Why it matters that the Lord lets the sun rise on both the evil and on the good.
This Tuesday, the sun will hang in the sky over the Northern Hemisphere for what is colloquially known as the “longest day of the year.” In reality, the sun’s position will be no different than usual, but our perception of it will be different owing to the earth’s tilt on its axis as it orbits the sun.
Where I live in the mid-Atlantic, we’ll enjoy over fourteen hours of sunlight, but for those at the farthest reaches north—in places like Svalbard, Norway—the sun will simply never set. (Folks in the Southern Hemisphere will enjoy the same phenomenon six months later when the seasons change.)
Traditionally, the summer solstice has been a time of celebration, bonfires, and revelry—inspiring stories like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and even the placement of architectural wonders like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
For many pagan cultures, midsummer was a time of ritual and sacrifice as humans worshiped the sun as the source of life. But there’s a difference between worshiping the sun and worshiping by the sun. And surprisingly, at least to our modern sensibilities, Scripture invites us to the latter.
Psalm 19—the psalm that tells us that “the heavens declare the glory of God”—calls attention to the sun’s orbit as it traces a path across the sky. The author likens it to an athlete running around a racetrack:
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth. (v. 6)
For the psalmist, the arc of the sun’s orbit (the same orbit that makes the summer solstice both possible and predictable) reveals something of God’s character. Elsewhere, the Scripture …Continue reading… www.christianitytoday.org
