“The Morning Stars Sang Together…”

by John Comer

Living in the smog-prone Phoenix area, it’s easy to forget that up above all the haze there’s still a beautiful sky.

Nighttime compounds the problem. City lights underneath a smoggy sky create an undefeatable combination for dimming down the night sky. And such a waste! Here in Arizona of all places, with all the open desert and mountains so ideal for star gazing, it seems an offense to obscure the heavens.

I miss the stars. Sometimes I forget that I miss them until something comes along to remind me of what I’ve been missing.

One evening not long ago we had a little weather front come through with enough breeze to clear pollution from the air.

The next morning well before daylight, I went out on the driveway to pick up the newspaper. The whole western sky was filled with more and brighter stars than I’d seen in ages. As I started back inside, I turned to take one more look—just in time to see one of the closest, most brilliant shooting stars I’d ever seen.

Sometimes “falling stars” are nothing but pieces of man-made satellites returning to earth. When David opened Psalm 19 with “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands,” he would not have been fooled by burning space junk. I’ve decided to believe that what I saw was not launched from Cape Canaveral.

Surrounded by a secular world, we need to keep in touch with God in every way we can. Nightly, God reminds us that the heavens are the work of his fingers, and that it was he who set the moon and stars in their place (Psalm 8). Each night there is a celestial glorification of the God of creation: “Praise him, all you shining stars” (Psalm 148:3). In telling of the creation, Genesis 1:16 reminds us, “He also made the stars.” That’s good to know. And too good to miss.