A World of Shadows

But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” – Ephesians 5:13-14

Everything that becomes visible is light.  I know I have commented on these two verses before, and the idea fascinates me.  It often seems we live in a world of shadows.  We have probably all been out in the woods before dawn or as the sun goes down and seen things that ought not be there.  Stumps and broken snags become ogres and trolls.  Apparitions arise from a clump of weeds shifting and moving in the wind.

The world system – that which is not the kingdom of God, is a shadowy place as well.  Lies shade the lifeless and impotent, causing frightful creatures to dance before our eyes.  I wonder if God didn’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah by suddenly pulling back the cloak of darkness, pretense, bluster, and self-deception behind which the inhabitants lived.  They were already pillars of salt.  The light destroyed their illusion of life.

I know that’s more or less what happened to me.  I wasn’t a bad man who became good.  I was a dead man who came to life.  I was a pillar of salt hoping it didn’t rain.  I knew in my heart what I was, but, like a lot of people, I could hide it from others, though mostly from myself, most of the time. 

It’s a funny thing about Jesus as you read the Gospel accounts.  The prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the rejected dregs of society ran to Him and followed after Him.  The rich young ruler came to the Lord, thinking that he would be accepted, applauded, and approved for his virtuous activities then went away saddened; the covetousness he had hidden from himself was made plain in the light of Christ.  Religious and political leaders, the wealthy and the well-educated, in many cases, erected against Jesus a barrier of arguments, perceived offenses, and violations of law or protocol to keep out that light. 

There are cases where our faith is going to legitimately and unavoidably cause contention.  We ought to be walking in the Light with the Light of Christ shining through us.  When we go into a dark place or around fallen or backslidden people, sometimes we are going to get the sense of rats scurrying for cover to avoid exposure.  But we, too, are a long way from perfect, and we should be careful that we’re not deliberately or pointedly contentious and using Christianity as an excuse.  I think far more people are drawn to saints than are offended by them.  Those sleeping often want to wake.    

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.      

Jars

Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! – Isaiah 64:1-2

I am not happy with the path taken by America in the last hundred years, especially, perhaps the last thirty or so.  My opinion is that our political choices are a function of the state of our hearts, that the decline in our culture, our decadence, our degeneracy arise from a lack of personal righteousness, not only in the hearts of corrupt politicians and corporate CEOs but in the hearts of Americans as a whole. 

God is good, and He will give us what we want.  Unfortunately we have chosen to follow after wickedness and sow the seeds of destruction.  We will reap the same.  One might start to think that the fields are, indeed, these days, white unto harvest.  I tell you, though, even now, God will hear us if we cry out to Him.    

Isaiah cried out to the Lord, asking Him to … rend the heavens and come down.  I pray today that the Lord would come down.  I will not presume to tell Him how to do that, but my study of the Bible makes me think that it is unlikely (though not impossible) that He would rip a hole in the blue sky above me.    

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.  And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. (Matthew 27:50-51)

The veil in the temple separated God from man.  Man’s sinful nature, what we call “the flesh” kept him isolated and unable to approach God.  When Christ, having taken on the nature of man in the Incarnation, suffered in our place and died a sacrificial, atoning death, that separation was ended.  Isaiah’s prayer found its ultimate fulfillment, its antitype.  God did come down, rending not the blue sky but the First Adam’s nature and bursting forth in the Last Adam. 

Why is there not revival in the Church today?  Why does it seem that evil triumphs at every turn, that we are ruled by the depraved and the godless?  For one, perhaps, we have not because we ask not.  Instead of praying for God to come down, we ask that we might go up.  Sometimes we pray for our leaders – as we should.  We pray that godly men and women will be elected to public office where they often become as corrupt as those around them, if they were not already.  We hope to escape in the Rapture because we believe in that things are just going to get worse and worse.  Maybe they are.  But that is not our call.  We are here.  And, from the Parable of the Talents, the Lord tells us, “Occupy till I come.”  (Luke 19:13)  Take care of business. 

We need to pray that God will come down.  So, you ask, O, wise guy, if the Lord isn’t going to rip the sky open, how is He going to come down?  I’m glad you asked.  He is going to rend something all right.  Consider this verse: But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. (2 Corinthians 4:7)

The power and presence of God resides in His people, in you and, ostensibly, in me.  He is right here, yet something is hindering Him, holding Him back.  That something must be broken.

Remember Gideon and his Three Hundred:

And he divided the 300 men into three companies and put trumpets into the hands of all of them and empty jars, with torches inside the jars. … So Gideon and the hundred men who were with him came to the outskirts of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch, when they had just set the watch. And they blew the trumpets and smashed the jars that were in their hands. (Judges 7:16-19)

What did Jesus tell us?  We are the salt He uses to preserve the earth.  We are the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16).  He says you don’t light a candle or a lamp and keep it hidden under a basket or in a jar because you can’t see it.

This is what prayer will do.  It will break the jar.  The reason we do not have earth-shaking, nation-transforming revival is because the torch is still in the jar.  If we are concerned about the world, if we are earnest in desiring liberty and freedom for ourselves and our children and grandchildren, if our hearts have been touched and burdened by the unrighteousness we see around us, pray that God will break this jar of clay, these jars of clay and let there be light. 

    

Bearing a Torch

Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. -- Matthew 5:15

Why do we turn on the lights?  Do we light a candle because the candle can’t be self-actualized unless it burns?  A lamp does not burn for itself, but for the one who lights it.  As the Gospel of John opens with its description of Jesus, the Apostle says, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men (John 1:4).”  The light in us is the light of Christ.  God wants to light the world.  We are it.

