Bethlehem Star: How the stars predicted the birth of Jesus

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

Jaziz Gutierrez presents on the historical and astronomical investigation into the Star of Bethlehem, analyzing whether it was a real astronomical event or myth. Throughout the transcript, the focus is on the intersection of biblical scripture, historical accounts, and astronomical data to explore what the Star of Bethlehem might have been. The narrative unfolds the speaker's journey from curiosity to a deep dive into software simulations revealing fascinating alignments in the heavens at the time of Jesus's birth and death, proposing that the celestial displays were poetic symbols of divine events.

Highlights

Debate on whether the Star of Bethlehem was a historical event or a biblical myth. 🌠
The speaker's personal journey from skeptic to advocate through astronomical research. 🔍
Jupiter and Regulus conjunctions bring astronomical support to biblical narratives. 🌌
Software simulations reproduce ancient sky phenomena, revealing potential symbolic meanings. 🖥️
Connections drawn between celestial events and significant biblical milestones, such as Jesus's birth and crucifixion. ✨

Key Takeaways

The Star of Bethlehem is treated as a puzzle combining biblical, historical, and astronomical clues. 🌟
Kepler's laws allow us to recreate ancient skies with astounding accuracy. 📜
The Star of Bethlehem might have been an astronomical event involving Jupiter and the star Regulus. 🔭
The event on September 3 BC aligns with biblical depictions using astronomical software. 📆
Theories on the Star link it to Jewish symbolism, like the Lion of Judah constellation. 🦁

Overview

In this riveting presentation, Jaziz Gutierrez embarks on a quest to unravel the mystery of the Star of Bethlehem, moving beyond myth, examining it through the lenses of both history and astronomy. The speaker navigates the intense historical debates and religious beliefs that surround this celestial symbol and its biblical references.

Gutierrez leveraged modern astronomical tools to peek into the past skies, linking the events described in scriptures to actual celestial occurrences. The analysis draws focus on Jupiter, known as the "King Planet," and its conjunctions with the star Regulus in the constellation of Leo the Lion, a symbol tied to the Jewish tribe of Judah and King David.

This meticulous investigation suggests that these celestial events marked significant moments around Jesus's birth and death. Such findings suggest a synchronization of divine and natural worlds, where stars poetically recorded the life milestones of Christ, leaving attendees deeply moved and contemplative of the stars' historical significance.

Chapters

00:00 - 10:00: Introductory Remarks The chapter titled 'Introductory Remarks' begins with some background music, setting the tone for the following discussion or presentation.
10:00 - 30:00: Personal Journey and Background The chapter begins with the sound of applause and music, setting a reflective and introspective tone. It hints at a personal journey, likely detailing the narrator's background and experiences that have shaped their life. The ambient sounds create an atmospheric introduction without delving into specific details, suggesting that the narrative might unfold as the chapter progresses or leaving room for personal interpretation.
30:00 - 60:00: Biblical and Astronomical Analysis The speaker expresses excitement over guiding the audience through the mystery of the Star of Bethlehem, a topic that has intrigued people for 2,000 years. The discourse aims to explore whether this star was a real astronomical event or a fictional creation.
60:00 - 90:00: The Star of Bethlehem Exploration The chapter explores different perspectives on the Star of Bethlehem, focusing on two main viewpoints historically held by people. Believers accept the biblical account of the star as truth without questioning its validity, while skeptics argue that the described behavior of the star is impossible and consider it a myth created by the early church. The discussion does not align with either of these positions but instead proposes a different approach to understanding the phenomenon.
90:00 - 120:00: Linking to Modern Astronomy and History The chapter introduces the author's exploration of the star of Bethlehem through biblical and historical analysis. The author, a lawyer by profession, shares how his fascination with this celestial event spurred an intriguing investigation. Despite lacking a background in astronomy, his keen interest led him to analyze clues from the Bible and history, aiming to find correlations between them. His unconventional approach promises to offer a unique and captivating perspective on what he refers to as a puzzle or mystery.
120:00 - 150:00: Conclusion and Reflections In the conclusion and reflections chapter, the narrator recounts an experience involving a young man from the neighborhood who wanted to make extra money by setting up Christmas decorations in people's yards. This enterprising young man approached neighbors door-to-door, including Mr. Larson, offering them a chance to select decorations from his book. The chapter likely reflects on themes of initiative, entrepreneurship, and community involvement, leaving the audience with thoughtful insights.

Bethlehem Star: How the stars predicted the birth of Jesus Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [Music]
00:30 - 01:00 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hmm
01:00 - 01:30 good evening you guys excited i am very excited because i'm going to be your guide to one of the great mysteries the star of bethlehem this this has been a mystery for 2 000 years since the original events and people have wondered about it for centuries whether the star was a real event or whether it was something made up by the
01:30 - 02:00 early church and you know really that's the two basic positions people have taken historically believers some people believe the bible is true and they say well the stars in the bible so i'm good with it they don't worry about it but there are other people who have a more critical attitude towards the star and uh they read the story and they say wait a minute that star is described as doing things that stars can't do that must have been made up you know it's a myth created by the early church to add weight to the name of jesus of nazareth well those are the two pole positions we're not going to take either one of those this evening what we're going to do is to treat the
02:00 - 02:30 star more like a puzzle or a mystery to be solved and we're going to go through the bible and find all the clues we can there and we're going to compare those against the facts we know from history and see if there's a match up and i think you're going to find this completely fascinating before i get off into the whole presentation i always like to tell people how i came to do it because most people want to know that anyway i'm not an astronomer i'm a lawyer and so it's kind of strange that i'm doing this thing at all but i got fascinated with the star of bethlehem and it became almost an obsession and
02:30 - 03:00 that's why i'm standing here so let me tell you how that happened it began with a young man in our neighborhood who wanted to make some extra money and he had this great idea of setting up christmas decorations in people's yards [Music] and he went door-to-door to everybody in the whole neighborhood [Music] he's going to house the house and he gets to my house and he says mr larson you're not going to put up the decorations you're going to look at my book and pick a figure
03:00 - 03:30 so i look at the book and it's full of things like uh duckies you know and bunnies carrying presents and things like that i'm a deeply committed christian so i just couldn't go there i mean so i just looked at the thing and i blew it i declined [Music] everyone else in the neighborhood did it and the result was the whole neighborhood lit up with this unified theme come christmas
03:30 - 04:00 people were driving in from out of town to drive through our neighborhood real slow five miles an hour all the kids looking out the windows and all that stuff they get to the larson house and it's dark so i had to do something and my little daughter marion decided what we should do is make the three wise men so we did we made wise men stand about that high draped them with cloth and all they look pretty cool they march across my front yard every year at christmas time so when you have three wise men what
