Ps. 19: 1-4  “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.  Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.  There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.  Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”

Remember that old conundrum “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?”  It’s supposed to be a very profound thing to think about, having to do with whether vibrations in the air constitute “sound” or whether it only becomes “sound” when those vibrations act on the hearing mechanism of some creature.  I’ve always thought it was a waste of time to spend time pondering the question!  If all the world were blind, would a rose not still be red?  The fact that a deaf person doesn’t hear me when I talk doesn’t mean I’m not saying words.  If there’s no one to hear a tree fall, then great – no one to get squished!  What matters isn’t some esoteric question about whether sensory input actually exists without a sensor to input it to, but whether, if there is a recipient, if that recipient is able to correctly interpret the sensory input.  If a person is colorblind, it doesn’t matter if red is a property unto itself or not, but whether a red flag will serve as much of a warning.

Did you ever notice in virtually all Nativity scenes that feature a star, that that star is huge?  I mean, that baby is humongous.  A super nova.  Brighter than a sports stadium at night.  And its tail? Oh, my goodness.  THAT thing trails all the way down till it lands on the rooftop.  The whole set-up couldn’t point the way to Jesus any clearer if it set up a row of shopping mall Black Friday searchlights with the Goodyear blimp  carrying a flashing red arrow and a sign saying “KING OF THE JEWS RIGHT HERE, Y’ALL”.  Think about it!  If that star had been like those pictures, the Magi surely wouldn’t have been the only ones to notice.  There would have been crowds of folks following that star.  It would have been the headliner on the 5 o’clock news! 

No, whatever it was that they saw, it wasn’t what the painters paint.  It wasn’t something obvious to every Moses, Elijah, and schmuck on the street.  It was something that everyone else saw, but no one else apparently understood.  The “wise men” were, in fact, astrologers who looked at the positions and alignments of stars, and the appearance of comets and other heavenly bodies, and read into them various meanings.  God’s people were forbidden from doing that.  God warns repeatedly in Scripture against reading “signs” and “omens” and “the stars”; God’s people are to rely on HIM to lead them.  God is sovereign, however, and He uses the communication method He pleases at need.  The Magi were not Jews, nor were they proselytes.  They had no knowledge of God that we are told of.  Yet, even in their ignorance and false religion, God still reached out to them through a language they did understand – the stars.  We don’t know exactly what it was that the wise men interpreted as “His star” indicating that a king had been born for the Jews; it is enough that when they saw it, it meant so much to them that they set out to find Him of Whom it told.

In modern times, of course, the language of the stars is being read through science.  We have an incredible amount of knowledge about the bodies that inhabit the universe, the various types of stars, their makeup, their properties, their effects on bodies around them.  Look up at the night sky, close one eye, hold your thumb out at arms’ length, and in the area of sky blocked from your view by just that one thumb lies countless galaxies!  The deeper into the universe we see, the more universe we realize there is TO see.  For the scientist who is a follower of Christ, of course, the more he studies the stars, the more he hears their voices declaring the glory of God and sees the vivid tapestry of His handiwork.  For the scientist who has excluded the possibility of the existence of God, those same stars are mute and colorless.

The wise men weren’t the only ones to see the star, but they were the only ones who understood its meaning and followed it until they found the Child Who had called it forth.  The stars still speak of God for those who have ears to hear or eyes to see.