Casting Shadows

Now that we've seen how darkness is merely a corruption of the light and how evil is just a corruption of good, there's just one more thing we need to understand about how all this works. And that is this:

It's all positional.

We know this from our dancing with our own shadows. The position and proximity of the light dramatically changes how the shadow is played. A light that comes from the side casts a longer shadow, while a light that is directly overhead produces nearly no shadow at all. A light that is closer (and therefore brighter) produces a darker shadow whereas a dimmer light or one that is further away produces a lighter darkness.

The same is true for goodness and evil. If goodness draws near to you as a friend, side-by-side, it casts what seems like a longer (or broader) evil in front of you. If goodness hovers over you like a cloud, the evil is greatly reduced. (In Christian terms, we might call this being wrapped in God's goodness. Or embraced.) If the measure of good you're encountering in your life is immense, the evil seems all the darker, whereas if good is but a mere distant idea, evil, too, may seem somehow muted.

So, too, is it important which way you're standing. Where are you looking? If the light is behind you, it casts your shadow in front of you so that all you can see is your own darkness. If goodness is behind you, evil falls in front of you. It's just how it works. But it works the other way, too. If you turn toward the light, if you turn toward good, the darkness and evil fall behind you. This is how we press on, although most of us can never shake the feeling that we're being followed.

And if you make either light or goodness your companion, walking beside you either to your right or your left, then darkness and evil fall to your other side, much like the proverbial angel and demon on each shoulder or the two roads diverged in the wood. You're set up to make a constant choice between one or the other, seeing both, feeling the presence of both.

This is not to say which is best, or even which is better. Sometimes, you need to have the darkness fall in front of you; you need to look evil in the eye. Sometimes, it's better off behind you so that you can move forward. Sometimes, you have to keep darkness on your right; sometimes, you're better armed if it's on your left. Of course, we'd all like to live with our shadows underneath us, but that's just not the way life works. So we have to be realistic about these things and understand that each has its own worthiness.

But we must remember, no matter where darkness falls, no matter where evil appears, it's all positional. It's all relational. It has everything to do with where we're standing juxtaposed to light and goodness. That's all it is.

So if you don't like the darkness you're seeing in your life, move. If you don't like the evil you deal with, move. Its you who makes the shadows dance, not the other way around. So make them dance. Put them in their rightful place; hold them accountable. Hold the shadows accountable to the light. Hold evil accountable to good.

Make darkness dance. 

Good and Evil

Yesterday, we entered into sticky theological territory by discovering that God actually only created light; it was the light that created the darkness, which left God with the work of separating the two. Although this is troubling, the question at hand is not really about light and darkness at all, but about something much more distressing.

Good...and evil.

The most frequent questions people have for God and about God centers around the existence of evil. Why is there evil in the world? Where did evil come from? Is God responsible for evil? Why hasn't God done anything about evil? This is the question that is most pressing to our faith.

And it's why I started with darkness and light. Because good and evil work on fairly the same principle. Just as God created the light and the light created darkness, so God created the good, and the good created the evil. And God has spent every moment since trying to separate the two.

It's not theologically satisfying. It's not a lot of comfort in the face of life's evils. But evil is a theological necessity; it illuminates the good. 

You wouldn't think that, right? We were always taught that it was the light that illuminates the darkness, but how can that possibly be the case if light is the only of those two things that actually exists? That is, you cannot create darkness; it is only a corruption of the light. Without darkness, you cannot know what light even is. If everything were light, it would be simply the way things are, and this light would be nothing at all. The darkness puts the light into perspective for us. It lets us see what "light" really is, by creating a void to show us what light must not be. Light must not be darkness.

The same is true with good and evil. Evil on its own does not actually exist. You cannot create evil; it is only a corruption of the good. (Augustine argued this very idea more than a thousand years ago.) But without evil, you cannot know what good even is. If everything were good, it would simply be the way things are, and you could put no qualitative judgment on it. Good would be nothing at all. Evil puts good into perspective for us. It lets us see what "good" really is, by creating a corruption that shows us what good must not be. Good must not be evil.

Still, the question remains: why doesn't God do anything about evil? Why doesn't God simply overcome evil with good? 

He can't. 

Actually, nobody can. Despite what we think, good cannot overcome evil because evil itself exists only as a corruption of the good, so the more good you put into something, the more opportunity for evil you create. The more light you pour into a forest, the darker the shadows. That's just how it works. For God to overcome evil, He would have to use something other than good. He would have to use power. Or authority. Or some other force. But there's one significant problem with this:

If God overcomes evil by power or authority or some other force, He fails to show us how good He is. If God overcomes evil, we can never possibly know His goodness. 