04:00 - 04:30 else do you have to have you got to have the star so miriam says daddy make a star [Music] and you know immediately kick in with the lawyer's way of thinking it's like well what was the start if i'm going to make a star what did it do would it look like how long did it last and whether was it a shooting star was it did it explode was it an angel i mean what was the star so i got sensitized to that question
04:30 - 05:00 [Music] next thing that happened is i came across an article by a phd astronomer that took the position the star was a real astronomical event fascinated me read the article most of it just went right over my head you know because i'm not i'm not an astronomer didn't really understand it but i kept
05:00 - 05:30 it and i actually put it aside and intended to look at it every year just almost like a christmas tradition is what i was gonna do and i always thought in the back of my mind someday i'm going to puzzle that stuff through astronomer no i'm going to figure that out [Music] next thing that happened to get me on the path to what i'm going to show you
05:30 - 06:00 my church asked me to teach a course called essentials which is the biblical basis for the core beliefs of christianity so i'm writing the curriculum for essentials and i decided well why not put in just a little section in the essentials course about external evidences meaning things outside the bible that tend to show the bible is true and as i was putting that one together the star came to me i thought my goodness the star the star of bethlehem if that's an actual historical event i mean how about that for an external evidence you know
06:00 - 06:30 so that turned me on totally and i said okay now's the time not thinking about maybe someday let's start and so i bought some astronomy software and for months and it actually turned into years i would go out on the deck after dark after my girls had gone to bed and i would go through that article tap on my computer look into the software look at the sky found everything in the article eventually found a whole lot more and a lot of stuff that i have to say it's pretty darn close to shocking to me
06:30 - 07:00 in fact the presentation when i first gave it to the essentials class basically dropped every jaw in the room so i thought well maybe i'm going to have to show it to more people so i decided to show it to my entire church same reaction then other churches started asking me pretty soon i'm getting requests from all across the country and even overseas and i'm winding up going to slovakia and italy and all these places presenting the star because the interest is so high
07:00 - 07:30 it seems strange to me that he would ask somebody who's not formally trained in astronomy to do such a thing but i guess maybe that's just the way he works when people seem weak then he gets the credit it's basically taking over my life and not really complaining but a very big surprise to me what's happened with it [Music] you might wonder if the star is a real astronomical event why are we just hearing about it right now i mean why isn't why isn't it all disclosed in history books why haven't you already heard about it didn't you
07:30 - 08:00 wonder about i i wondered that when i've been finding all this stuff i i wonder why are we finding this stuff out now so let me explain that a little bit the several reasons that i want you to know first we couldn't really know what the sky's ancient skies looked like before we discovered the math behind the movements of the solar system that happened in the 1600s anybody know who discovered how the solar system works you hear copernicus vernon has figured out that the sun was the center instead of the earth the guy who figured out the actual math that drives the planets that was kepler johannes kepler and kepler
08:00 - 08:30 puzzled out the three laws of planetary motion in the early 1600s now those laws hold today their math and they're the same laws that nasa uses and the esa uses to predict where planets will be when they launch a rocket and it has to travel for 13 years to get someplace they know where the celestial bodies will be because it's all like a great clock it's extremely irregular it's mathematically precise kepler discovered that in the 1600s before that we couldn't calculate what the skies looked like in past times but with kepler's discovery we can
08:30 - 09:00 [Music] kepler discovered the math but he did have a problem i mean math is was laborious back then it was done in your head or on paper and you have a lot of calculations if you're trying to calculate the appearance of the night sky and all the stars in it i mean that's a lot of work and then the man used you know a quill pen and some vellum probably and probably took a long time for him to draw a chart and it would be accurate his math was excellent and he'd have an accurate picture but it would be a snapshot you know and if he if he calculated the
09:00 - 09:30 appearance of this guy on the wrong day or the wrong week or wrong hour for that matter he might totally miss something very significant but that all changed you know today i mean that's one of the reasons why we're hearing about the star now because we've taken that math and put it into software [Music] you can see the night sky from any place on the surface of the earth at any time in history in an instant and it's so fast you can animate this gun
09:30 - 10:00 kepler was a religious guy so the first thing he did once he discovered these laws first thing he did he starts cranking those laws trying to find what the star of bethlehem he wrote two books on it but kepler missed the star the reason he missed the star is he was looking in the skies of the wrong years here's the problem kepler had a mistaken understanding of first century history he thought a very important man died on a certain date and he was just wrong the very important man was king herod the same king herod who tried to kill the baby jesus so obviously herod was alive when jesus
10:00 - 10:30 was born and kepler believed that herod died in 4 bc and so he only looked in earlier years he looked in 5 and 6 and 7 bc for the star of bethlehem when you look in those years you don't find much it turns out that kepler was taking his information from the writings of one flavius josephus josephus was a a jewish scholar he wrote in about the same time that jesus was on earth and he wrote jewish histories and and from the josephus writings it's possible to infer the date of herod's death i use that
10:30 - 11:00 word infer because uh he didn't use our dating system our calendar system so he couldn't just say four bc but you can but you can infer the date of herod's death from josephus's writing kepler thought that inference should be for bc but we have new knowledge a man took an interest in this question of when herod died and this gentleman went and looked at manuscripts from josephus he looked at in the british museum and our museums here in the united states and he found that all the oldest manuscripts everyone that dates before 1544 all of them
11:00 - 11:30 are consistent with herod having died in one bc some kind of a printing or copying error or something crept in and propagated from there and so actually if you have a copy of josephus on your shelf right now it's probably going to be a 4bc copy because it propagated widely but all the early manuscripts you know are consistent with having died in one and that opens up the possibility for us to look in the years two and three bc for the star and when you look there the sky explodes
11:30 - 12:00 [Music] [Music] now if anything happened when i began to find all this stuff in that article and then a lot of other stuff too i was
12:00 - 12:30 finding signs in the sky funny thing happened i got cold feet and i decided i gotta quit this let me tell you why my parents are relatively conservative christian people and they taught me when i was just a kid not to fool around with astrology they said look astrology is either just you know entertainment just false or it's a cult neither one's good and so they advise me just to stay away from astrology okay so i'm outside on the deck tapping away on my computer finding all these signs right i'm thinking wait a minute am i becoming an astrologer
12:30 - 13:00 that's when i shut down all the astronomical research for a time i just didn't i literally didn't do any more at all i instead went and did an extensive bible study on on the stars in the bible because i wanted to know what i'm doing okay i mean is it okay to look for signs in the sky or is this weird [Music] let's go to the stars in the bible and we're going to learn that god takes credit for the constellations takes credit for the stars what's the oldest book in the bible anybody know probably job there's not complete
