It’s easy for my daily Scripture reading to fall into a monotonous routine, but one day while reading through the book of Jude, a few lines from the book jumped out and grabbed me by the throat.

Jude begins his letter by warning the early church of false teachers and apostates who were creeping in unnoticed. By verses 12 and 13 he reaches the apotheosis of his denunciation of these men.

“These [men] are spots in your love feasts, while they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves. They are clouds without water, carried about by the winds; late autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, pulled up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming up their own shame; wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” Jude 1:12-13 (NKJV)

The line that stuck out to me was the last one: “wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” It evokes a powerful impression of aimlessness, loneliness, and the hopelessness of those who are consigned to infinite darkness.

In ancient times, there were skilled astronomers who watched the night skies. Most stars are fixed and remain at the same position in the sky, but they noticed there were five stars that wandered during the year. These stars would sometimes even move backward for a time before continuing on their journey through the sky. They were called “wandering stars” because of their irregular movement. The Greek word for wanderer is where our word planet came from.

During the millennia before modern navigational aid such as GPS, sailors used the stars to determine their position. Polaris, the North Star, could be used to determine the latitude of the observer by measuring the angle of the North Star above the horizon. If the North Star was 26 degrees above the horizon, then the sailor knew he was 26 degrees north of the Equator. The fixed nature of the stars made them perfect for navigation. They were always at the same position and always rose at a predictable time each day.

Jude develops a bit of a nautical theme in verses 12 and 13. In the first part of verse 12 he mentions that these men are “spots in your love feasts.” The Greek word for spots could also be translated as stains or as hidden reefs. The word stains works well to describe these men, but hidden reefs give a better picture of the danger they pose to the church. In verse 13, Jude mentions “raging waves”, which reminds me of a verse from James: “But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” These apostates are loud and brash, but their noise is revealing how shameful their words and actions are.

Then we return to the wandering stars at the end of verse 13. The wandering stars don’t have the regular movement that made the fixed stars useful for navigation. If sailors chose one of the wandering stars as their guide, it is likely they would not arrive at their destination, or they might even wreck their ship on a reef or shore they didn’t know was there. These men are like wandering stars because if others guide their lives by their words, they will be led astray to crash on the reefs and rocks of apostasy and destruction.

However, there is another aspect of the description of the wandering stars given in Jude that made me wonder if there was more to it than just being a description of the planets. The last line “for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever” doesn’t quite make sense if we are speaking about the planets orbiting the Sun. The planets are way out in the blackness of space, but so are we on Earth, and we wouldn’t say that we are resigned to the blackness of darkness forever.

One of the most active areas of astronomy recently has been the discovery and investigation of exoplanets. Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars outside our solar system. Astronomers used to think that our solar system was unique in having numerous planets, but they have found that most stars have two or more planets orbiting them. Most of the planets they have found so far are more like Jupiter and Saturn in being gas giants, but astronomers have also found many rocky planets similar to Venus, Earth, and Mars.

In the last few years, I learned about another type of planet, a rogue planet. Rogue planets are planets that are not gravitationally bound to a star. Instead of orbiting a star, they are freely floating through the nearly infinite spaces between stars. There are different ideas about why there are rogue planets, but one of the main theories is that they formed along with the rest of a solar system, then they were ejected from their orbit around their parent star. This ejection could have been caused by interacting with the gravity of another planet or star that acted like a sling shot to accelerate them to escape velocity.

Once these planets are ejected from their orbit, they will move farther and farther away from their parent star until it is no brighter than any of the other stars in the galaxy. There is so much empty space in space, that it is likely they will not encounter another star for many thousands of years, if ever. They will truly be wandering the blackness of darkness forever.

Are rogue planets what Jude is talking about in verse 13? Likely not, but the image of planets wandering the cold blackness of the Milky Way for eternity evokes an image that accurately describes those who leave the warmth of God’s presence.