I am sure some people really are called to stand on a street corner with a bullhorn, hold up “John 3:16” banners at football games, hand out tracts in the mall, and knock on doors.  I’m not.  I have an acquaintance, a lady who does face-painting.  She goes down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, sets up on the street, and paints people’s faces. When someone asks her how much she charges, she replies, “I just want a chance to tell you that Jesus loves you, and, since I’ve done that, the painting is free.”  In a way, I kind of like that. 

Nevertheless, I hate to be “guilted” into anything.  It’s too close to gelded.  Thus that “do unto others” thing precludes me from using guilt to get my way.  I figure most people feel bad enough at least part of the time or in flashes about their lives.  I don’t have the heart to add to it.

My plan comes in part from George MacDonald who said in one of his sermons that “to let our light shine is to be just, honourable, true, courteous, more careful over the claim of our neighbour than our own, as knowing ourselves in danger of overlooking it, and not bound to insist on every claim of our own.”  Live right.  Treat other people well.  Try not to express my irritability. 

I suspect most of us get plenty of opportunities to “witness” for Christ.  People pay more attention than we are apt to think.  We aren’t invisible.  We aren’t on mute.  The Lord knows I’m not.  As my wife says, my voice “carries”, especially when I get agitated. 

We have to remember, too, that it is not our light.  When we read about Gideon, back in Judges 7, we learn that he had his three hundred men put torches into clay jars.  They surrounded the camp of the Midianites, and, all at once, broke the jars so that the torches suddenly blazed out.  Paul says that … we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us … so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh (2 Corinthians 4:7-11).

The light I am supposed to give is not a function of my ability, my own brilliance, or my intellect.  Sometimes it is in my brokenness that the light shines brightest.

The Parable of the Mudhole

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me. -- Micah 7:8

For various reasons, most of which probably should not be discussed in detail, darkness falls on me from time to time.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing (Romans 7:19).  If I have learned anything, it is that when I can’t see where I am going, the best thing to do is stop and wait for the light.  It’s a good thought, but what if the light does not come?  Wait for it. 

I have screwed up just about everything it is possible to screw up, but the worst screw ups all too often result from trying to fix a screw up.  Let’s say that you are trying to put something together, and you drop some essential fastener down a duct.  Not that that would ever happen in real life.  You’re a little peeved as you pull the grate, but the fastener is right there hanging.  Then it falls down into the duct, but it’s still in sight, not yet around the bend.  You reach for it and almost have it, but it slips and rolls away over the event horizon.  You wonder why they didn’t put the ductwork in the attic.  An hour later, the fastener has been joined in the black hole under your floor by a magnet that came loose from the string and some vacuum cleaner attachments.   Meanwhile the original projects remains in disarray, all but forgotten in the angst and frustration.

We had to plow up a ten-acre section of our biggest hay field.  Dad did the plowing one evening while I milked.  The next morning was too good a hunting day to pass up, so he loaded his hounds and told me to hook up the disk and get the field ready to sow.  I might have been thirteen at the time, old enough to be trusted with some things.  The disk was an old heavy drag type.  It may have originally been horse-drawn.  It certainly wasn’t designed for three-point equipment.  We hooked it to a drawbar.  If I remember right, there was a lever that raised the plates a little for transport. 

I got over to the field and started around.  This field has a natural pond in it, and several places near the pond, it is seepy.  I didn’t really think it through too well and just assumed that I was supposed to disk what was plowed.  Right next to the pond, I hit a spot that had no bottom and stuck it. 

OK, I could go do something else and leave the tractor and disk buried.  I knew that would make Dad mad because it would have made me mad:  nothing accomplished and more work to do.  I got off the tractor, walked away and sat down on the broken ground.  The tractor wasn’t buried or high-centered.  It looked like it would come out.  If I could have raised the disk, the whole she-bang looked like it would come out, but I couldn’t do that.  I got down in the mud and disconnected then drove the tractor onto solid ground.  It was a matter of feet.  Then, instead of giving up and going to the house, I walked away and sat down again to think. 

I don’t remember – this was most of a half century ago – if the log chain was on something nearby or if I saw it in a vision.  Anyway, I got the chain, put one end around the hitch on the disk and the other around the drawbar on the tractor.  To my utter amazement, the disk came right out, nothing busted, nothing hurt.  A couple of short ruts and a wallowed spot were the only remaining indications of my struggle.  I kept the chain with me the rest of the day but had no more need for it.

I’ll bet I sat on that tractor ten minutes cussing myself and my stupidity.  I could have sat there all day and never figured a way out.  It was walking away and getting a different perspective that allowed me to see the solution. 

It was my fault that I got stuck there.  When I experience a moral or spiritual failure and fall that, too, is my own fault.   There’s no point in blaming anyone else, but there’s also no point in wasting too much time blaming myself.  If I can somehow rectify the situation, I need to find a way to do that.  Repentance is changing the way we think about something.  We could depict it as getting off the tractor and looking at the place in which we have been mired from a different angle, from the solid ground of God’s viewpoint. 

We can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we can’t get out of a pit by digging the hole deeper.  We have to find an anchor that will hold.  We have to have a purchase on the Rock of reality if we are going to pull our lives out of the muck and the mire. 

Sometimes when we are sitting in the dark, God will shine his light on the key we would never have seen in the broad glare of day.