13:00 - 13:30 agreement on that there's some disagreement but but job is likely the oldest book in the bible and most people think that job was written before abraham was called out of the counties before the founding of the jewish nation so it's an ancient ancient book and isn't it interesting that in the very oldest book of the bible we're already talking about stars and god's taking credit for him let's have a look in job 9 job is talking he says god is the maker of the bear and orion the pleiades and
13:30 - 14:00 the constellations of the south later in the book god is putting job in his place and god says hey job can you bind the beautiful pleiades can you lose the cords of orion can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons the answer no he's saying job i made the stars i made the constellations i'm running the show i'm controlling it all so here's god taking credit for the constellations and stars let's have a look and see what isaiah says isaiah writes lift your eyes and look to the heavens who created all these he who brings out the starry host one by
14:00 - 14:30 one and calls them each by name incredible he brings them all out he has a name for all the stars uh anybody in here ever seen a hubble space telescope photograph raise your hands i'm curious some almost everybody has but not everybody has i'm going to show you one to make the point let me give you something to look at while i'm talking to you that's the tadpole galaxy and i'll talk about it in just a second hubble if you don't know it's a i call a space telescope because it rides outside
14:30 - 15:00 of earth's atmosphere so it doesn't have to look through our smog and haze and pollution and clouds for that matter it's out in the vacuum and so it sees very clearly into very deep space and since hubble has existed we've been able to learn so much about deep space that we didn't have any clue before for example we have learned that there are at least a hundred billion galaxies the size of our own milky way and each of those galaxies has at least a hundred billion stars feel small yet
15:00 - 15:30 this is the tadpole galaxy and i'm showing it to you i think this is pretty but also because i want you to see all these little dots if the room was darker you'd see more yet more but all these little dots here that you might miss you might mistake those for stars those are not stars those are galaxies each one of us has at least 100 billion stars in it just like our milky way now does does that make the universe huge from god's perspective i don't i don't think it necessarily does because numbers can be very uh confusing they can be misleading uh my
15:30 - 16:00 biologist friend of mine told me that i have a hundred trillion cells in my body not billion trillion cells in my body does that make me huge well i i don't know it depends on your frame of reference doesn't it so we don't know if god thinks the universe is big god may say the universe universe where'd i put the universe he calls them each by name because of god's great power and mighty strength not one of them is missing what does it mean to be missing it needs to be out of place not where you belong you mean all the stars hundreds upon hundreds of billions of
16:00 - 16:30 stars are right where god wants them that's what isaiah is saying now i'm going to show you something that david has said the thing that makes me just love him is his nickname in scripture you know what he's called he's called the man after god's own heart i hear that i think oh man i want that you know wouldn't you like to be a person after god's own heart i mean love the man love him now you probably have read this next psalm i'm going to put up here but you read it wrong i want you to read it my way i want you to read it for the verbs
16:30 - 17:00 david writes the heavens declare the glory of god the skies proclaim the work of his hands day after day they pour forth speech night after night they display knowledge there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard their voice goes out into all the earth their words to the ends of the world now isn't it interesting that david chooses verb after verb after hebrew verb all different to say that the stars communicate
17:00 - 17:30 fascinating now in romans paul is asking a rhetorical question the rhetorical question is did the jews know the messiah had come paul's kind of shocking answer was yeah of course they knew but what i like is the structure of his argument look at his argument paul says faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard to the word of christ but i asked did they my people the jews not here of course they did and then he quotes david he says their voice has gone out into all the earth their words to the ends of the world
17:30 - 18:00 let me just paraphrase that now what paul is saying yeah the jews my people knew the messiah had come because the stars told him now do you make that argument unless something interesting has happened in the sky you don't make that argument so obviously something did happen in the sky what was that that's what we want to know that's what we're trying to find out this last authority is jesus he says there will be signs in the sun moon and stars so is it okay to look for him well i guess so i guess so but mr
18:00 - 18:30 larson aren't you trying to play it both ways here i mean you say astrology's bad but it's okay to look for signs in the sky how does this work you know you can't have it both ways mr larson oh yes i can i'm a lawyer i can make a distinction right okay and my distinction i'm going to call a thermometer distinction it's a metaphor of course men and and thermometers everybody knows how they work they can tell you if it's hot or cold they can't make you hot or cold because they're not active agents they're indicators that's how the bible treats the stars it was very reassuring i quickly found out on in that study that it's
18:30 - 19:00 absolutely fine to look for signs in the sky what's not fine is to think that the stars are running your life that's astrology and the bible disagrees with that in fact um there's such a distinction between astrology and what we're doing here that astrology was a kill on the fence in the old testament times it was a capital offense okay so we now know it's okay to look at the stars if we do it in the right way understanding they can be signs from on high but they don't actually run your life
19:00 - 19:30 when i began really pushing hard the research after having found the stuff in craig chester's article i wanted to go further so that means i had to really puzzle it through you know it's the only way i feel safe making a presentation is if i pushed it all the way back and i know what i'm saying is so and i've got the back end filled in so i went to matthew and i treated it like it was the bible i mean that was the real set of clues right there and most researchers don't pay that much attention to matthew
19:30 - 20:00 only to the extent they see oh there was a star they basically don't treat the bible seriously you know they find out there's a star they see matthew chapter two and then they throw away the bible you know and just start looking around the sky and for that reason nearly everything in the night sky has been proposed as the star of bethlehem at some point or another in nearly everything i wanted to go through and see let's mine this for data i'm looking for data points here i'm looking for clues to solve a mystery and so i went through matthew very very carefully
20:00 - 20:30 and found that if you if you pay close attention there are nine characteristics of the star that's a fair amount of data when you have that much data you can quickly eliminate a whole lot of things other people are proposing why well because i'm paying attention to matthew and i'm very conservative too about this issue so if we find something in the sky that you know maybe fulfills aid i'm going to say that's interesting but it's not the star it has to completely line up with scripture for me to think it's really the star in fact when you guys go home if you get interested in
20:30 - 21:00 this you go home you google this deal you're going to get a bunch of weird stuff coming up you know occult strange bizarre stuff fortunately in most of the major search engines my site's going to be very near the top because it's very well rated so you can find my site and i encourage you to go there my site is called bethlehemstar.net so let's go to the second chapter of matthew and look at the clues after jesus was born in bethlehem and judea during the time of king herod so you see again how important it is when herod died if pharaoh died in 4 bc you look in later years but we think he died
