It’s difficult to believe but the days are still getting longer and we have almost another month before we hit the longest day of the year. It seems like just yesterday that we were in the middle of winter and the sun was heading down in the late afternoon. But tonight, I was home around dinner time and had to go to the post office around 9 pm this evening. I couldn’t believe that the sun was still up and it was daylight that late in the evening. I think that I have been working so hard lately that I haven’t noticed the change in the seasons as we move toward summer.
It occurred to me that light was one of the first things that God created after the formation of the heavens and the earth in the first several verses of Genesis. It must have been important to God and the idea of “forming” things was fundamental to the reason for the book of Genesis. In fact, the first three days of creation were all about the formation of different parts of the earth as we know it. God even created the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. We call them the Sun and the Moon but God never named them – probably because the Egyptians had more than 3000 gods and one of the most powerful was Ra, the Sun god.
Theologians have debated for centuries why God never assigned names to the sun and the moon. The best that they can come up with is that the lights were so insignificant in relation to the awesome power of God that they weren’t even worth naming in the scheme of things. I’m sure that didn’t go over very big with the Egyptians.
Light is also synonymous with God in the New Testament. In 1 John, one of the epistles of John, and the first book that you learn to translate when you learn Greek, we are told that God is light. We are also told that there is a great difference between being in the light and being in the darkness. We are admonished that we should aspire to be in the light and that the blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is also in the light, will purge us of all sin. This is so important to our eternal security.
Because we can’t be in the light unless we believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our Savior. In summation, light is good and darkness is bad. There are even places in the Scripture that refer to darkness as being in sin – or even in the presence of evil.
The verse for this evening is one of the introductory verses in 1 John. We are told in 1 John 1:5-7, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
My encouragement this evening is that God wants us to walk in the light and not in the darkness where we can lose our way and und up eternally lost. My prayer is that you will follow the true light of the world and that you will always endeavor to seek more light, becoming more Christlike in the process – have a great day in the Lord, grace and peace…