What do you think about when you look up at the stars?
Maybe you’re a stargazer, an astronomer or a scientist, counting, cataloguing, tracking and arranging the stars? Stars are a scientific definition, a mathematical equation, an intellectual problem begging to be solved. How many stars are there in the universe? How old are they? What are they made of? How far are they away? You find your wonder in the answers to these questions. Or perhaps you’re an adventurer, an explorer, a traveler. The stars then are signposts for your own adventures here. In the darkness they light your way and signal the right direction to follow. But even more, they’re a mysterious undiscovered country, something to ‘be’ explored, a new territory to claim and tame. But the only way you can fully understand them is to experience them. As you look up at the stars, you desire to hang in the sky with them.
Or perhaps you’re an artist, a poet, a singer, or a writer. Starry, starry night. A Don McLean or a Vincent VanGogh that found their muse in the clear night sky. Stars are a pretty picture, a love song’s chorus, the perfect backdrop for the story’s climatic first kiss. Stars don’t need to be understood, just appreciated for their mystery and beauty. Or maybe, maybe you’re still just a child at heart, a dreamer. Stars are small lights in the big dark. A larger than life LiteBright set. Twinkling, blinking and shooting. Something to wish on, hoping against hope that one day your wish comes true.
On any given night when you look up at the sky, out of the glare of streetlights and the polluting haze of the city, you will see a few thousand individual stars with your naked eye. Enough that you or I couldn’t count them all. Our astronomers, with their telescopes, see millions more. Our scientists build mathematical models to prove the existence of billions upon billions more still. NASA builds shuttles, and satellites and probes just to get a closer look. And despite all that we can see, even all we can perceive of, there are infinitely more we do not. And it’s easy to feel small and insignificant in something so big and wonderful. A seemingly infinite number of stars in the seemingly infinite vastness of space.
Maybe that’s their true design. Designed by the Creator, to awe us, to inspire us, to humble us. But not only through their beauty (though they are beautiful)…Not even by their sheer number (surely they cannot be counted)…No, not by only what we ‘can’ see, but also by that which we ‘do not’ see and cannot perceive.
Consider Genesis 15. This is God speaking to Abram (not yet Abraham) in a vision.
5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars - if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be."
This is of course not the first time God has come to Abram, first calling him in Genesis 12 to receive his commission to leave his homeland and strike out into that future that God would reveal to him. It’s here that God lays out His promises to Abram:
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you."
Each promise almost begs the question “How?” How will you make me into a great nation? How will you bless me? How will you make my name great? How will I be a blessing? And how on earth, will I bless all peoples on earth? How, How, How, How, How, How??? But he went anyway, leaving his country, his people, and his father’s household, willing to risk it all on God’s wonderful, yet almost unbelievable, promises. So he went. But the inherent problem Abram had throughout the next few decades was this: “How was he to live in the real here and now world, in light of such seemingly open-ended and future-forward promises?”
No different for us right. I’ve been following Jesus for over a decade now, but I still can remember what it was like to first ‘go’ and enter the promise. At the time, I had no idea what it all meant. I couldn’t communicate it, much less align my life to it. I just went. Clarity seems to happen gradually as we mature into our faith. We grow farther up and further in as God reveals Himself to us in increasingly specific ways. And it's a lifelong process.
And similarly, here in Genesis, God continues to reveal in increasingly specific ways those promises made to Abram. In Chapter 15 we catch up with an impatient and frustrated Abram. God first said to him back in Genesis 12 that He would make him into a great nation. Yet here he is, pushing the century mark, no child, no natural heir, and a barren wife. The great nation has not started off well. Abram not so subtly points this out to God of course:
"O Sovereign LORD, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus? "You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir."
