Did you see the ‘smiley’ in the sky last night as Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon made a rare line-up? Here’s our photo of it from our front balcony. Hopefully you can make out the smile, sitting above the lights of Lismore.
It made me think, for some reason, of one of my all-time favourite lyrics from any Christian hymn or song. It’s from ‘The Servant King’ by Graham Kendrick:
“hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered”
For all the awesomeness of the stars we see in the night sky, there is someone even more awesome. It is the one who flung the stars around at creation. It is the one who holds them in his hands even now. And it is the one who also submitted those hands to a cross to bring our salvation. To die for our sins.
The crucified, risen, ascended Lord Jesus: he not only looks down on the world in love – with a smile, but came down to die in love – with anguish. As we sing in another terrific song, “Love came down and rescued me… I thank you”.
I love that line too. The sky smiley also made me think of another line – “how can this be, creator in creation?” I think a lot of people through teh ages (including many today) have seen such things in the sky as “God” smiling down on us from “heaven”. The greatness of the gospel is that the God who made the heavens and the earth didn’t remain distant or outside his creation but became one of us to rescue us from ourselves.
Did the smiley remind anyone else of a song?
Paul Coleman Trio sing a line “I want to be the moon, because it reflects the Son”. A pretty cool image I think, because if we turn away from the Son, then we don’t shine very brightly (if at all). If we focus on Jesus then we will shine as a reflection of him. The glory of the moon is a reflection of the glory of the sun.
Imagine a few hundred of us fully reflecting His light on Lismore.
As far out into space as we can see there are only fully formed galaxies. There are no galaxies just beginning to form as evolutionists would have expected, it is just as the Bible says – “God flung stars into space”