21:00 - 21:30 in one so we're looking in two and three bc magi came from the east to jerusalem okay gotta ask what's a magus same word as our word magic are they magicians you know the one showed up in acts and he was a bad actor so some of them were bad we don't know that much about the magi we don't even really know how many there were we think there were three only because there are three gifts mentioned in scripture but we do know something about magi at least because we have the writings of a jewish philosopher and historian named philo feil lived in
21:30 - 22:00 alexandria egypt in the large jewish community there and he was a a copious writer and his works have made it through to the present day i've got you know a huge compendium of philo at home most first century histories have been lost that's the truth because we burned the world's major libraries in various conflicts over the years but philo made it through and philo does discuss magi and he describes a particular school of magi calls it the eastern school and these magi he praises he says these guys understand the natural order and they're able to explain natural to
22:00 - 22:30 others and and we they were according to philo probably what we we might call something like proto-scientists they were the scientists of their day at least this fancy eastern school of magi was of that character now we don't know that these magi in scripture are from that eastern school but don't you think it's interesting that matthew wants us to know they came from the east i think he's telling us this magi we're from the good school impressive magi i have a theory about this eastern school of magi that perhaps they were descended from daniel's day daniel never went home he stayed there until he died and i'm
22:30 - 23:00 sure was uh training people to come up behind him that may well be the eastern school that gets described in philo the magi asked a question that's just loaded loaded with clues they said where is the one who has been born king of the jews those three clues right there did you see him go by whatever the magi i saw in the sky suggested to them birth the jewish nation and kingship next they say we saw his star in the east i'm going to stop there because i have to correct the translation a little bit when it says we saw a star in the east okay sure they were in the east and
23:00 - 23:30 so yes they saw his star when they were in the east but that's not the sense of the greek the greek says they saw the star on a toll which means rising in the east and that's a clue because most stars rise in the east because of the rotation of the earth of course but not all stars do that like pole stars don't so that's another clue and then they say and we've come to worship him if the magi were in fact of jewish descent that would explain why they'd be looking for jewish signs in the sky and why they would be excited enough that what they
23:30 - 24:00 saw to get on their camels and ride 700 miles to jerusalem and it would also explain why when they got to jerusalem in addition to asking questions they wanted to worship the jewish king who wants to worship a jewish king perhaps someone have jewish descent watch herod's reaction when herod heard this he was disturbed and all jerusalem with him everybody who heard the story that the magis presented was disturbed that's that is a clue also it's kind of a hidden clue it comes back again in a few minutes but let me just talk about that for a moment tell you why it's a clue um
24:00 - 24:30 i'll back into it by getting you to participate how many people in here have seen the milky way and almost everybody here here's the deal the milky way is not visible in most parts of the country for several reasons light pollution and air pollution being the two major ones but in ancient times they had neither problem um for example they didn't have bright lights like this the brightest thing anyone ever saw at night was a flame so their eyes were adjusted plus they didn't have air pollution which cuts down visibility did not have smog and stuff like that back then as a
24:30 - 25:00 result they all had seen the milky way everybody had seen the milky way and were familiar with the stars and the constellations and all because the star you know they were perfectly available to the naked eye unlike most of our cities another reason they knew about the st the stars because it's a hot arid place to live in the middle east in the summertime people used to sleep on their roofs that way they got off the street level for a little bit of security and got the out of the hot house and just get to lay there in the relative cool and as you lay there on your back what are you seeing i mean the internet like you
25:00 - 25:30 people you know no they're looking at the stars all night every night as long as they're up they're seeing stars and so people understood the sky now here's why that's a clue when they heard about the star from the magi they were shocked that's a kind of clue and i'm going to come back to in a minute it appears twice when he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law he asked them where the christ was to be born now what's going to happen is his chief priests and teachers they're going to quote the ancient prophet micah and it's a faithful prophecy too that micah makes
25:30 - 26:00 in fact if micah had made his prophecy herod wouldn't have killed of little babies in bethlehem the king's experts say in bethlehem and judea they replied for this is what the prophet micah has written but you bethlehem in the land of judah are by no means least among the rulers of judah for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people israel that's how hare decided to kill the babies then herod called the magi secretly and found out from the exact time the star had appeared that's the second time one clue is coming by he doesn't know when the star appeared he had to ask that's an important clue
26:00 - 26:30 and then the next clue is that it's associated with an exact timing okay we're building up our nine points he sent them to bethlehem and said go and make a careful search for the child as soon as you find him report to me so that i too may go and worship him after they had heard the king they went on their way and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was two more clues it went ahead of them as they went from jerusalem to bethlehem let's do that one first you may not know the geography of israel you don't need a
26:30 - 27:00 map you don't need a star you don't need a guide to find bethlehem from jerusalem it's five miles south on the main road you can see bethlehem from jerusalem so it's just five miles south so we know the star whatever it was had to be ahead of them as they were headed due south okay oh you know what else there's another clue i have to pull out of this for you remember that they saw the star when they were in the east and then they traveled to jerusalem and then they saw the star still that means the star endured over time and then here's the tough one here's the toughest of all nine points
27:00 - 27:30 until it stopped over the place where the child was can a star stop you wouldn't think so but it can and did and i'm going to show you you now know more about the star than any of your neighbors i promise you you now know the nine points that identify the star so i'm going to give you a little quiz here don't worry you'll do great um first might the star have been a shooting star meteorite no i agree with you not why not there are probably six or eight reasons why
27:30 - 28:00 it doesn't stop right shooting stars don't do that right gun for two seconds okay what about uh it's not a shooting star what about comet i'll answer that one for you comets are a better candidate because they rise in the east like other stars they endure over time they can be spectacular some of them have tails that could be taken to point that's kind of cool um but i don't think it was a comment i got basically three reasons for thinking that first one is kind of soft science but it's just the fact that from the earliest recorded human history and by