That's why this is such sticky theology. It's not that God is responsible for evil or that He's idle about the whole idea. No. Evil exists by natural law only because good exists, and that good, like light, is a gift of God. It's a reflection of Himself that He's endowed to Creation itself. The same way that we say God is light and He has created such a thing as light, we say also that God is good, and He has created such a thing as good. Necessarily, so that we could know that good at all, it is susceptible to corruption - evil - but evil never changes the good.

Just as shadows never change the light.

There are no easy answers here, which is why these questions continue to plague us. But there is one more thing (at least) that we can learn from this reflection on light and darkness, good and evil, that may put some perspective (quite literally) on the whole thing. That idea, tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

Light and Darkness

There's something interesting, and confusing, in the beginning of the Creation dialogue that we must pay attention to, even if we can never fully understand. And it's this:

God only created the light.

In the earliest verses in Genesis, God says simply, Let there be light, and there is light, but then, it says, God separated the light from the darkness. But God never created the darkness, so where did the darkness come from?

This is, admittedly, some complicated theology. It is scientific reality that darkness does not exist in and of itself; it only exists in contrast to the light. You must have light to create darkness. A tree does not create a shadow all by itself; it creates a shadow by blocking a part of the light. Now, you might be saying that this cannot be entirely true, for the night is entirely darkness and in it, there is no light, but remember that the night is the earth's rotation away from the sun, the light, and so it is only by turning away from this light that we create darkness. 

So the question becomes (at least, the first question becomes): did God anticipate darkness? When He created the light, did He know that the light would form its own creation - darkness? And how, exactly, did all this work?

God created the light, we are told, and then separated the light from the darkness. Did darkness arise, then, as some imperfection in the light? Was light "good" only once it was separated from the darkness or was light "good" in its very being, even as it created the darkness? These are not easy questions, but they have incredible consequences (we'll get to that). 

If we want to take this a step further up into the theological mists, we could ask the higher question: We are told repeatedly that God is light; His very essence is light. This means that before even the creation of light, while the universe was still formless and void, God was light. If God is light, is there darkness? Does the light of God cast a shadow over the formless and void or is form and fullness necessary for creating the shadow? 

On one hand, we could say that if God as light casts a shadow before there is anything at all, then yes, God was prepared to handle the darkness. He knew what was coming when He formed light, for He knew light intimately already and knew the way it caused the darkness to dance. Creation, then, was in a sense His orchestration of this dance as He separated the darkness from the light.

On the other hand, if God as light casts a shadow before there is anything at all, we must say that darkness is heavily intertwined with the light in an inseparable way. Although physics would tell us this, in this pre-physical world, this has broader, more difficult implications: it means that God's very nature, His very brilliant, lighted nature, is in some manner responsible for the darkness. That's precisely the theological pill most of us are not prepared to swallow. How can God's light be reassuring if it is also the shadow-caster? How can we take comfort in God's light if we know that it is only from His light that darkness comes? 

I suppose the easy answer is to say that before the physical creation, there was no such thing as physics. There was no natural order or natural law to guide such things as darkness and light, since the natural order is the outpouring of God's wisdom into creation. And therefore, since God exists outside of the natural order (He is not a created being), He exists also outside the natural law that would govern such a thing and therefore, in a formless and void universe, light can possibly exist without darkness, even if our finite minds cannot possibly understand how. 

See, it's messy, all of this theology, even from so few simple words as Then God said, 'Let there be light.' Because there was, indeed, light, but there was also darkness. 

Maybe it doesn't seem like much, darkness and light. Maybe we've become so accustomed to the ideas that they no longer bother us. And maybe that's okay. But how about this one:

God is not only light. He is also...good. And His creation is good. And where there is good, there is also evil. More on that tomorrow. 

The Very Breath of God

We like to poetically say that God spoke this world into existence, that the entire act of Creation took nothing more than the mere Word of God. Except, yes...and no. It may be true that the act of creating takes nothing more than the Word of God, but that's not how it played out. 

Not when it comes to you.

Maybe God spoke and created the light. Maybe God spoke and separated the light from the darkness. Maybe God spoke and thus came the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, the oceans and the lands, the birds and the beasts. Maybe. I wasn't there.

But then God spoke and said, Let us make man..., and then God stooped down, drew together the dirt in His hands, and began to form a man. Not by His Word, but by His work. It's the one thing we know for sure that God formed by His own hand, rather than by His mere authority. It's the one thing we know for sure in all of Creation has God's very touch on it. 

It's why, by the way, the image of the potter and the clay is so prominent. This is how we were formed. 

But that's not all there is to us.

