The Dawn Line

For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. --1 Thessalonians 5:5

We have all seen those pictures of Earth as some point on the globe moves from looking toward the Sun and plunges into the darkness of the planet’s long shadow.  As long as we are here in this life, like the turning world on which we reside, we, too, will move between light and darkness, joy and sorrow, even hope and despair, for we are creatures ruled in part by the physical laws of the cosmos. 

For our physical bodies, the darkness of night, rest and sleep are as vital as the light of the Sun.  But for our souls, when we have found the Light of life, there is no more darkness.  The light of Christ dispels the shades of sin and past mistakes, and it chases all the shadows from our hearts. 

That line between light and darkness is the real line of demarcation in the affairs of the world.  It is not left or right, communist or capitalist, hawk or dove, but the children of light versus the children of this world and its darkness (Luke 16:8).  Those who are of the darkness practice deceit, but they mainly deceive themselves.  They believe that the murkiness of their twilight world conceals their motives and stratagems, not realizing that God’s vision sees in midnight as at noon. 

It is not my job to remake the world.  I am to be light.  Take a lamp into a dark and unused room.  The light falls on what is there.  It does not make the room orderly or disorderly, clean or dusty, it simply exposes the true situation.  The idea is to use the lamp to enable one to get rid of the grime and set things in their proper order.  Some, though, blame the light for the room’s state and say that it should be put out.  Sometimes they put it out.  Yet the world still turns, and the day will dawn.      

Here Among the Shadows

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. -- John 1:5

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness.  Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.  If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.” – Luke 11:34-36

In a simpler time, someone said that light floods the whole universe and darkness is naught but shadows.  Given the vast distances of interstellar space, there may be places where the visible spectrum of light is weak and fades.  Our sun is on a wing of the Milky Way’s pinwheel.  Closer to the center of the galaxy we would not be able to see through the night for the abundance of neighboring stars. 

Darkness serves as an appropriate symbol for evil.  Evil, like darkness, is derivative and situational.  Good, like light, is transcendent, absolute and universal.  Here on earth, night occurs when we are in the planet’s shadow.  The sun never sets.  The light is never extinguished.  Darkness has not overcome light.  Evil comes to us like the night, a shadow falling upon us as we go our way.   As shade can exist only because the sun is shining, so the darkness in our lives can exist only because God is Good, all the time. 

Our tendency is to say that evil comes upon us, to see it as having an independent and external source, and there are certainly those who seem to embrace evil, acting upon it and propagating it.  For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). 

“This present darkness” – surely this means crime in the streets, corruption, injustice, oppression, tyranny, wars and rumors of wars, natural disasters, disease, famine, and so on and on.  That’s certainly how it manifests.  Should I then become a crusader, prohibitionist, preacher, revolutionary, or vigilante?

 I could start by getting the darkness out of myself, lighting the lamp of my spirit.  It is all too often my own self that casts the long, dark shadow in my own life. 

The trouble with saying something is that so much can’t be said and then there is that which should not be said.  It’s like walking on a ledge, no room on one and too much on the other. 

Evil will not go away because we ignore it or deny it.  It is not just “in our heads”.  It was almost seventy degrees here yesterday and will be over seventy today.  There is still a pile of sleet and snow alongside my driveway and right under my window because it is the north side and shaded most of the day.  There was so much still piled up under the window yesterday that my thermometer was reading a good ten degrees colder than all the “official” temperatures around.  The shadow of my house preserved the ice, and the ice, in turn, suppressed the air temperature above it.  For a while it didn’t occur to me why my thermometer – which is usually about right – was so far off. 

Just because evil is a shadow does not mean it is not real, and that it does not have real, objective, observable effects.  Checking just now, I’m still about four degrees cooler because of the ice.  I have my door open and the storm door screen open.  I’m reading 61 degrees on the inside and 57 outside – over the ice.  The official temperature reported a few miles away is almost 63. 

We can understand evil, find out why it is here.  Come summer, when the rays of the sun strike here more directly, there will be no shadow on this wall.  It faces a little east of north, and the sun rising early heats the bricks like an oven.  Evil is not eternal, not permanent.  It is a temporary condition of the season we find ourselves in.  Sometimes the bad things that befall us are correctives, the shadows falling to show us where we need to change, what we must let go of.  

There are those who say that if we are sufficiently enlightened within, we can banish the shadows of evil entirely.  I would agree that we may be free of the effects of evil in ourselves.  It is possible to dispel the darkness from my own heart, and that I ought to seek to do. 

Return to Sender

God’s love was revealed to us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we must also love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us. – 1 John 4:9-12

Humanity is an ugly mess, and we do well to recognize it. As the old saying goes, you aren’t paranoid if they really are out to get you, so, too, you aren’t being cynical when you question the motives of your fellow man – especially if there is money involved, or he’s a politician. Yet in spite of all our craziness, God, who knows us best, loves us. Knowing we could not come to Him, He came down to us.

We could only hope and work, struggle and sacrifice. We could build temples and altars, give our best, do our best to play by the rules, and repent in sorrow when we failed. We could only hope but never know that we had done enough and been good enough for God as we understood Him to accept us. We only knew that He was sometimes angry with us and punished us for our sins. When the rains did not come or the locusts did, when the crops failed or our enemies succeeded, we knew we had failed to appease the god we served. Is it any wonder that some of us have done horrible, stupid things in the name of some god, from Moloch to Marx, made in our own image? Darkness was the standard state. Light came only in brief, prophetic flashes like bolts in the blackest of storms.

Then came Jesus, and, slowly, we began to understand God as Father, as One who cared for us, wanted the best for us. We saw the Light. At last we could know that we were truly loved and accepted. Now we know the God who loves us so much that He Himself was willing to submit to our death that He might give us His life. He identified with us – not just in a figurative sense. He took on the restrictions of human existence, and, in the end, in some way that is beyond our comprehension, He even took on our sins.

We did not love God first. We did not pursue Him and win Him over. No, like the good shepherd that He is, He came looking for the lost sheep, found us, and carried us back to fold, rejoicing all the way. Now in joy and gratitude we return that love to Him, or we would if we could. We can’t buy God flowers or a cool watch. We can offer Him praise and thanksgiving, and we need to do that – it is the foundation of a good attitude in a sometimes confusing world. But love needs more of an outlet than words.

Love is like electricity. It must have a circuit to be complete. It must have a place to go to be perfected. How is the love of God perfected in us? God says we close the circuit by loving one another. When I love you, the love I have received from the Father flows back to Him.