28:00 - 28:30 that i mean cave paintings from the very earliest times comets have been omens of doom that's how humans conceive of them because they operate outside the normal system they come from nowhere it seems like uh you know so in the earliest cave paintings if there's a comet in there in the cave painting all the animals are running from it and even in the 20th century even even as far as that uh modern time people still thought comments were omans of doom the first time haley showed up in the 20th century all the churches packed everybody thought oh you know what the world was ending so what i'm thinking is
28:30 - 29:00 probably wasn't the comment i mean would god choose an omen of doom to announce the coming of messiah i mean i don't know maybe it doesn't seem likely but there are other reasons not to think to think it was not a comet several ancient cultures kept excellent astronomical records notably the chinese you go to the records you look in the years two and three bc which is our hypothesis no comments but i the one that persuades me the best the one that i think is the strongest evidence that it wasn't the comments is that kind of a funny clue where herod was surprised about it harry didn't know
29:00 - 29:30 when the star appeared he had to ask and that's really fascinating to me because that just suggests that it may have been an ordinary thing in the sky that was striking when explained when the magi put it in context and said what was happening and had been happening for the last nine months i think that's what blew him away look if a comet appears in that ancient culture where everybody sees the sky most and every night is are people going to know about it yeah and it's a moment of doom it's going to be the talking town i mean everybody's going to be buzzing about it so probably not a common well how about a nova
29:30 - 30:00 an exploding star now they appear at a point in time that's good lasts over time they rotate i mean they should say they rise knees probably not i know though for the same reasons you look at the chinese record and aren't they no if i recorded and also herod would not have had to ask you know if the thing appears everyone's going to know so we wiped out everything no we haven't there's another class of things we have one class of stars that we call wandering stars today moderns call them planets but that word comes from the greek verb to wander
30:00 - 30:30 and they're called wandering because they move around in the field of fixed stars when you go outside and look up tonight you're going to see just this huge canopy of stars we often visualize it as a sphere over the earth and those stars most of them in the in that sphere they move very very slowly of course it's really us it's moving but the earth rotates and it makes the stars appear to rise in the eastern set in the west right most stars then are in the in the fixed class but then there are the wandering stars the planets and the planets move around through the field of thick stars they do interesting
30:30 - 31:00 things so might one of these wandering stars have something to do with messiah's star well that's going to be our working hypothesis um anybody tell me what's the largest planet in the solar system it's jupiter jupiter's name for the highest god in the roman pantheon it's a gas giant we call it it's the biggest planet by far it's about 11 times the diameter of earth it's you know hundreds of times more massive runs in an orbit way outside of earth takes about 12 years to get around the sun so might jupiter which has been known as
31:00 - 31:30 the king planet from ancient times because the biggest one um might jupiter have something to do with messiah star well that's going to be a hypothe hypothesis that we can test that's not going to be enough to have a kingly name jupiter is going to have to do some pretty peculiar things to satisfy all nine points from the bible so did jupiter do that so now i'm going to take you and show you the starry dance we're going to go to the sky and see what really happened 2000 years ago this program incidentally is
31:30 - 32:00 it's called starry night and uh it's a fabulous program i'm only going to use it just a little here today to show you something spectacular but if you're interested in astronomy it's great stuff used widely by astronomers around the world it is extremely accurate it incorporates kepler's three laws of planetary motion plus newton refined kepler's work he added something called perturbations uh and so and that's all included in the the software so what i'm going to be showing you through these screens is not something that approximates what things look like in ancient times it's quite an
32:00 - 32:30 accurate reproduction of the positions of the planets because we can actually calculate that so um we can view from any place we like i'm choosing to view from babylon because i believe that's probably where the magi came from that's the eastern school and now most everybody in this room knows that babylon's in iraq people didn't used to know that but everybody's very familiar it's about 60 miles south of baghdad right and you can choose to choose any time to view and we're viewing 3 bc it's september this is the compass rose it says yeast and this red line is the path of jupiter through the sky i've turned it on just
32:30 - 33:00 to make it easier for you to follow jupiter now when i animate the sky what's going to happen is you're going to watch the screen increment it's going to kind of do it step wise and what's happening in between those steps is the program is running through all that math it's to make sure that exactly what what you see is exactly what happened so let's take a look and we see jupiter rising oh cool mr larson there better be more right i got just more there's more i'm already messing with you though because there are actually two things here can you see
33:00 - 33:30 the two objects there let me take you to another screen so i can enlarge it without messing this screen up i'm just going to zoom in and as i zoom in you'll find that there are two objects there this is jupiter the smaller object is a star it has a name it's called regulus that's the same word which is our word regal the babylonian is called regulus uh shahru which means king the romans called regulus rex which means king this is the king star we now have the king planet the king star coming in a very close approach
33:30 - 34:00 so i'm out there on the deck and i'm typing away and i find this and i think well that's pretty cool i mean you know i can see king there well that was interesting it was that was a conjunction it was interesting but it also made me um suspicious you know because i like i say i'm a lawyer and i'm not an astronomer and i didn't want to be fooled i don't want to find something that turns out to not have any significance at all maybe that happens every thursday you know so i start running the universe backwards and forwards just trying to find out how often do these conjunctions happen
34:00 - 34:30 [Music] here's the situation let's just make some assumptions to put this in context for you i don't know how old any of the magi were but let's just make some assumptions let's say you have to be an apprentice to become a magi magus let's say that uh you make make the grade by age 20 or something then you got maybe 50 years until your eyes go bad and you can't observe anymore so let's say they had 50 year careers
34:30 - 35:00 let's put them in mid-career just making some assumptions here if that was the case and if they were watching weather permitting if they were watching they might have seen something like this two or three times before so somewhat rare somewhat interesting yeah make a note of it that's what they were into but uh probably wouldn't send them to jerusalem probably not but of course there's more now i'd already told you that wandering stars move about in the field of thick stars right but um they don't they don't do it correctly
35:00 - 35:30 just so you know the planets misbehave let me show you what they do uh here's what it looks like here's what mars is uh looks like as it moves through the thick stars it moves along like you'd expect it to but then it slows down and loops continues on and loops again and what's with that mars that's pretty weird isn't it okay i mean it's looping through the sky like that that's exactly what it looks like but of course it's optical it's what uh astronomers call retrograde motion retrograde motion it's caused by the
