The Evidence
About four in the morning I felt my way to the kitchen and peered through the
window. The dark outline of the eastern hills loomed into the skyline and the
faintest outriders of dawn began to melt the night.
The stars were gone and the sky was empty of colour but centre stage to my view,
clear shining above the hills, rode a golden Venus.
Planets are dark, they have no light of their own, they can emit no gift to
their surroundings unless it is given to them. Centuries of wonder and delight
have been poured out upon us through a variety of planets because they are
lighted up from another source.
Because of the light from the sun, we see through a telescope the multiple moons
of the mighty planet, Jupiter, or the mysteriously captivating rings of the
planet, Saturn.
Though we do not usually see the sun at the same time as we see the planets, the
sun is visible and present in them.
It is as though the planets are made in the image of the sun and they tell us
how we, too, are made in the image of God.
We have no light of our own and we are dark unless we are illuminated by him.
Even when he is absent to our view, and the world declares him dead, he is
present. He would no more empty his people of himself than empty the galaxy of
sunlight. Wherever his people are, God is visible and present.
So ‘show yourselves innocent and above reproach, faultless children of God in
a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in a dark world
and proffer the word of life,’ (Philippians 2:15,16).
When it seems that God is not, look at all the evidence.
Elizabeth Price