Episode Details

Prayer

Heavenly Father, Please instruct me from your word. I am yours, save me. Cast me not away, take not your Holy Spirit from me, restore and renew unto me the joy of your salvation, and renew in me an upright and clean heart. Lord, I am in desperate need of the daily cleansing of your word and, unworthy though I am, I plead for mercy. Save me, Lord, or I die. And the dead shall not give praise to you, so for the sake of your name – feed and nourish my soul, make me to walk in the light of life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Reading

Gen 1:14-19.

“And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15. and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, (18) to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.”

Meditation

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying before: “shoot for the stars.” What it means is to “aim high” in an effort to achieve great things. In other words, when you try to do something, try and do something challenging, or even seemingly impossible, seek to achieve great things. My then six year old son had to write a sentence using the word “centre” one day as part of his schooling, and this is the sentence that he chose to write: “When I’m six, I want to go to the centre of the earth”. Now that is what you call shooting for the stars!

We don’t often give much attention to the stars and the planets above, but they have a far more profound role to play in our lives than we sometimes realise. In verse 14 we read: “And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years…” What’s going on in this verse? What’s God doing here? Very simply, he’s creating the sun, moon, and stars, and telling us why he created them. That’s day four in a nutshell. There’s much more, however, to be said than just that – much more here for us to unpack and understand.

Perhaps the very first thing we can say about day four, and this will be the particular focus of our devotion here, is that day four represents a reflection of the glory revealed on day one. It’s hard to miss that there is a parallel between day four and day one, which itself is part of a bigger parallel between the first three days and the second three days. On day one God said “let there be light” and on day four he created the lights. On day two he made the expanse of the heavens and separated the waters, on day five he fills the heavens and the waters. On day three he made the land and the plants, and on day six he populates the land with creatures and gives them the plants for food. In broad terms we could say that the first three days are about forming the environment, and that the second three days are about filling that environment. So then, day four gives us a clear counter-part to day one, and as we build upon that insight, day four offers us a very clear principle, which is that: God shines into creation through creation. Re-read that statement and ponder it for a moment longer.

God shines into his creation through his creation. In other words, as we learned in our studies of day one, on that first day God announced and initiated his grand intention of shining his glory into all the creation. Day four shows us that God uses the creation itself to unfold that very same purpose. As God sets lights in the expanse, he’s declaring to all that it will be