Your Horoscope for Today

Let me cut to the chase: Horoscopes are utterly stupid.

My favorite horoscope joke/cartoon is the one where every space is filled in with the same sentence, over and over and over: “The relative position of stars and planets on the date of your birth has no actual bearing on the circumstances or decisions of your life.”

I don’t believe in blind luck or impersonal Fate. I believe in a personal, righteous, sovereign Creator-God who brings about all circumstances of human existence to accomplish His purposes and result in His greater glory. Why do I believe this? Because that’s. what. the. Bible. says.

This is why it makes me bonkers when I see Christians posting about and talking about horoscopes on social media. It isn’t harmless fun, gang; it’s error and confusion, and you’re just sowing it into your life. UGH. Anyway.

And yet, today, I fell into the error of horoscope-thinking myself. How, you ask? I was on the bus-ride into work, and I pulled out my Bible because, honestly, that’s the only time of day when I stay still long enough to concentrate on anything, including Scripture. I had just finished reading Galatians and wasn’t sure where to go next. (Not following a plan might be my first mistake.) So I flipped open to the “Proverb of the day.”

The first several verses of Proverbs 18 deal with sins of the tongue and how foolish speech can bring all sorts of trouble. I thought to myself, “Hmm, guess I need to watch my mouth today.” I even imagined possible scenarios that may arise today, and how this text was, in a sense, predicting what was going happen.

And right then, I had the thought: “Stop using the Word of God as a horoscope, Dave.”

(Now, I specifically didn’t say that “the Holy Spirit” said that or that I “received a word from the Lord.” I am not a prophet or an Apostle, so I don’t think it works like that. If I were looking for a “word from the Spirit,” it turns out that I already had everything I needed for life and godliness–I was holding it in my hands, bound in brown leather. What more likely happened is that my mind recalled my own words from a past Sunday School lesson. That’s the blessing and curse of the Bible teacher–you’re responsible for living up to what you teach. In any case, the thought was clear in my mind.)

We do that, don’t we, Christian? We still believe that the Bible is God’s Word, inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness. But we forget that the benefit of God’s Word is not simply a “horoscope of the day” approach, in which we pull a random text out of its context and try to twist and turn it until it matches up to our circumstances, like it’s a puzzle piece or a bad preacher analogy. The benefit of taking in God’s Word every day is that it saturates our thinking and directs our steps, so that obedience to the precepts and commands of God becomes more natural to our redeemed minds and hearts. (That’s called “sanctification,” for you folks keeping score at home.)

But, hey, do still you want your horoscope for today? Here you go–I’ve got just the thing for you:

Today, you will sin against the holy and righteous God who made you, by disobeying His commands and not giving Him the honor and glory He deserves. That sin results in wrath, condemnation, and death–either to you, if you stand on your own “works” before God, or to Christ, who stood in the place of sinners and absorbed the curse and condemnation and wrath that sin deserves. If you have repented of sin and believed on Jesus the Son of God, because of Christ’s work you now stand acceptable before the Judge of all the Earth, legally declared “Not-Guilty,” clothed in the righteousness of the sinless Savior, and set to share in the inheritance of the Son. And because of this glorious truth, today you should seek to please the God who rescued you from eternal darkness, by obeying His commands with a thankful heart, through the power of the Holy Spirit residing in you as a guarantee of the inheritance to come.

Hope that helps you figure out what to do today.