After God created all the celestial bodies, He “…set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.” Although I don’t agree with all of MacArthur’s theology, I do like what he said about the sun and moon and stars: “Naturalistic science has always struggled to explain all the stars and planets that exist in the universe. How could so much have evolved out of nothing? How did the stars get scattered across such a vast expanse of space? Why is there such diversity among them? What set the stars ablaze, and where did the planets come from? Genesis 1 gives a simple answer: God made them all. He spoke them into existence. Their vastness, their complexity, their beauty, and their sheer number all reveal the glory and the wisdom of an all–powerful Creator. And they remind us how amazing it is that such a great Creator would lavish His grace and favor on the human race. After all, from the perspective of size, our whole world constitutes only an infinitesimal speck in the vastness of all He created.[1]

The sun “rules” over the day. It washes out everything but itself! Other than clouds in the lower regions, the sun is just about all you see in the day sky. It’s dominant over all the sky lights, that is how it rules. Gazing into the sky during the day, the Sun is all that we see. The moon dominates the night. There are the other, lesser lights, but the moon is often gorgeous at night and dominates our attention – it rules!  David must have spent many nights camped out on the Judean hills, and some silent times looking up at the night sky. There would have been no city lights or air pollution to spoil the view.  As David gazed up into the sky he wrote Psalm 8;3-4. It says, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,  What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?”

Jackson is right on, “To know God, we need to get ourselves into proportion. Lying there at night looking at all those stars, David asked how God even remembers that we are here, let alone individually visits one man—me! It is worth taking the time to meditate on the enormity of the creation. It helps us to get our relationship with the Creator into perspective. When you are dealing with the One who set the stars in place as a jeweler would set diamonds in a tiara, it doesn’t make much difference if you are 5 feet tall or 7 feet tall.”[2]

[1] MacArthur, John. 2001. The Battle for the Beginning: The Bible on Creation and the Fall of Adam. Nashville, TN: W Pub. Group.

[2] Jackson, David R. 2007. Crying out for Vindication: The Gospel according to Job. Edited by Tremper Longman III and J. Alan Groves. The Gospel according to the Old Testament. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.