The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

I've just come in from a two-hour star-gazing episode with a friend. Even though it's a lovely windless night of 5 degrees Celsius, we were cold. My neck was cold (of course, we've already put away all our scarves and mitts.)

We set up the telescope and had a beautiful view of the crescent moon with its many craters in high relief.

We saw some double stars and picked out the constellations we know. I always try to spot something new. Tonight we worked on Draco, but we were too close to town light to see it all clearly.

There are so many stars. I never tire of looking at them. Well, my neck gets tired from bending my head back to look up, but I don't tire of gazing at the sky. I love to see that handful of stardust we call the Milky Way. The Chinese call it the Silver River, I'm told.

The sky charts make it seem so easy, with all those lines connecting the dots of the stars into shapes: eagle, crown, bear, dog, a woman on a chair. But they are flat, two-dimensional. Looking through the telescope gives a small glimpse of the three-dimensionality of the sky. There is depth there; it goes on and on and on.

Beautiful Saviour, Bright and Morning Star, how glorious is your name!

No "Examination Copy" of this Book

As a teacher, I often get sent what are known as "desk copies" or "examination copies" of new text books being published in my field. Publishers send out these free copies in hopes that teachers everywhere will adopt the new book as a class text, thereby boosting sales of the books. They're free samples, letting the instructors examine the new text (hence the name, examination copy), view the features, and compare it to the textbook currently in use in a particular course.

After many years of teaching, the new editions seem to multiply on my bookshelf, and at the end of the semester, I'll often put some of these samples in a box outside my office. I tape a FREE sign on the box and within a couple of days, maybe even a couple of hours, some students have gone away happy with a new book, and I have some room cleared on my bookshelf.

It's a good thing, isn't it, that God has not offered an "examination copy" of the Lamb's Book of Life. We get no chance to check it out and see whose name is there and whose isn't. When we get to Heaven, we're going to look around and maybe there will be some surprises. Some people we were sure were going to be there will be conspicuous by their absence; on the other hand, our jaws may drop when we recognize those we thought were destined for somewhere where we were sure we weren't going to be.

Of course, we are called to holy living, and we can judge the tree by its fruit, but beyond that, we can only declare what God has done for us and in us, not what He hasn't done for someone else. For it's only God who knows the heart . . . and there's no examination copy of the Lamb's Book.