35:30 - 36:00 fact that we're watching from a moving platform just like when you are driving your car and you pass somebody on the roadway they appear to drop back uh they're not really going backwards you're just watching from a moving platform same thing we're watching from earth and so when earth spins past another planet in its orbit that planet may appear to act strangely move backwards retrograde motion and jupiter does that of course jupiter's retrograde is very shallow if i can get my star to go on [Music] goes like this it slows up it doesn't blink like that
36:00 - 36:30 and it does a very shallow little circle kind of a little like that yeah it kind of looks like a halo or somebody so did jupiter do that at an interesting time well yes it did let's take a look i'll animate jupiter and let it drop a tail so you can watch it jupiter passed regulus changed its mind stopped and went back for a second close approach that's two past regulus again changed its mind and came
36:30 - 37:00 back for a third close approach triple conjunction much more rare much more rare and if you choose to see it jupiter has just drawn a halo or a crown over the king planet interesting i can see king there can't you i can see king king right some people would say well king king you know new king or maybe it means birth i don't know i can't get much more out of that but i do see king there very true a lot of stuff still missing though i mean i don't see the jewish nation up there any place so of course there's more
37:00 - 37:30 next i want to ask you a question um 12 jewish tribes one produces messiah which one anybody know you're right say it louder it's judah that's right what's the animal symbol for the tribe of judah that's correct okay good let me take you to the first book of the bible and look at genesis 49 for a prediction of the coming messiah we read you're a lioness kobo judah you return from the prey my son like a lion he crouches and lies down like a lioness who dares rousing the scepter will not depart from judah not a ruler's staff from between his
37:30 - 38:00 feet until he comes to whom the scepter belongs and the obedience of the nations was his i need a prop i'm gonna use this for a prop y'all know what a scepter is the thing that kings hold to show their kings right i want you to remember the septuagint is gonna show up again okay so this is a prediction of messiah coming in his role as king of king of kings well that association with the lion of judah that helps us let's go back to the sky if we look at the sky and turn on the constellations
38:00 - 38:30 we'll see that jupiter has been crowning regulus right here in the constellation leo the lion well now i can see an association with the jewish nation i can see king king king in leo that's pretty interesting that's pretty cool but there's something even bigger that i got to show you that really spooked me when i saw it and to do that i'm going to take you back to the bible to the last book of the bible we've just been in the first book of the bible now in the last book of the bible revelation and i want to talk a little bit about revelation first about its author
38:30 - 39:00 because i want to make sure you're all on the same page um it was written by a man named john uh he wrote five books of the new testament including the gospel he wrote revelation was an old man he he and and under dire circumstances the guy was on the island patmos basically locked up for his christian beliefs and he was there most commentators think for six to nine months and basically solitary on a rocky island and he was old at that point maybe probably in his 80s maybe almost could even be 90s and that's when he wrote the book of revelation now now all
39:00 - 39:30 of you have read it you know it speaks in a swirling prophetic imagery you know and it's a it's a lot of it seems metaphorical sometimes it's not chronological it's a difficult book it's a difficult book to interpret but i can't explain most of it i can though explain a little i'm gonna go to revelation 12 and show you a corner that i think i understand let's take a look and see what john describes he says a great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven what is the sign well i want you to
39:30 - 40:00 watch this it's a woman clothed with the sun with the moon at her feet a crown of 12 stars on her head she was pregnant and cried out in pain and she was about to give birth then another sign appeared in heaven an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads if you understand this please email me okay his tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment it was born she gave birth to a son a male
40:00 - 40:30 child will rule all the nations with an iron scepter hey here's that scepter again who's the child that's jesus in his role as king of kings we saw the pres the prediction in genesis and here in revelation he appears again and he's got that scepter because he's now the king of kings so if the child is jesus who's the woman yeah that's pretty easy okay and in in metaphorical terms who's the dragon that waited the fleet at the foot of the women to devour the child that's herod the dragon is herod john
40:30 - 41:00 elsewhere tells us in revelation that the dragon is satan but we know in human terms it was herod so we now understand what he's describing is the birth of jesus but he sees it in the heavens i'm going to show you something now that definitely got all little hairs up on the back of my neck on the back of my arm and uh because what follows jupiter into the sky is we animate the sky is virgo the virgin [Music]
41:00 - 41:30 and she's closed in the sun [Music] and she has the moon at her feet it's just a crescent moon a very small crescent barely invisible moon there's a reason for that this is jewish new year rosh hashanah the sheer weight symbolism in the sky on this day blew me away in september of 3 bc when jupiter is coming in close conjunction with regulus the king planet and the king
41:30 - 42:00 star that happening in leo the lion representing the nation of judah the tribe of judah that rises in the sky and behind it rises virgo the virgin and she's clothed in the sun and she has the moon at her feet it's exactly what john describes in revelation 12. it's what he saw in his vision it's obvious that got me when i went to time forward and saw that rise and realized oh my goodness that's what john saw there it is that really let all the pairs come up
42:00 - 42:30 [Music] [Applause] so i'm looking at all this stuff happening and everything's just you know really moving me and i'm thinking man this may be the birth of jesus then i thought wait a minute maybe not because jewish people and a lot of christian people believe that life begins at conception so i thought to myself well this might maybe this is the conception of jesus maybe this is the you know in the annunciation when gabriel appeared to
42:30 - 43:00 marion and she said be it done unto me well you can test that i thought well let's just wind forward nine months and see if there's anything interesting happening in the sky so that's what i did so let's jump forward nine months now we're still viewing from babylon because uh i don't think they've left yet it's now two bc it's it's june it's nine months later jupiter has finished crowning regulus in leo is now moving backwards through the constellations like it always does
43:00 - 43:30 i mean not the sunset because i need the sky to be darker you can see it setting in the west of course like everything does because the rotation of the earth incidentally if you're in babylon and you're looking west what are you looking toward israel okay now i'm going to show you something that you can see in any planetarium around the world even if they don't believe in jesus or you know the bible or anything they're going to show you this at christmas because all planetary do christmas shows that's the only way they can get you in there right
43:30 - 44:00 um and they always show this event because this event is simply so spectacular whether they believe in god or not they're going to show you this this shot um i'm going to kind of cheat as i show it to you though because the uh observation back then was all naked eye observation they had no lenses so i'm going to cheat i'm going to zoom in because i want to show you guys i'm going to take you in on the secret of what's happening here they couldn't zoom but we can so i'm going to zoom in way in [Music]
44:00 - 44:30 until finally i'll get those two objects separated one of them is jupiter the other one's another planet you're going to tell me which one too men are from mars women are from venus that's the mother planet venus is the mother planet so we have jupiter the king planet and venus the mother planet coming into very close conjunction that seems kind of pregnant doesn't it in fact they got even closer than that let me wind time forward just a little bit [Music] what i'm trying to show you is that they really stacked like a figure eight so they didn't block each other's light
