Daily Devo: Tuesday, September 23, 2008

“And God separated the light from the darkness”

Genesis 1:4 (ESV)

The words ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ serve as powerful metaphors in the Bible. ‘Darkness’ often referred to ‘obscurity, gloom’ and was used in the ancient Greek world to describe the darkness that surrounds death. It came to be seen as something that obscures and consumes. The ‘darkness of death’ was a fate from which no one could escape, and no one can ever return. Quite fittingly, in the Old Testament it could be used to refer to God’s judgment. The word ‘light’, on the other hand, was often a metaphor for “happiness, victory, and glory”. In the Bible it is often used to signify God’s presence. Over and over Scripture uses this image to describe our new nature as believers. A true believer, properly understood, is one who has been called “out of darkness into [Christ’s] marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

One of my favorite ancient tales was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In the story, a prisoner was chained in a dark cave with his back to the entrance. As humans and animals passed in front of the cave, the shaft of light penetrating its entrance formed shadows of the reality outside the cave. He mistook the shadows for reality, though in actuality reality was obscured and remained hidden. The book of Job tells us that “there are those who rebel against the light, who are not acquainted with its ways” (24:13). Jesus states that those who are evil hate the light (John 3:20). Darkness only hides and silently destroys, whereas light brings truth and life.

Just like their physical cousins, spiritual light and spiritual darkness are mutually exclusive. When Paul asks “what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Cor 6:14) the answer, clearly, is nothing. For believers, this means that the values we cherish and live by will be diametrically opposed to those of our surrounding culture. Christians, we must remember who we are! The world desperately needs the life-giving light of Christ, and he has placed us as the beaming lanterns of hope in a world obscured in destructive darkness. Each evening we should ask God’s forgiveness for failing to brightly display the light of his glory, but also ask him for the strength to be such a light tomorrow.

JG