Is The Gospel In The Stars?
Asher Chee |
Genesis 15:5 ESV And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
Some Bible teachers claim that in Genesis 15:5, God was communicating the story of the Gospel to Abraham through the constellations of the stars. They claim that the Hebrew word for “number” here really means “to declare; to recount; to narrate”. Therefore, God was not telling Abraham to “number” or “count” the stars, but rather to “tell the story of” the stars. However, this is not the case.
The Hebrew word for “number” in Genesis 15:5 is the verb sāp̄ar (סָפַר), which means “to count”, and not “to narrate”. It is another verb from the same root, sippēr (סִפֵּר), which means “to narrate”. While both verbs come from the same verb root, spr (ספר), they are actually two different verbs with two different ranges of meaning. This can be confirmed by simply looking up the verb root spr in a lexicon.
The image above shows the entry for the verb root spr in Gesenius’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. Notice that the occurrence of the root spr in Genesis 15:5 is listed under the Qal section, with the meaning “to number”. The meaning “to narrate; to recount” is listed under the Piel section. Therefore, according to the original Hebrew text of Genesis 15:5, God could not have been telling Abraham to “tell the story of” the stars.
When did God preach the Gospel to Abraham?
Teachers of the “gospel in the stars” theory sometimes point to Galatians 3:6–9 to show that God preached the Gospel to Abraham:
Galatians 3:6–9 ESV just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
According to the Apostle Paul, God preached the Gospel to Abram by telling him, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” These words come from Genesis 12:1–3, and were spoken by God to Abram “while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran.” (Acts 7:2–3) In other words, God had already preached the Gospel to Abram long before the events narrated in Genesis 15.
Further reading
I have only dealt with the Gospel-in-the-stars theory from a linguistic standpoint, looking at the original Hebrew text of Genesis 15:5. For more in-depth refutations of this theory, check out the following articles: