Page 64 - Through New Eyes

Sun, Moon, and Stars 57

whole Old Covenant is seen as nighttime. Malachi 4:1 says that
a “day is coming,” and goes on in verse 2 to predict that “the Sun
of Righteousness will rise with healing in its wings .“ In this way,
moon and sun are governors of time, of the Old Covenant and
New Covenant; but they also symbolize the First and Last
Adams, who are the real governors of these two eras.
Finally, we should note that in the Bible the sun can also
symbolize counterfeit gods, those who falsely pretend to be the
true Sun of Righteousness. The Pharaoh of Egypt claimed to
be an incarnation of the sun, and thus it was appropriate that
in the judgment of Egypt, God put out the sun for three days
(Exodus 10:21-23).

The Stars
The prophets often see the “sun, moon, and stars” falling to
the earth. One of the most frequently encountered mistakes in
Bible prophecy today is the notion that this always refers to the
end of the world at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Actually,
though, this expression usually refers to the collapse of some
particular nation.
Suppose we wrote a prophetic poem about the destruction of
the United States, and included in the poem these lines:

The sun was darkened, the moon eclipsed;
The stars fell, they fell to the ground;
Fifty in ranks, trampled under foot;
Her rulers imprisoned, caged in darkness.

Let’s analyze this section of our “poem.” It has an ABBA
structure, which (as we saw above) is a “chiasm .“ The first line,
about the darkening of sun and moon, is explained by the last
line about the imprisonment of our rulers. The second and third
lines clearly refer to the defeat of the fifty states. This would be
fairly obvious to us, would it not? Anyone who has had a high
school class in literature could probably figure it out.
With this in mind, let us begin a survey of the Biblical pas-
sages that use sun, moon, and stars as symbols of rulers and
times.