stars and planets, as he willed.
I never refer to the earth just as ‘a planet’. As godliness has declined in our nation, people speak increasingly of what is happening to ‘our planet’. This relegates the earth from its unique position and function in God’s universe to an astronomical curiosity.
No! God so loved the world— the world. And in relation to (and for the benefit of) this microscopic speck of universal dust, ‘he made the stars also’ (Genesis 1:16).
But why did he make them? Just to give us light in the darkness? Again, it would be enough. He would have ‘made the stars also’ just to guide the seafarer on a dark night. But it was for more than that. The stars are referred to more than fifty times in Scripture, and the references are for our instruction. Here are ten reasons why God made the stars.
To show his greatness
Never has such a mighty act been dismissed in so few words. Five words in the English Bible: ‘he made the stars also’. Remove the italics and we have the nearest literal rendering in a mere three words: ‘the stars also’. Return to the Hebrew text and it is two! Yet, according to Scripture, this vast universe of stars serves a primary purpose, namely, to show the greatness of God.