What’s at play here is that if God didn’t provide a natural heir for Abram, his only heir would be through legal custom; through a servant of Abram’s household. Not ideal in his mind. Abram had in mind a son of his own. God knew that, reassures him, and says "This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir." And maybe sensing that this may not be enough for Abram, the Creator allows creation to speak to creation. The Lord then leads him outside, I don’t know maybe they kicked off their sandals, threw a blanket down, laid their heads on a couple of smooth rocks, and just looked up at the stars. And the Lord said this: "Look up at the heavens and count the stars - if indeed you can count them." "So shall your offspring be." Abram's #WOWGOD, that moment that he would keep going back to time and time again when he needed encouragement or explanation or direction or inspiration or hope to press through.
And as Abram looked at those thousand points of light, I wonder if he put name to star. Oh, that one is going to be my great grandson Benjamin, oh that one for sure is my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson’s mother Ruth. Oh…that big and bright one, to the North, yeah that one, well that one is going to be my first-born son. Yeah that’s my son alright… And at that point the magnitude of the promise probably hit him hard. I can just see it too. Half weeping, half giggling like a child, he says to himself “More stars than I can even count. Just one would do.” I’m a wrinkly, tired old man, my wife is old, still sexy as hell, but come on… “More stars than I can even count!” Thank you Lord.
And the thing is, as Abram stared up at those stars he had no idea. Not really. He only saw the thousands of stars in the sky. He was most interested in that one star; his first-born. What he didn’t know about was the millions of billions of stars beyond them. Abram didn’t have the complete revelation of the Bible to get a fuller appreciation of the new promise made through Jesus. He was grounded in his world, the “real here and now world.”; the old covenant. He looked up at the sky and saw his heirs, he saw his future family; a full sky full of them. He saw blessings, he saw land, he saw a great nation. He saw them, he just didn’t receive them. Hebrews 11 says that Abraham died not receiving the things promised. That he only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. He saw the beginnings of God’s salvation plan for his people through his heir Isaac. But, as with much of the Kingdom, the promise was much bigger than what he could possibly see or could even perceive. That, my friends, is the new promise, the new covenant, that has been given to you through Jesus. And unlike Abram, you will not welcome it from a distance, you will receive the promise in all its fulness.
What of today then in this woundup and winding down world? The same problem that Abram was faced with is the same one that continues to burden us now. Even more so perhaps. “How are we to live in the ‘real here and now world’, in light of seemingly open-ended and future-forward promises?" By faith. But what does that mean? Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see and then aligning our present thoughts and actions based on that belief. That’s what Abram and then Abraham did. Hebrews 11:17 says that “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned."
Gutted. Just when Abraham began to see the Lord’s promise being fulfilled, he’s asked to give it all back. In Genesis 22, God said to Abraham "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about." Isaac, his natural heir, his first-born son, the promised one that he had been waiting decades for. And the Lord asks an almost impossible task of a father. Now Abraham is getting it. Things are a little clearer. He sees it for more than what it is, more than the taking of his son’s life, more than the end of his family’s line. He doesn’t completely understand, he doesn’t agree, but he trusts that God is faithful and that He is faithful to His promise. Maybe drawing from his stargazing moment with God, Abram grew the courage to be faithful.
See that’s the kind of man I want to be. That’s the kind of family I want to raise. That’s the kind of church community I want to be in relationship with. Being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. And that taking irrevocable action based on that surety. One that is prepared to lay all we have today on the altar, “Your Kingdom come Lord. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, because we ‘believe’ in the promise. Not because of the wonderful beauty of the night sky, but because its a reminder of God's promise fulfilled and being fulfilled. I remember that they same sky that Abram sat under first counting his descendents...my star was there. Yours too. It was then, it is now. Crazy! #WOWGOD.
But as beautiful as the night sky can be, the true wonder of it for me is that when I look up I see the cracks and bullet holes in a beat-up and defeated darkness. It's a powerful reminder that darkness doesn’t even own the night. Light is breaking through and it’s always been that way. Just as He promised. And just beyond the stars, I think I can just make out a cloud rolling in. And I wait for the sound of trumpets. And I wait. And as I look up at the stars, I’m reminded that dawn is just a night away. Every night, just a night away.
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