Darkness and Light

Jul 7 2023 - Eric Buresh

Let me start this post with a question: as human beings, what rights do we have before God? I’m not going to give you an answer, but I’ll give you a hint.   

A word-picture. When my boys were younger, they used to play flashlight tag all the time around our house and neighborhood. The game is simple. Find a dark area of the house or yards, and one kid is “it” with a flashlight. Everyone else scatters into the darkness and hides. The goal of the kid that is “it” is to find or chase down any of the other kids and shine the light on them. When the light illuminates someone enough to call them by name, they are “it” and it is now their turn to search, chase, and shine the light. 

While the analogy is not perfect, the image portrays Jesus (the Light) chasing us down, shining His Light, and calling us out, while we try our very best to scatter and hide. John describes it in two parts. First, Jesus, the Light, chasing us down: “In [Jesus] was life, and the life was the Light of men. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) Darkness cannot overcome light. Darkness, in fact, is not anything in and of itself. It is just the absence of light. That is the state of our heart before Christ – darkness. When “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” shines into a heart, the darkness gives way in that heart. “For it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4:4-5). 

John the second part of the picture, however, by relaying the words of Jesus, “this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” (John 3:19-20) That’s describing every human being. When Christ comes with His Light shining, it is at the very core of our humanity to run for the bushes and hide just like Adam and Eve first did in the garden. I hate cockroaches, but that is the picture that comes to mind. Light comes, cockroaches scurry away. We too hate the Light. His Light is so bright it makes us look entirely insignificant. We want to be our own light. We want to light our own way. We don’t want to be on the Way of another following some other Light. To embrace His light is to acknowledge we have no light of our own. Our pride tells us not to accept this Light. So, we scurry away. That is the condemnation. We love our own darkness. We relish it even though, deep down, we know our darkness is cold and ultimately cruel.   

Yet, here is the crazy thing: despite our disdain for Him, the Light keeps chasing us down. For some of us, we consciously avoided the Light for many years, and now we bask in it. For some of us, the Light shined on us when we were still a child and, as a child, we peacefully yielded to the Light’s beauty and have delighted in the Light as long as we can remember. In both cases, the Light chased us, found us, shined in our hearts, and called us out from darkness. My final question -- related to the first -- is simply why? When we hated the Light and loved our own darkness, why did He keep chasing us? Why did He keep calling out to us? If you’re not sure of the answer, please go ask one of our campus pastors who would delight to answer these questions with you.