For all its stellar beauty, the North Star (Polaris) has its limits. It can point close enough to true north, and therefore to all points of the compass, but it cannot point to heaven. Englishman George Herbert, in his famous anthology of poems called The Temple, expressed it well at the end of his second piece on Scripture: ‘Stars are poor books, and oftentimes do miss: This book of stars (that is, Scripture) lights to eternal bliss’.

There is a spectrum of poor speech that is poured forth by the stars. To be more precise, there is a spectrum of poor speech that is poured forth by those who observe the stars. At the poorest end are those who by them pretend to tell the future. Next along are those who mistake one star for another, and who therefore speak amiss and miss their mark. Further along is that poverty defined not in term of falsity or mistaken identity, but limitation. Polaris can only be seen on one side of the hemisphere, and even then, only when the night is clear.

But the main poverty of all the stars is this. They can proclaim the existence of a Creator, but they cannot reveal how to know that Creator. Yet what the stars cannot tell, the ‘book of stars’ does. And powerfully, in all her constellations, Old Testament and New, that Christ is the True Light and Lamb of God, and that He is the way to eternal bliss.