Here is a passage from his* sermon on day 4:
Now let’s just look at the greater light to govern the day, that’s the sun, that’s the sun, literally, to rule over the day. And that’s what the sun does. Down in verse 18, to govern the day, that’s the sun’s function. And by the way, when it says this, we want to stop right here. We are not talking about anything that’s a persona here, that ancient tribes have worshiped the sun god, the Egyptians worship Ra, the sun god. They worship the god and goddess of the moon.
The bizarre pagan idolatrous ideas that somehow the sun, the moon, and the stars are literal rulers. They are deities that govern the life of men. That’s not what’s intended here. Ancient Babylonian accounts make the sun and the moon and the stars into gods endowing them with personality and intellect and will. And strangely enough, some of the rabbi’s even picked up on some of this stuff. There are rabbinic myths influenced by such paganism, which make the luminaries into persons. Who somehow communicate with their creator so that some of the Jews actually got involved in worshiping the sun and the moon and if you read Ezekiel chapter 8 you will find an illustration there. Israelites, in the temple of God worshiping the sun. All such idolatry, all such myth is excluded by the Old Testament. They are simply material creation.
Worship and myth are not the same.
Now, worshipping the Sun is forbidden.
However, considering God set an angel to move the visible material creation of the Sun around (partly each day, ultimately each year around the Zodiac) is not forbidden and is definitely not excluded by the Old Testament.
Rather, it is even rather specifically endorsed.
- In Joshua 10, Joshua, as a miracle worker of God, is adressing Sun and Moon as persons, so, the angels who move Sun and Moon about, on God's order were obeying Joshua;
- In Judges 5, Debborah and Barac praise the Lord for a cause which seems curious to modern readers:
War from heaven was made against them, the stars remaining in their order and courses fought against Sisara.
- Stars and morning stars sing praise to God, when He creates:
When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody? (Job 38:7)
And the stars have given light in their watches, and rejoiced: They were called, and they said: Here we are: and with cheerfulness they have shined forth to him that made them. (Baruch 3:34-35)
There are at least two more passages with the same implication, if not three:
He hath set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridegroom coming out of his bride chamber, Hath rejoiced as a giant to run the way: [Psalms 18:6]
[58] O ye angels of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [59] O ye heavens, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [60] O all ye waters that are above the heavens, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all for ever.
[61] O all ye powers of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [62] O ye sun and moon, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [63] O ye stars of heaven, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [64] O every shower and dew, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [65] O all ye spirits of God, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [Daniel 3, Sun, Moon and stars mentioned among "angels" and "spirits" of the Lord.]
Perhaps also this one:
[11] Thy pride is brought down to hell, thy carcass is fallen down: under thee shall the moth be strewed, and worms shall be thy covering. [12] How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? how art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? [13] And thou saidst in thy heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. [14] I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High. [15] But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit. [Isaiah 14, implying that Satan before his fall was ruling one "morning star" and wasn't satisfied with it.]
Now, let's pick apart what John MacArthur says:
The bizarre pagan idolatrous ideas that somehow the sun, the moon, and the stars are literal rulers. They are deities that govern the life of men. That’s not what’s intended here. Ancient Babylonian accounts make the sun and the moon and the stars into gods ...
We most certainly do NOT believe that these angels rule our destinies, God does, and confides part of the daily ruling to guardian angels, other than those governing stars. Neither those rabbis, nor Catholic scholastics. Among whom myself.
... endowing them with personality and intellect and will. And strangely enough, some of the rabbi’s even picked up on some of this stuff. There are rabbinic myths influenced by such paganism, which make the luminaries into persons.
A totally different question : how can you rule out God created them that way?
Where in Genesis 1 does it say "God created the Sun as a lifeless burning ball of gas, and the Moon as a lifeless cold rock and confided them not to angels but to gravitation or electromagnetism"? It simply doesn't. MacArthur is reflecting a very modern prejudice, not a Biblical doctrine here. When he claims that the Old Testament excludes this, he is reading things into it which are not there.
And he is ignoring things that are there in the Old Testament, as I enumerated.
He has made an idea a sign of idolatry of Sun, Moon and Stars which isn't such. Namely the idea they are or are more likely governed by persons. In fact, the Catholic Church has at least twice condemned the idea they are persons, not on the highest level, but on the somewhat lower levels of one Church Father (at least), St John of Damascus, and one local bishop, Tempier of Paris. Whether the alternative that they are governed by angels was present to the cultural context of St John of Damascus, I don't know. That it was present in the time of bishop Tempier is however clear, since he made this condemnation about 3 years after the death of St Thomas Aquinas who had promoted the idea of angelic movers. More than once. And he did not condemn it.
| Index in stephani tempier condempnationes
http://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/index-in-stephani-tempier.html Capitulum VII Errores de intelligentia uel angelo http://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/capitulum-vii.html Condemned proposition: 12 of the chapter (77 in total). | ||
| Quod si esset aliqua substantia separata que non moueret aliquid corpus in hoc mundo sensibili, non clauderetur in uniuerso. | That is a separate substance existed which was not moving any body in this sensible world, it would not be included (enclosed?) in the universe.
| |
| Capitulum XII | Errores de celo et stellis
http://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/capitulum-xii.html Condemned proposition: 1 of the chapter (92 in total). | ||
| Quod corpora celestia mouentur a principio intrinseco*, quod est anima ; et quod mouentur per animam et per uirtutem appetitiuam, sicut animal. Sicut enim animal appetens mouetur, ita et celum. | That celestial bodies are moved by an intrinsic principle, which is a soul; and that they are moved by the soul and by the appetitive power, as an animal. Since, as an animal is moved (moves itself) by desire, so also heaven. | |
So, we have a reference to angels moving bodies - either one saying they do, and condemning that when they don't, they are outside the universe, or one condemning the idea that they aren't included in the universe, don't exist, if they aren't moving bodies.
