THE STARS AND EARTHLY CATASTROPHES
Written by Vladimir Moss
THE STARS AND EARTHLY CATASTROPHES
It is a common belief among pagan peoples that there is a close connection between events in the heavens and events on earth. Stars are seen as gods that cause people to act in certain ways and to experience certain outcomes, good or bad. This is, of course, the false religion of astrology, which so many moderns, even so-called Christians, believe in. It probably goes back as far as Nimrod, who is thought to have practiced astrology on the top of the Tower of Babel. However, as Nimrod tried to get closer and closer to the objects of his worship in the heavens, we read that God looked down from heaven and destroyed the Tower…
A modern substitute for astrology is astronomy. Of course, modern astronomers would hotly dispute such a judgement, insisting that while astrology is pure superstition without any basis in fact, their researches and probings deeper and deeper into the galaxies are completely rational ventures that produce real knowledge. I wonder... Anybody who has witnessed the peculiar obsession of astronomers and cosmologists with their science, or see the ecstatic outpourings of emotion that accompanied, for example, the successful landing of a space probe onto a frozen comet some months ago by scientists of the European Space Agency, could be forgiven for thinking that there is perhaps more emotion, and less pure reason, involved in these researches than appears on the surface…
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that events in the heavens can symbolize events on the earth, even if they do not cause them. This has been the belief of many generations of Orthodox Christians. For example, the sun symbolizes Christ, the Sun of Righteousness. And the moon symbolizes the Church, which borrows its light from the Sun and waxes and wanes in accordance with its fortunes on earth. Stars symbolize bishops or churches (Revelation 12.4).
Moreover, major events in Church history have often been foreshadowed, it would seem, by unusual events in the sky. Thus the momentous event of the Great Schism was heralded in the heavens by a huge explosion. “Arab and Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of the bright Crab Supernova in [July] 1054. At X-ray and gamma-ray energies above 30 KeV, the Crab is generally the strongest persistent source in the sky today.”[1] Again, in 1066, as armies were being assembled in France to invade Orthodox England, Halley’s Comet flashed across the sky. Again, in July, 1927, as Metropolitan Sergius signed his notorious pro-Soviet declaration that would elicit the greatest schism in the Orthodox Church since 1054, a major earthquake took place in Jerusalem. And now astronomers around the world are getting very excited by an extraordinary upcoming event...
Recently[2], a BBC4 programme first summarized what is known about black holes, those terrifying objects of enormous gravity where the laws of physics cease to operate and which do not allow matter or light to escape from them once it has crossed the black hole’s “event horizon”. Then it went on to report on an extraordinary event due to take place in the summer of 2017: a gas cloud, or perhaps an unusually shaped star, is due to cross the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way – and that event will be visible with the aid of special new telescopes. The scientists don’t know exactly what will happen at that point, but one hypothesis is that just before disappearing into impenetrable and irreversible blackness in the midst of the black hole, the wandering star will flare up and produce an extraordinarily bright light.
Now let us turn to Holy Scripture: “These men are spots in your love feasts, while they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves. They are clouds without water, carried out by the winds; late autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, pulled up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming up their own shame, wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever” (Jude 12-13).
There is scarcely any more powerful and frightening language in the whole of Holy Scripture. Evil men are here compared to wandering stars that are swallowed up into some kind of eternal black hole – evidently, a symbol for hell. So could the gas cloud or star several times the size of our earth that is about to be swallowed up into a physical black hole be a symbol for the destruction of our evil civilization, a process that will begin in about nine months time?
This is of course speculation. And yet it may not be “mere” speculation. There are solid grounds for believing that a nuclear war between East and West is closer now than at any time since the Cuban crisis of 1962. Moreover, today’s unprecedented crisis in faith and morals on both sides of the rapidly re-emerging Iron Curtain must surely bring its due punishment from God, as many of the prophecies suggest. If so, then we can be only grateful to God if He has provided us with a warning from the heavens…
October 14/27, 2016.
950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, when the English Orthodox Autocracy was destroyed.
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