“Despite all the hype,” wrote Jeffrey Kluger in an article for Time Magazine “the moon has nothing special planned for Aug. 21. It will continue doing what it’s done for more than 4 billion years – insensibly circling Earth, a dead rock at the end of a long gravitational tether.” And so it did. The total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 came and went and the moon kept orbiting around the earth.

Astronomers can tell us the distance from the earth to the moon to the sun. Astronauts visited the moon and collected samples from its surface which NASA tells us is a mix of “oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.”

But when scientists tell us that the sun and moon function only as light giving, gravitational tethers, they are lying. Half the truth is the truth only when it doesn’t claim to be the whole truth.

Here is the whole truth according to the Bible:

“And GOD said let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.”

Genesis 1:14-15 (KJV)

Fascinating. According to God, the sun and moon’s primary purpose is not to give us light but to function as signs. Some might say “Well, yeah, that’s just what the Bible says, but where is the proof?”

Well, we can easily see with our eyes that the sun and moon provide light on the earth, but it takes spiritual eyes to “see” the signs. Before you think that faith and science are incompatible consider the following.

Dr. Tyler Nordgren is an astronomer and professor of physics at the University of Redlands, CA. Many Americans, myself included, appreciated his beautiful 1930’s art deco styled posters made for the National Park Service that advertised the 2017 solar eclipse.

Despite the fact that Dr. Nordgren does not believe that eclipses are harbingers of doom, he reveals something interesting when he speculates on the difficulty of discovering the Saros, the pattern by which all solar eclipses repeat:

“But consider for a moment what is required to make the mental connections needed for astronomy. The ocean tide is a direct physical effect; it gets you wet when it rises and reveals its food when it recedes. The moon, by contrast, is so foar away you can’t touch it, hear it, or smell it. There’s no reason, intuitively, that the tides and the moon should be connected, and what connection there is can only be revealed through observations over a long period of time, requiring memory, abstract pattern recognition, and a belief in an underlying order or relationship.”

– Tyler Nordgren, SUN, MOON, EARTH

You won’t often hear a scientist tell you that their work requires faith, but it does. Scientific theories begin with faith in an underlying order or relationship. What would happen if we actually looked for the evidence of God in his creation?

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse…”

Romans 1:20 (KJV)

If you are going to succeed at deciphering messages hidden in the heavens, you must believe that there is an underlying order or relationship between heaven and earth.