Step outside on a clear evening and ponder with me for a moment that faithful witness of the night, the moon. I have often been struck by the fact that when I read the words of some ancient writer, musing over our nearest celestial neighbor, or see some piece of art depicting that glowing orb, it is the very same moon that I look at now. I get a similar feeling as I did when my grandfather would point out some structure or landmark from his childhood that was still standing, the sense of “oldness” and the passage of time.
Indeed, this was the stated purpose for setting the moon in orbit to begin with, along with the stars – “…and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years…” (Gen. 1:14) And for millennia this is precisely how our predecessors, the world over, marked the progress of each year. Practically every reference to the moon in Scripture is to its sign-bearing or time-keeping properties. Consider how hard it would have been for our ancestors to mark the months without the moon. Sunset, sunrise, sunset, sunrise, day after day. The sun may be glorious in its light and power, but it’s largely nondescript – its face never changes. How could they have known one day from the next?
Not so, with the moon. Each night we look up to find the moon slightly different from the night before, and so know our movement through time. Perhaps it is this function of the moon that gives it a doleful feel, or maybe just its loneliness in the night sky. For though it walks a crowded field of countless stars, their company seems too far away and disinterested. At any rate, it seems a mournful marker to me. Not so much that it is sad in itself, but that it marks a sad reality – it is dark and time is moving on. There is mortality to the moon.
But then, it is also the most radiant object in the murky sky. Aside from the sun, it is the brightest object in the heavens. And surely this silent sentinel has hindered many a wicked deed through its pale illumination. Evil hates the eye of the sun, and even when darkness has cloaked the world, it is still the brightness of that same eye that casts shadows on the ground about us, for the moon has no light of its own. It is a whirling mirror, rough and wounded by the blows of a million meteors, and with a surface hardly more reflective than worn asphalt. It lights up the black expanse above us, reminding us that even in the dark the sun is shining somewhere.
And there is faithfulness to the moon. Though like its light, it is a faithfulness not its own. It is held in orbit by another. It cuts its steadfast path along the waist of our globe, ensuring both hemispheres see its witness night after night. From a silver sliver to the boldness of its beam-casting full, it is constant in its changing phases, yet still only shifting shadows on the one side we see. One unblinking gaze, that seems to look not so much at us, as beyond us, to another. The moon is testifying.
And though it is 400 times smaller than the sun, the sun is 400 times further away, so this relative pebble appears virtually identical in size and can block the light of that mighty star as it steps between the earth and the sun. How instructive. So too, when the world blocks the eye of the moon from the sun, her face is darkened.
In all these things the moon seems to bear some kinship with Adam’s fallen race. Made to image our God, yet pocked and scarred by sin, we still wear the royal mantle of sole reflector. Like the moon, we are held by a faithfulness that is not our own and shine only as we gaze on our Savior. Painfully more frequent than our sober satellite, we stand between the world and God, obscuring rather than reflecting His light. And just as the earth slides between the sun and moon, producing that eerie dimming of a lunar eclipse, so our faces cease to shine when the world fills our vision. It is fitting that it alone, of all the heavenly bodies, bears the footprints of humanity. There is humanness to the moon.
When C.S. Lewis arrived at his first dismal boarding school, he noticed the full moon outside his dormitory window and called it a “ghastly beauty.” It is an apt title (he always did find the best descriptors). The Psalms speak of being struck by the sun as well as by the moon. The harshness of the one is a blistering heat, the other a biting cold. There is terrible and breathtaking barrenness to the moon, a somber loveliness in its luminous testimony of the passage of time, and a reminder of the unrelenting appointment we all have with the approaching light.
There will come a time when “the moon will be no more” (Psa. 72:2), for John was shown a city in the future, which will have “no need of sun or moon to shine, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light.” (Rev. 21:23) But until then, like the moon, we must walk the narrow circuit set before us, bearing the light of that coming Day.
