And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day. (Gen 1:14-19)
According to many ancient pagans, the heavenly bodies (the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars) were eternal. They were entirely like everything here on earth. In fact, they were often seen as gods. The sacred author here eradicates this error. The heavenly bodies were created by God out of the same matter as everything else and serve as a sign from the one God.
This is because it is God alone who is eternal. The Seraphic Doctor explains that God must be eternal for he is both simple and infinite. Because he is infinite, he cannot be limited by time. Because he is simple, he must lack prior and posterior. However, even if the planets truly were from endless time ago, they would still be temporal compared to the eternity of God who is outside even time itself.
Does not the Trinity contradict the eternity of God though? This was the claim of the heretic Arius, who asserted that because the Son is from the Father, the Son cannot be eternal. However, the Seraphic Doctor explains that both the Father and the Son are coeternal, for the Father produces the Son essentially, not accidentally, and so the one produced, the Son, must be eternal as well. The same is likewise true of the Spirit.
Whenever we see change in this world, even change that might seem eternally unchanging like that of the heavenly bodies, we should remember that all things were created by God. The change of temporal motion should cause our minds to rise to their unchanging and eternal cause.
Let us pray.
O God, who made even the heavenly bodies subject to time, grant, we beseech Thee, that we might have the grace to join Thy eternal and unchanging presence. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
