As my wife and I traveled home from my most recent post-radiation Prostate Cancer check-up at UCH (University of Colorado Hospital) Aurora (think Denver), we were driving south and east. We discovered a spectacular lunar show had been provided to help keep us awake on the 725 mile round trip through the grasslands of Eastern Colorado.
It was the full moon, and I do mean FULL! As the huge orb elevated slowly above the eastern horizon I was able to make out a continent looking much like South America. The moon was so large it looked as if one could simply drive up and touch it. It was easy to see how the primitive peoples of the earth and of history could think this huge brightly lit sphere was something worthy of worship. (keep in mind we all see the same moon)
Now I know what I saw really wasn’t South America, but it certainly looked like it. North America however was a bit misshapen
The huge moon brought to mind something we had learned as a brand new Christians. My wife and I were first exposed to the fact of the Bible being true as we began our spiritual journey in a Bible Study led by Jehovah’s Witnesses. We lived at the time in Scotland.
The Witnesses explained how God was done with the nation of Israel because they continued to disobey His laws. Not knowing anything about the Bible, that made perfect sense to us. Take the Book of Judges for example. How long would He, God, be expected to put up with these people? We were convinced! It felt good knowing a Bible Truth.
Fast forward several years and we are no longer in Scotland but back in the States and continuing our spiritual journey. We had trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior as an outreach of a local church.
In a new experience for us, we found ourselves one Sunday morning sitting in a Sunday School class. The study that morning was on the Book of Jeremiah. Someone read the following verses from Chapter 31. “Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord” – Jeremiah 31:35-37
At that moment I realized that although Israel had certainly done some really bad things over the centuries, God in his infinite wisdom, grace and mercy wasn’t done with them yet. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had been wrong.
I learned later that God in Genesis 12 had made specific promises to Abraham and his descendants and even today He is about keeping those promises
So it naturally follows, that with that enormous moon, I could see “the ordinances of the moon and of the stars” were still in place and obviously then “the seed of Israel had not ceased being a nation” before God. That moon reminded us and reinforced those lessons that in spite of all that’s going on in our increasing unsettled world, and in my own personal battle with cancer, God is in control. We were encouraged.
It had been encouraging also many years ago to realize that we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, were included in the specific promises God made to Abraham and his people and that while it may seem puzzling to us, God isn’t surprised about anything going on here.
It made the drive home a blessing and a time of reflection. Oh, and I wanted to let you know I had extremely good test results from Radiation Oncology at UCH.
There’s one more thing: In those verses from Jeremiah 31, remember it said, “when the waves thereof roar.” I’m a kid from the Oklahoma Panhandle where there isn’t hardly any water laying around, let alone waves, but I have heard the waves roar. We lived in the wee village of Inverbervie on the North East coast of Scotland, just up from a pebble beach. Waves created by North Sea storms would pound our rock beach and create a terrific roar. I’m sure that still happens. I carry a small stone from that beach in my pocket just to remind me.
And if there is still a moon, and if the waves still roar, God isn’t done with Israel and he’s not done with me.