44:30 - 45:00 they added what you had then was two stars stacked on top of each other too close together to separate with the naked eye so to an observer it appeared to be the brightest star anyone alive had ever seen um we know the math and so i can tell you that no one alive had ever seen a star that bright that was it i believe the star of bethlehem was the brightest star so we've seen the birth of the king in the sky we've seen the brightest star but now we have the issue of it being in the south remember when they are
45:00 - 45:30 traveling from jerusalem to bethlehem the star is said to have been before them ahead of them and so it would have to be in the southern sky so let's go back to the sky see if jupiter did that they've now traveled to jerusalem it's november i've given them some time for travel this is south remember uh bethlehem is due south of jerusalem and then seven in the morning sure enough they're in the sky in the southern sky is jupiter over the little town of bethlehem
45:30 - 46:00 now the hard part though can a star stop how can a star stop that was a puzzler because we all know stars can't stop i mean physics and inertia prevent that so our puzzle was without hard i worried about that one until i realized that i had the problem upside down i had it backwards the problem is not that stars can't stop the problem is that all stars are always stopped i mean they move like the hour hand on your watch you can't see it you know it's moving but you can see them move
46:00 - 46:30 well if the problem is that stars are always stopped what can matthew have meant by saying the star stopped and i thought retrograde motion because of course stars do stop planets do in in their movement through the field of fixed stars they stop leaving reverse cores [Music] and that's how i think retrograde motion explains what the star stopping was so did jupiter do that let's have a look i'll animate jupiter and let it drop a tail
46:30 - 47:00 and there you see it sure enough jupiter comes to a full stop and reverses course over the little town of bethlehem but i want to show you another screen it's more fun because i can throw dates with it now what i'm going to do on this one is i'm going to let jupiter fly through the field of fixed stars and it's going to throw off dates so we can tell when these events are happening the first one there i know it's small i'll read it for you it says 10 30 of 2bc now let's fly jupiter you see it moving through the fixed stars there's that says 1125 of 2bc and it's
47:00 - 47:30 slowing up it's going to stop right about here reverse course the date when it stops over the little town of bethlehem 1225 of 2bc that date sound familiar well mr larson you mean they went down there on christmas well turns out that's true um am i saying that jesus was born on 12 25 no i'm not saying that at all absolutely in fact i don't think anyone thinks that no what i'm saying is that that is quite literally quite possibly the date of the first christmas did it have any meaning to them no it had no meaning the date
47:30 - 48:00 had no meaning to them because they didn't use our calendar system i mean but it does have meaning to us it could well be assigned to us um let me give you give you the chronology now in september of 3 bc jupiter crowns regulus in leo uprises virgo clothed in the sun new moon birth to defeat rosh hashanah jewish new year nine months later the biggest planet goes together with the brightest planet to make the brightest star anyone alive had ever seen where right over jerusalem
48:00 - 48:30 as it sets the magi ride they get there uh sometime around november they go to herod they say we've seen the star where's the baby king uh here it says uh bethlehem so they're leaving uh the gates of jerusalem to go to bethlehem five mile trek uh and they look up and there's the star there's jupiter right over this little town of bethlehem one of the guys is the guy who does the math for the group he's going wait wait wait wait wait it's in full retrograde it's stopped right over the little town of bethlehem they ride down to lethal in 1225 to bc
48:30 - 49:00 we know that's the date because that's when the star stopped they're carrying gifts remember frankincense golden myrrh they find the baby boy is he living in a manger no no no no he's moved he's in his house in a house now he's described in greek as a piedeon he's a toddler they find the baby boy and they present these fabulous gifts to him on what turns out to be the first christmas 12 25 of 2 bc and now i've shared with you the star of bethlehem but now i'm going to reveal something to you it turns out in my studies i find that the star of
49:00 - 49:30 bethlehem is the beginning of what i think of the celestial poem that ends at christ's death and to show you the full poem i've got to take you to the day of the cross [Music] i'm going to talk to you about pentecost but first i kind of have to give you some background so you'll understand um the jesus was killed at passover the next jewish holiday is a feast it's called the feast of pentecost it's called pentecost because it comes 50 days after passover so it's pentecost now pentecost is a festival and people
49:30 - 50:00 jews who could afford to travel came from all the surrounding nations came back to jerusalem for this festival so a lot of out-of-towners in town let's do the chronology of christ's death remember he dies on passover he's buried he rises again bible says that he's then appears to people on earth stays around for 40 days so he almost makes it to pentecost doesn't he then he leaves and he gives instructions and he says stay here until you receive power from on high so they do the disciples stay in one place and they're all gathered together and pentecost comes and the weirdest
50:00 - 50:30 things start happening something like the sound of rushing wind happens in the room where they are something like fire dances over their heads and suddenly the disciples begin to speak in foreign languages other tongues people who are in town for the pentecost feast hear the promotion the crowd starts to gather and these out-of-towners are hearing their own languages being spoken by a bunch of galilean fishermen it gets crazy some get the crowd gets big enough that they're hecklers in the back and one of the hecklers shouts out says oh they're just drunk
50:30 - 51:00 peter stands up and says they're not drunk it's only nine in the morning i lecture to a lot of college students and i'm wondering this is persuasive you know so he the next thing he does don't try on on your own you know what he does next is crazy he's got a huge crowd and it's kind of unruly crowd he's got hecklers and stuff so peter stands up and he starts quoting an ancient prophet this is what he says he quotes joel he says i will show wonders in the heaven above
51:00 - 51:30 and signs on the earth below blood when there's been a crucifixion fire something like fire danced over the disciples heads and bills of smoke and the sun will be turned to darkness i think joel saw a vision of something like smoke that blotted out the sun the sun will return to darkness and the moon to blood the moon turned to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the lord and everyone who calls in the name of the lord will be saved then he
51:30 - 52:00 shouts at him he says men of israel listen to this jesus of nazareth was a man accredited by god to you by miracles wonders and signs which god did among you through him as you yourselves know now let me tell you why i put italics there that's a that's a very interesting argument let me paraphrase what just happened got a rowdy crowd out here peter stands up and he says basically this joel predicted a bunch of stuff and you've seen it now you don't make that argument
52:00 - 52:30 especially to a rowdy crowd unless they've seen the stuff and one of the things they are said to have seen was a blood moon y'all know what a blood moon is i thought that was weird i thought that was just weird prophet talk you know i don't know have you ever read and you see something in scripture and it just strikes you so strange like the moon would be turned to blood and say oh okay you know it just sounds like prophet talking i didn't know what it meant but it turned out i was very wrong that's a technical term it's an ancient technical term and it has a specific meaning it means a lunar eclipse why do they call those blood moons
