Contemplative Bible Reading

Genesis 1:14-15 (New International Version)

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.

The phrase that caught my attention today comes from verse 14 above. It is lights in the expanse of the sky… let them serve as signs to mark seasons…

God put the stars, including our sun, in the sky to mark the seasons for man. What a wonderful gift.

Today, we take for granted that we have watches, clocks, and calendars. (I often hate the calendar as that is a device that runs my life at work. If only people would live for now instead of for the blasted calendar.) Calendars are everywhere. Everyone knows the day of the week, the date of the month, the month of the year. It is no surprise when summer begins. We count down the number of shopping days until Christmas.

This precise knowledge of day and time did not occur until the last several hundreds of years or so. For the vast majority of human history, people struggled to know the season. This meant people didn’t know when to plant crops so that food would be available before the season made plant growing impossible. If you didn’t plant lucky, you died.

In the world today you can find many places where through the centuries men erected markers to watch the stars. Stonehenge in England is one example. There are many others including the pyramids in Egypt and South America. The large stones of Stonehenge were set to coincide with the changing seasons. The people could watch the sun rise next to certain stones and know what time of year it was.

These people were not worshiping the sun and stars as some have conjectured. Instead, they were using the gifts of God to live. The lights in the sky marking the seasons allowed people to plant crops and perform other duties of life at a time that permitted survival.

In some ways it is a shame that man has the technology to know what time of day and what season of the year we are in. We no longer need faith in the lights marking the seasons. We no longer depend on the gift from God mentioned in Genesis 1:14.

We do, however, still depend on and enjoy many other gifts from our creator.