Title: What to Do about a Falling Star Problem

Topic: Second Coming

Summary: We look at stars from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, and see how unstarlike they sometimes are. Stars in Scripture are subject to (1) darkening, and (2) falling, even to the earth. What does this mean?

Use the reference links below to follow along in the Bible as you watch.

References:
Genesis 1:14; 15:5; 37:9
Numbers 24:17
Deuteronomy 1:10; 10:22; 28:62
Job 9:7
Ecclesiastes 12:2
Isaiah 13:10
Joel 2:10; 3:15
Genesis 37:9-10
Daniel 8:10
Job 9:2-9; 15:15; 25:4-6; 38:1-7
Psalms 148:1-3
Ecclesiastes 12:1-2
Isaiah 13:9-10
Ezekiel 32:7-8
Daniel 8:3; 12:3
Joel 2:10, 31; 3:15
Matthew 2:2, 9-10; 24:29
Mark 13:25
Luke 21:25
1 Corinthians 15:41
Revelation 8:12
Matthew 24:29
Mark 13:25
Revelation 6:13; 8:10; 9:1; 12:4; 1:16, 20; 2:1; 3:1; 6:13; 8:10; 9:1; 12:1, 4; 22:16

4174. 'That stolen by day and that stolen by night' means the evil of merit-seeking in a similar way. This is clear from the meaning of 'stolen' or theft as the evil of merit-seeking. The evil of merit-seeking exists when someone attributes good to himself and supposes that it originates in himself, and on that account wishes to merit salvation. This is the evil meant in the internal sense by 'theft'. But the situation with this evil is that at first all who are being reformed imagine that good originates in themselves and as a consequence that they merit salvation through the good which they perform. For the supposition that they merit salvation through the good which they perform is the outcome of their supposition that good originates in themselves, since the one supposition clings to the other. But people who allow themselves to be regenerated do not set their minds firmly in that way of thinking or convince themselves that such ideas are right. Instead these are gradually dispersed. Indeed as long as a person stays in the external man, as all do at the beginning of reformation, he inevitably thinks in that way. But he is thinking solely from the external man.

[2] But when the external man together with its evil urges is being removed and the internal man is starting to be active, that is, when the Lord is flowing in through the internal man with the light of intelligence and by means of it giving light to the external man, that person starts to think in a different way and to attribute good not to himself but to the Lord. From this one may see what the evil of merit-seeking is, which is meant here by evil through which good comes - the kind of evil for which one is not blameworthy, dealt with already. But if, on reaching adult years, a person firmly establishes this evil in his thinking and becomes utterly convinced that he merits salvation through the good which he performs, that evil becomes strongly rooted in him and cannot be put right. For such people claim to themselves that which is the Lord's. So they are not receivers of good which flows in constantly from the Lord; for the moment this enters them they channel it into themselves and into their proprium, and in so doing they defile it. These evils are what are meant in the proper sense by 'thefts', see 2609.