We Shall Shine as the Stars
By G. B. Thompson
“And they that be teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever.” Dan. 12: 3, margin. What an encouraging promise is this to those who engage in the labor of saving souls! The mightiest achievements of man, with all human greatness are ephemeral, soon passing into oblivion. The crown is not enduring. But here is something which will last through eternal ages, and it lies within the grasp of all. Behold the stars! Kingdoms have arisen and passed forever from the earth, known only in the chronicles of the historian. But the stars have not changed. These burning gems which blaze in heaven’s dome are the same that Adam gazed upon in his Eden home. From the plains of Shinar, in all climes and in all countries, men have looked upon the same unchanging blazonry of the Builder of worlds. The Persians in ages past burned incense to the same heavenly family on the mountain tops. The psalmist gazed on the same shining worlds from the heights of Bethlehem. The same star guards the place of the mysterious north. Arcturus and his sons are still marching through the heavens as in the days when the Lord conversed with Job from the whirlwind. Orion and Pleiades remain unchanged among the ethereal host. There they stand, fixed and eternal, many of them millions of times larger than this atom of a world, separated in the silent and mysterious depths of space by incomprehensible distances. Time has marked the grandeur of earth with the odor of decay, and changed again and again its social and political events. But the stars are ever the same, marshaled in the fields of space as in the days of eternity. And it is to these that the Lord directs us to look as a symbol of the enduring reward of the faithful pilgrims bivouacked on the battlefield. He calls us away from the fading laurels of earth to the enduring monuments in the sky, made by the hand of the Infinite, and says that we shall shine like these. The humble, God-fearing missionary of the cross may make a failure as the world estimates profit and loss. But not so in the Lord’s estimation. We may sacrifice the comforts of home, for the love of souls, enduring poverty, ridicule, loss of reputation; but it will pay. When the fires of the last great day are consuming the earth, with all the glory of human achievements, when Lucifer and the fallen angels, with all the finally incorrigible, sink forever into the realms of the second death, the righteous will be saved to shine as the stars forever and ever. Yes, it will be forever. No pen can describe their brightness and their glory. “The wonderful things I there saw, I cannot describe. O that I could talk in the language of Canaan! then could I tell a little of the glory of the better world.” — “Early Writings,” page 15. Let us, like Abraham, lift up our eyes and view the stars in infinite space, and do the work of the Master faithfully, remembering that “they that turn many to righteousness” shall shine as the stars through eternal ages.