No, for we are told that after God had formed man in His image, after God had completed the work of His hands, likely before He had even washed the last bits of dirt and clay off His masterful hands, God bent down and breathed His very breath into man's nostrils and bestowed on this man the gift of life. 

Life...the same life that in five days prior was spoken by a Word was now shared by a breath. A breath that, for five days prior, had given itself only in Word now gave itself fully in live.

It's amazing.

There are just not words to capture what the Word could have done but chose not to do, the one moment in all Creation when God chose more than merely to speak; He chose to breathe. To breathe life into our very being.

It's a moment we relive over and over again. When a woman gives birth to a child, she does not celebrate when the doctor declares, It's a boy or it's a girl. No, she waits until she hears that first primal cry, that first breath. That's the moment right there. That's it. This very breath...this very breath of God. 

Maybe it's poetic to talk about how God spoke this world into existence, but never forget that you are more than the Word of His mouth; you are the work of His hands. And more than that, you are the very breath of God. 

Darkness and Light

A few times this week, I've wondered out loud what it means to be created in the image of God. But perhaps another worthwhile question is what it means to be created at all. To begin to answer this, we look not to the creation of man, but to the creation in general - to darkness and light, earth and heaven, water and land.

There's been much debate over the Genesis account of Creation. What does the Bible mean when it says "six days"? Are we talking here about six literal days, a Sunday through Friday sort of motif, or are we talking about six ages or periods of Creation, in the metaphorical use of the word "day"? As I pondered this question recently with some friends and colleagues in ministry, I wondered what the latter interpretation suggests about the power of God. If we are to believe that God created the entire universe out of a Word, that He spoke and things came to be, then how are we supposed to account for a creation that takes six ages to complete? Of course, the more I've thought about it, how could it take even six whole days? If God speaks and separates the darkness from the light, how does that take even one whole day? I mean, just how long does it really take to separate darkness from light if you're the omnipotent God of all Creation?

That...is the question.

But the more I've thought about it, the more it seems to make sense that this Creation could take a whole day, or even an age. God spoke, and the light and the darkness began to separate, the earth and the heaven started to divide, water and land worked their way toward their mutual corners. But movement takes some time. And so does stillness. 

It takes some time for darkness to work its way wholly out of the light. Light, of course, cannot work its way out of darkness; darkness never produces light. So it's darkness's responsibility to move at the command of God. (Isn't that cool, by the way?) God speaks, and darkness starts to move, but it takes some time to get to where it's going. And once it gets there, it takes some time to settle in. Yes, this is the God who calmed the wind and the waves with a word, but He's no taskmaster at Creation; He's an artist. 

There has to be time for the paint to dry. 

There has to be time for darkness to settle into its place, for light to spread over the void created by darkness leaving. There has to be time for the earth to solidify into its form. The artist never forms the clay without firing it, never shapes the form without letting it set. The earth may have come together at God's command, but it takes some time for the pieces to stick. The water, receding from the land and finding its rest in the oceans, is still, we might argue, settling. The waves are evidence enough of that. 

It's like dropping a marble down the side of the bowl - it rolls around and up and down for awhile until it finally comes to settle in the bottom, but put another marble in, and they're likely to strike and stir up both. I think this early Creation was probably something like that. Darkness started to settle, only to have more darkness push in and stir it all up. The earth began to form only to have more earth come to cling to it. The waters receded, but as more and more water dripped into the oceans, it all got stirred up again and formed the waves. Eventually, yes, things will settle where they are, but it takes some time. 

Maybe even a whole day. Or perhaps an entire age.

It's all theory, of course, since nobody but God knows precisely how Creation works. But it's hard for me to embrace the idea that God authoritatively picked every little fleck of darkness out of the light by His mere Word. He could, but I don't think that's His style. It's hard for me to accept that God grabbed every piece of earth and compacted this ball of matter in His hands until it couldn't come apart. Again, He could, but I don't think that's His style. It's hard for me to imagine God pushing all the water around until it fell into the oceans He prepared for it. It's just not how God works. 

When we say that God created the world, we often say, too, that He set this world into motion. And that's what I think Creation must have been like. God spoke, and the darkness started to move. He spoke, and the heavens and earth started to move. He spoke, and the land and the sea started to move. And when you start to move, it takes awhile to settle back down again. It takes some time to settle into your place. It takes some time to discover and become who God has declared you to be - to become darkness, to become light; to become heavens, to become earth; to become waters, to become land. It takes some time to stop rolling around like marbles in a bowl. 

And I think it's by the grace of God that we're all given that time. 

That's why I don't worry too much about six days in Genesis, about how long Creation really took. How long does it take to separate darkness from light? I don't know. But I know that at a Word, darkness began to move and by grace, God gave the darkness as much time as it needed to get there.