A LIGHT IN THE SHADOWS

Job 12:22 “He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light.”

When I was a little boy, in grade school I remember taking a field trip to the Olentangy Indian Caverns. They are a set of caves in Central Ohio. It was a fun trip, but also a little frightening for a nine year old boy. The one thing that seems to be held in common by all cave tour guides is that at some point during the tour they turn the lights out and allow the group to experience absolute darkness for a few seconds.

Darkness is something that is almost foreign in today’s world. We live in a world where street lamps light up the night sky, even in a small town. Even when we lived in the country we had a light that would illuminate our yard. And when the power goes out, almost every household has its extra flashlights lying around somewhere… in the junk drawer, or whatever you might call it. So it’s hard for us to imagine what it might have been like even 2 or 3 hundred years ago, let alone 2000 years ago.

But the Bible talks a lot about light, and how it drives away darkness. In the very first book of the Bible we read that creation began with darkness covering the face of the deep, and it was God’s creative word that brought light into the darkness. In John’s Gospel he wrote that through the word all things were made and “In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not understand it.” Of course John was using that metaphor to describe sin and salvation, but our scripture today also talks about the contrast to darkness that is brought by God himself.

You see, we all have an opportunity to move from darkness to light. Moving from darkness to light is not about trying our best. We are light because we are in Christ, or we are darkness because we are still in our sins. It’s pretty cut and dried. The light of Christ in our lives transforms us, it drives the darkness away, and it’s not only obvious in the way we live our lives, it also transforms our minds so that we have sort of an inherent knowledge of what it means to please God. Paul wrote in Romans 12 that we ought to renew our mind in order to know what the will of God is. So this light that transforms us is the light which proves us or tests us… it exposes the flaws and weak points, and lets us know what we need to work on, and what we’ve accomplished.

How do we renew our minds? How do we find out what is acceptable to the Lord? What does God use as His proving grounds? His word. It was God’s word that brought light in the beginning, it was God’s word made flesh, His only son Jesus Christ that brought light to us, and we are light only in the Lord. It is God’s word which continues to transform us by the renewing of our minds. We are to test and prove what is right and acceptable to God by the word, not some heart felt emotion, not by some warm fuzzies, its God’s word. It’s this light that drives the darkness away. We ought to apply this word to our life so that the light of God brings everything to light.

We are light, but only in the Lord. If we are light, we should act as light, bringing goodness, righteousness, and truth and driving out the darkness.