It had been a stressful day in the classroom. In fact, the whole week had been a trial of patience and endurance. It was the week before Christmas break, and the normally well-motivated and cooperative students were restless as "visions of sugar plums danced in their heads." All thoughts of serious academic pursuits were crowded out of their minds by the prospect of the coming holiday adventures. So, as I arrived home late that Friday afternoon, I was really bushed; I went out on the back patio and crashed into a lounge chair.
The sun was setting and the blessed Sabbath was approaching. I closed my eyes and felt the tensions drain away as I utterly relaxed. When I opened my eyes, the sun had set, the turquoise sky was darkening, the bright clouds were turning from yellow to red and finally fading into gray. Then, suddenly, I saw a bright light in the western sky. It grew brighter as the sky darkened, and I thought perhaps it was a plane or helicopter, but it didn't move. It looked like a star, but it was much brighter than a star, and it didn't twinkle. It appeared like a lantern hanging in the sky. It could only be the planet Venus, the evening star. As I gazed in wonder, suddenly all was right with the world; God had set His lantern in the sky with a message of hope and reassurance that He was in control.
Adam and Eve understood the "mysteries of the visible universe, God's glory in the heavens, the innumerable worlds in their orderly revolution, the mysteries of light and sound, of day and night" (PP, p 50-1). But down through the centuries this knowledge was lost, and as man gazed at the starry heavens, he imagined all kinds of weird shapes such as lions, fish, serpents, warriors, and horses. He assigned certain star groups to depict various gods. Astrologers invented the twelve signs of the zodiac as omens. These early stargazers noticed that most of the stars remained fixed, but some moved across the starry background and were called movable or wandering stars. They invented all kinds of intricate scenarios to explain their erratic movements. It wasn't until the days of Galileo that man identified these moving stars as planets revolving around the sun, and this gave a logical explanation for their wanderings.
Because of their relative movements with respect to the earth, the planets sometimes appear in the western sky as evening stars and in the eastern sky as morning stars; and this is true of the planet Venus. The evening star that I was observing that Sabbath evening would in a few days become the morning star as it made a transit past the sun. Jesus has described Himself as the bright morning star, and He has promised that one day soon He will arise in the east with healing in His wings as "the Morning Star."
