Genesis 1:14-19

God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of sky 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 expanse of sky to give light on the earth”; and it was so. God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

This demonstrates God’s patient character toward his children. Notice that God didn’t overwhelm us with all the information about the stars and sun and moon. He just told us what we needed to know from our perspective. As a sinful human, I am prone to brag. God literally made millions and millions of stars and He didn’t brag first. Instead, He told us what we needed to know. God has every right to brag and I am glad He does eventually because He is the only one who deserves the glory. We get to brag about God when we study the stars that He “also” made. The Bible says that God purposefully hid things in our universe for us to discover:

Proverbs 25:2 :

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,
but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.

This verse sheds a whole new light on the United States space program doesn’t it?

Sales and Marketing: Notice that when God tells humanity about a product, he uses words they understand and tells them how it benefits them from their perspective. He could have talked about the molecular structure of hydrogen but He didn’t. He simply said that this will produce light and give you a way to mark out days and seasons. It is wise to explain a product from the perspective of the user.

Apologetics: Some consider the earthly perspective used here to be a sign of the foolishness of the human writers. Saying that the sun moon and stars are just “lights” when we know that they make the earth look like an insignificant object in space from God’s perspective sounds misinformed to them. In a non-biblical worldview, the fact that the writers were inspired by God is not accepted. That’s why they make these assumptions. But, we know that the writers were inspired and that God was not ignorant. We also know that He does things out of love. It only makes sense that He was acting in love as He explained things from an earthly perspective. Even today we say that “the sun sets” even though it is actually the earth that turns. It’s a matter of perspective.