52:30 - 53:00 because when the moon goes into eclipse it goes into earth's shadow and so it gets no direct illumination from the sun instead the only light that hits the moon under those conditions is refracted through the earth's atmosphere it's red shifted same thing the similar phenomenon makes our sunsets red sometimes so when the light comes through our atmosphere and it's red shifted it illuminates the moon which becomes a dull red color have you ever seen one of those yeah pretty spectacular it can be well here's the just just what we've just seen peter says that joel said there's a
53:00 - 53:30 blood moon and you've seen it so there was an eclipse interesting now we need to date christ's execution the reason we have to do that is otherwise we won't know what to look at the sky we need to know what day we should study the sky to see the the end of this poem that i'm showing you so we have clues um incidentally let me make another pitch for my website here bethelhamstar.net the reason i'm pitching it again right here there's a whole lot of really fascinating stuff on the website about this issue the dating of christ execution
53:30 - 54:00 first we know it was preparation day and the sabbath was about to begin okay some of you may not know what preparation day means jews of this time if they were observant jews could not work on the sabbath which was saturday they couldn't cook couldn't wash clothes so if they wanted to eat they had to prepare it on friday and so friday came to be called preparation day so all four gospels say that jesus was killed on a friday next clue it was just before the passover feast that's super useful because we know when
54:00 - 54:30 passover is we find from leviticus the lord's passover begins at twilight in the 14th day of the first month that's the jewish lunar month of nissan the jewish calendar is not a solar calendar like the one we use so those three clues taken together are extremely powerful and let me explain why because their lunar calendar works like our solar calendar in some ways and this is one of them think about your birthday it's always on the same day of the month right is it always on the same day of the week
54:30 - 55:00 no because in a solar calendar and on the lunar calendar days of the month can float through the days of the week our calendars are like in that but that's a clue it's a huge clue because now you can see jesus must have been killed in a year when nissan 14 happened to fall on a friday can you see that okay that really narrows things down let's get some more clues up there jesus himself is about 30 years old when he began his ministry john recounts three passovers during christ's ministry and we know he was
55:00 - 55:30 taken before a pilot and we know when pilate sat because tacitus the roman historian records it 26 to 36 a.d so all these things taken together plus more stuff on the website come to one conclusion only april 3 of 33ad seems to fit all the lines of evidence this is the day of the cross
55:30 - 56:00 isaiah says the messiah was beaten so severely he was hardly recognizable as human and in that state they put him on the cross at nine am he only lasted about six hours but while he was on the cross all hell broke loose there were earthquakes big earthquakes big enough to bust
56:00 - 56:30 boulders because the new testament tells us this the sky gets dark at noon joel and his vision of this event seems to describe building clouds of smoke that obscured the sun tombs get shaken open there's a veil in the holy of holies in the temple in jerusalem it separates the deepest part of the sanctuary from all the people who come to church synagogue
56:30 - 57:00 that was ripped in half top to bottom symbolizing ordinary folks having direct access to the holy of holies to god himself because messiah's sacrifice made it possible [Music] they had to get him down off the cross before sent down they had to do that because otherwise he would defile a passover so they got him down but the signs didn't stop when the moon rose that evening it was a blood moon a lunar eclipse which probably scared everybody out
57:00 - 57:30 there to death i mean i can really honestly think having lived through all of those events and then seeing the blood moon being scared spitless when the moon rises it's already an eclipse it's a blood moon now i don't know what the roman soldiers said when they saw that but don't you know they were freaked out i mean seriously after all these events during the day and then the moon comes up and it's a blood moon they'll
57:30 - 58:00 probably think oh man wrong side of this one but there's more and i want you to see it all to show you what else there is i need to take you back to scripture because i want to get some data from mark i'm jumping around in the book because all i want is is the time of day it was the third hour when they crucified him mark tells us and mark counts from six so he's telling us he went on the cross at 9 00 am at the sixth hour which is noon darkness
58:00 - 58:30 came over the whole land until the ninth hour and at the ninth hour jesus cried out in a loud voice set back tonight which means my god my god why have you forsaken me and with a loud cry jesus breathed this last no nobody wore wrist watches but jesus died at about three let's go back to the sky now can you see if the moon rises and eclipse that eclipse has to have begun beneath the horizon
58:30 - 59:00 there's already an eclipse okay well of course they couldn't look beneath the horizon but we can we have software [Music] so i'm not taking him beneath the horizon it's 2pm jesus is on the cross and he's still alive when i animate the sky i don't think you're going to be surprised what you see as jesus expires on the cross the moon goes into eclipse but there's more [Music]
59:00 - 59:30 to show you what else i need to remind you of the skies of jesus's birth or perhaps conception magnificent imagery jupiter crowning regulus in leo uprising's virgo the virgin clothes and the sun new moon rosh hashanah spectacular and now return to the sky of christ's death and turn on the constellations and you see the moon has returned to the foot of virgo but now it's a full moon a life fully lived
59:30 - 60:00 blotted out of blood [Applause] [Music] i remember the night when i found the eclipse of christ crucifixion [Music] i remember because of what was happening to me
60:00 - 60:30 when i found out the moon was back at the foot of the virgin and then when i further found that the moon went into eclipse at the moment my savior expired on the cross [Music] and i remember exactly what i said i don't think i could ever forget it i looked up at the sky and i said my god what did you do because this is poetry of terrible
60:30 - 61:00 beauty it showed me a sight of god that i'd not seen it showed me a god that would write poetry to record both the coming and the passing of my messiah and then he let me find it
61:00 - 61:30 so what does this mean what does this mean you know human beings have a characteristic response when they see a sign they draw near to learn the fuller message that's what moses did when he saw the bush that burned but wasn't consumed by the flames he drew near to learn the fuller message that's what the magi did when they saw the symbolism in the sky they rode for jerusalem to learn the fuller message
61:30 - 62:00 so what does this mean well one thing it means because you can press the scriptures extremely hard and they hold up but it means more than that i believe it means messiah has come our messiah was announced in the sky it's possible for us to have reconciliation with the perfect god because of messiah's sacrifice we just have to accept that [Music] it might mean even more than that
62:00 - 62:30 because if we found the star and a reasonable person could conclude that we have well then the star was part of the natural order the solar system is like a great clock it's mathematically precise we know exactly what it looked like thousands of years ago and if the star was a part of that great clockwork solar system in universe that means it was a clockwork star and that to me is almost overwhelming because that means that from the very moment that god flung the universe into
62:30 - 63:00 existence he had to know exactly when he would enter the human race as a man and when messiah would expire on the cross because he marched in the stars from before time [Music]
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64:00 - 64:30 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
64:30 - 65:00 you