07/09/2025
THE MOON HAS DIED… OR HAS IT? LESSONS FROM THE SHADOWS AND SCRIPTURE
By Rev. Isaac Lokai Kamais
7th September 2025
Among the Turkana people, when a lunar eclipse occurs—as it has today, the 7th of September 2025 across East Africa—it awakens song, sound, and ritual. Children and women stream out of their huts, raising voices to the night sky:
“Iyee Yeooyie! Akuj Akapolon kiteyarai Nyakuj a, Ng’akon kipi kimasi…”
The earth trembles with rhythm as drums, gongs, and empty jerricans echo through the plains. Even now, the atmosphere in Baragoi, Samburu North, is alive with these reverberations, as though the heavens themselves were shaking.
I remember as a child being caught up in the same frenzy. We would run barefoot into the open fields, our little hands clutching sticks to strike against tins, our throats hoarse with chanting. The elders would urge us on, saying that the moon was dying, and unless we sang and drummed with all our might, the heavens would collapse upon us. Fear and wonder mingled in my heart. I believed that our voices, raised in urgency, could rescue the moon from death.
But now, having reached my cogito ergo sum—my awakening of faith and reason—I see clearly. The Bible shines its light on such practices. These songs to the moon are but misplaced devotions, exercises in futility, for Scripture warns:
“Beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars… you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them.” (Deuteronomy 4:19)
Job confessed that even the thought of being enticed by the splendor of the moon would be “an iniquity to be punished by the judges, for I would have been false to God above.” (Job 31:26–28)
The Apostle Paul writes with piercing clarity: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:25)
The moon eclipse, then, is not the death of the moon. It is only a shadow cast in God’s perfect order, a momentary dimming in the great dance of creation. To sing to it, to fear it, to offer it honour, is to mistake the created for the Creator. God, who once overlooked such ignorance, now calls all people everywhere to turn and worship Him alone (Acts 17:30).
For the truth is this: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.” (Psalm 19:1) They declare His glory—not their own.
The moon does not die. The stars do not reign. The sun does not save. Only God is eternal, and only He deserves our praise.
As I listen tonight to the echoes from Baragoi, I cannot help but think: how often humanity confuses the creation for the Creator. Yet the lesson is plain—when we worship the created, we miss the Creator; but when we worship the Creator, creation itself sings in harmony.
