I recently watched the Star of Bethlehem, and was staggered at what it proposed.

Christ’s conception, birth, and death were marked by significant celestial ‘signs’.  Not supernovae, not comets – but intuitive astronomical events that held significance to the Ancients that should by their sheer collective improbability – attest to us today the believability/historicity of Christ and of a God in control.

Here’s a major ramification for me personally;  I confess as an ignorant mere mortal, that I wondered how ‘powerful’ God really was.  The attestation to his omnipotence within the Testaments I had potentially written off as just omnipotence with respect to the affairs of men & of this world.  After all – he did ‘rest’ on that seventh day.  Surely flinging those stars into space must have taken something out of Him…  But now to see that those stars are aligned such that from the beginning of the earth & heavens, the birth of Christ was an event that was being counted down to by a incomprehensibly large celestial clock…

Ok – you could argue that God doesn’t need to be powerful to have those stars aligned.  For example it’s not outside of today’s processing power to calculate forward and find some extremely rare astronomical event.  Perhaps made easier if you’re responsible for designating the King Star’(Regulus), the other King Star (Jupiter), and the Mother Star (Venus), and a few pertinent constellation names…  That would make it easier!  You could set up your own prophetic signs today too somewhere down the temporal track.  But setting up celestial signs is one thing – having something significant occur at the same time is something else!

Also consider that that those celestial sign’s weren’t all that pointed to the Christ.  There were old testament prophecies containing specifics about his earthly arrival, and departure.  So while you might be able to write off the heavenly signs as perhaps ‘inevitable’  (because the stars had been in deterministic motion for billions of years perhaps), the fact that someone at that precise time who has had such a significant impact on history certainly wasn’t.  That they would point to him, his birth and his death so precisely certainly wasn’t.  And the fact that specific scripture was written about this same person hundreds of years before his birth puts it in a box and wraps it all up in a neat bow – And that box is screaming out ‘HERE IS GOD!’

Upshots

• God planned to the hour exactly when Christ would enter the world and when he would depart.
• God had this plan when he named and distributed the stars (I’ll use Job as justification here)
• Christ wasn’t Plan B

Technical Details

I used the stellarium application to ‘roll back the stars’ to 3 & 2 B.C. (Note that it doesn’t allow for the fact that there is no zero year – so you have to increment by 1 (towards zero) for B.C. years)

And I could replicate the triple conjunction of Regulus & Jupiter in September and then the conjunction of Venus & Jupiter about the 17th of June (9 months later).  I’ll also more concisely confirm the timing of the eclipse at Christ’s death soon.