You have another saying stars are not animals, moved by an own soul.
Between these, you have possibilities like stars are angels or stars are moved by angels, the latter being the more common interpretation.
And obviously, there is no mystery in how angels have access to God : as long as they are not fallen, they adore Him.
Now, there is a penalty for John MacArthur confusing this position with idolatry of heavenly bodies as gods or rulers of human fates or influencing directly human souls (positions which are soundly condemned by both Tempier and St Thomas). He is stuck with modern astronomy, attributing the movements to gravitation and inertia, which makes geocentrism difficult and even with geocentrism lands the phenomena of aberration and parallax as tied to same distance to Sun, only differring distance to Earth, by which such a geocentrism misses out on these having nothing to do with the distance from Earth and being useless to determine distances.
And this leaves MacArthur admitting stars are several thousands or even hundred thousands of light years away.
HERE he has a problem with the Distant Starlight Implication for time.
Now, our little light beam has to travel another 80,000 years at it’s six trillion miles per year pace to reach the Magellanic Clouds which is the closest galaxy or series of galaxies to our Milky Way, we are now, having left this morning 160,000 years into the future. And our light beam still moving of the same speed of 186,000 a second faces 1.8 million years of empty space before it reaches the end of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is close enough to earth to be seen with the naked eye.
Obviously, if so the "end of the Andromeda galaxy" is shining light on us which left it 1.8 million years ago, normally. Which contradicts a recent creation of the universe, more recent than 1.8 million years ago, that is.
The question is often asked, how can such distant light reach the earth so fast in a six-day creation? If it takes our little light beam hundreds of thousands of years to get out there, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for a light from those far away stars, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for the light to reach us? Well, first of all, you can file this somewhere. God could not only make the stars out there, make us here, but he could make all the light in between instantaneously. It is also true that light already existed, it was created on day one according to verse 3 of Genesis. And so, all he had to do was put it where he wanted it.
That's how I explained it myself, back at age 12 after reading Swedish translation of a book the final title of which was From Nothing to Nature (Edgar Andrews) ... when revisiting the question, I have come across the problem that novas pose for this theory. Supposing that God created a full light beam from 1.8 million light years away from a star, if that star exploded right away, we would still have to wait nearly 1.8 million years (minus 6 or 7 thousand) until we could see that explosion.
Other possibility:
But I really do lean, after continuing to read on the subject to the fact that as one scientist put it, at the time of creation the speed of light was possibly 10 billion times faster than it is now. Some scientists have been working to demonstrate that because of the effect of the fall the speed of light is slower now than it’s ever been and it’s getting slower all along. And if you push it back six or seven thousand years ago, it would be ten billion times faster.
Other scientists claim however, to me at least somewhat believably, that the experiments in question are not fully reflective of the speed of light and that the implications of a real radical slowing down would be chaos in physics.
The best case for a slowing down would be if Rømer had determined a higher speed than the actual one. He determined a lower one:
By timing the eclipses of the Jupiter moon Io, Rømer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. This would give light a velocity of about 220,000 kilometres per second, about 26% lower than the true value of 299,792 km/s.
From : Rømer's determination of the speed of light
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8mer%27s_determination_of_the_speed_of_light
So, either the speed of light has become faster (if for instance more hydrogen in space has been used up, so light travels to sth closer to vacuum), or Rømer was off.
Neither way can Rømer's calculation be used to claim that we have observed light slowing down over last 3 centuries.
Setterfield has claimed that speed of light slowing down has led to longer halflives of radioactive decay. But we know historical time distance to objects from Rømer's time and comparing this to radiocarbon dates for such objects, when of organic material, would tend to confirm that half life has been constant and that also during this period the approximate level of carbon 14 has been constant (somewhat lowered for combustion of old carbon from fossil fuels, since Industrial Revolution). So, I could be missing something on the lines of both level and halflife being other than presumed, but equalling out, but normally, I'd say halflife has been constant, in AD times and most recent BC times carbon level has been constant, meaning, on Setterfield's view, speed of light should have been constant too.
If I instead consider geocentrism as true and the movements described as "aberration" and as "parallax" (or the one movement described as a compound of these) is from angelic movers, then I don't have any Distant Starlight Problem either. AND I don't need to take a distance from "old timer" Catholics of 13th C. whether a saint as St. Thomas or just a regular bishop as Bishop Tempier. AND I can enjoy thinking of the Sun as my brother and fellow servant of God.
Altissimu, omnipotente bon Signore,
Tue so le laude, la gloria e l'honore et onne benedictione.
Ad Te solo, Altissimo, se konfano,
et nullu homo ène dignu te mentouare.
Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature,
spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.
I also think I have a guardian angel, and though I confide myself to him, I don't worship him as if he were God.** If thinking of my guardian angel as an actual person is not idolatry, why would believing the sun has one imply idolatry? Or St Michael***? I wish him to trample the devil down, but I don't worship him as God. John MacArthur's criterium is nonsense. Since he prefers consulting Umberto Cassuto on Genesis 1 over consulting St Thomas, I am not quite surprised.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Tatiana, martyr
12.I.2019
* For those who think of a general, this pastor is fifth cousin to the general. Link to sermon on Spanish mirror site:
https://www.gracia.org/library/sermons-library/90-215/creation-day-4
** Guds engel min beskyddare, åt dig har Guds faderskärlek anförtrott mig. Upplys, skydda, styr och led mig idag!
*** Sancte Michael archangele, defende nos in prelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto presidium. Imperet illi Deus, tuque, princeps militie celestis, Satanam, aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude.
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