For thousands of years, people of have gazed into the night sky and drawn pictures, a sort of celestial connect-the-dots. These drawings, or constellations, constitute the twelve signs of the zodiac. Ancient cultures assigned names, characters and colorful stories to these constellations. But one interpretation of the zodiac holds that each sign actually may tell a piece of the story of Christ. Could the twelve signs of the zodiac be a stellar fifth gospel?

Take, for instance, the constellation Virgo. In Latin, Greek, and Arabic, Virgo means “virgin.”  It contains 110 stars and shows a woman holding a sheaf of wheat in her left hand and a branch in her right hand (see inset).

This may be a reference to the Biblical “seed of the woman,” that is, the child who would be born of a virgin. Isaiah 7:14 says, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” The wheat represents seed.  Scripture portrays Christ as the seed of a woman in Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: it shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”

Scripture also portrays Christ as a branch in Jeremiah 23:5, “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up to David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land.” These prophecies present a picture of the coming messiah, born of the lineage of David.

This interpretation is further confirmed by the fact that the brightest star in Virgo’s left hand is called Spica, which means “seed,” and that one star in her right hand is called Subilon, which means “branch.”

The three minor signs in the constellation Virgo are Coma, Centaurus, and Bootes (see inset). Coma consists of 43 stars and depicts a woman holding a child in her arms (according to the ancient zodiac) which may symbolize the Virgin Mary and child. Coma also means “Desired One,” another reference to Christ as told in Haggai 2:7, “I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory.” We are also told in ancient tradition that the star of Bethlehem was in the constellation Coma.

Centaurus, a 35-star constellation, refers to the centaur, a mythical creature that was part horse and part man. The centaur refers to a creature with dual natures, symbolic of the dual nature of Christ who is both the Son of God and the Son of Man. The Hebrew name for this constellation is Bezeh meaning, “the Despised One”—the opposite of Coma. Scripture also portrays Christ as the Despised One in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

Bootes portrays a man holding a spear in one hand and a sickle of over his head in the other. Bootes means “The Coming One.” Scripture also portrays Christ as the coming one with a sickle in Revelation 14:14-15, “I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one ‘like a son of man’ with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’”

Did God plant His story into the stars of the sky?  Psalm 147:4 says, “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.”  Look for this section in our next issue of Seed where we will discuss the zodiac sign Libra.

(Note: The zodiac is not the same as astrology. The signs of the zodiac simply refer to the twelve constellations, while astrology is the study of how the sun, moon, planets, and stars are supposedly related to life and events on earth. The Bible condemns astrology.)

Source:  “The Real Meaning of the Zodiac” by James Kennedy