A few years ago, I was having dinner with a close friend who was going through a pretty dark time spiritually. He was battling doubt. He hadn’t abandoned his faith, but he felt a pull. Inwardly, he was wrestling with conflicting truth claims. Outwardly, he was wrestling with the deep brokenness and suffering in the world that had suddenly dawned on his family.
My friend and I are a lot alike: we both take life very seriously and process information, observations and experiences through a similar inner reality detector monitored by a skeptical inner inspector. We both have a penchant for the melancholic, and being amateur musicians, we are drawn to composers who reflect and express our complicated perceptions of reality.
So, as he described his own struggles, he quoted a songwriter who had once been a Christian but had since lost his faith. The lyrics were a raw and honest portrayal of earthly life as the songwriter saw it today, like Ecclesiastes, but without any hope that a God exists to provide ultimate justice or salvation. My friend admitted that the lyrics were dark, but at the time they seemed a more accurate depiction of reality than the gospel songs we sang together in church.
He wanted to know my thoughts because he knew I had wrestled with similar questions many years ago during a spiritually dark time. The first thing that came to mind was the title phrase of an old Switchfoot song, “Shadows prove the sun.” Those five words began a fruitful discussion about the nature of spiritual light and darkness.
What is light and darkness?
Imagine you and I are sitting in a booth in a restaurant, and I ask you the following questions: If you can, pause for a moment after each question and try to answer it before reading on.
In the physical world, Light — The sun, a fire, the light coming from a light bulb?
If you tried to answer, I think you would have come up with at least one reasonably accurate explanation of what light is, even if it was more difficult than you expected.
if you darkness Try explaining what light is in your previous answer without mentioning anything. darkness.
If you tried, I suspect the answer would have been essentially the same, after you probably found it a little harder.
Well, explain to me darkness Without mentioning it at all LightBut it’s not enough to say “darkness is dark”: we must explain what darkness is. teeth Without contrasting it with light.
Can you? Can you meaningfully define what darkness is without ever mentioning or inferring light? If you can, please share your definition with me, because I don’t think it’s possible. Here’s why:
Why do we have eyes?
The light we experience in this world is electromagnetic radiation. In other words, light is actually thingBut darkness is the absence of light. In other words, darkness is thingDarkness is the absence of things. To try to explain darkness without referring to light is there is nothing Without reference thing. there is nothing is the negation of thing (there is nothing). thingterm there is nothing It makes no sense at all. And the same thing happens. darkness; it is the negation of LightWithout it Lightterm darkness It will become completely meaningless.
We have eyes because light exists. If we lived in a universe where light did not exist, we would not have eyes. And in our world, millions of people whose eyesight is impaired for one reason or another can survive and thrive, but only with the help of others who can see.
What is true about eyes is also true for all our physical faculties of perception: the reason we, as humans, have eyes is because the reality in which we live requires them.
Now, if we get too caught up in our own thoughts and philosophize about what is truly real, we can slip into a skeptical solipsism, doubting almost everything like Descartes did, and end up in a very dark place, because reality is far more complex and multidimensional than our individual powers of reasoning alone can ever perceive. And one of the ways our physical senses keep us grounded is that the very existence of our perceptual faculties attests to the nature of physical reality. We have eyes because light exists.
Why do we have spiritual eyes?
All of this leads me to the lyrics of the Switchfoot song, “The shadows prove the sun’s brightness.” In addition to our physical perceptions, we also have spiritual perceptions. And we have these spiritual perceptions for the same reason we have physical perceptions: because the reality we live in requires it. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have it.
Why do we have spiritual darkness? darkAnd when we perceive reality or our own existence as dark and foreboding, why do we describe it as dark, why do we feel a sense of foreboding? Why does it make us feel depressed, anxious, and scared? It is because, even though our rational faculties alone cannot comprehend everything, our spiritual perception, or what Paul calls “the eyes of God,” [our] in our hearts” (Ephesians 1:18)—it tells us that spiritual light is present.
Darkness is not a thing; it is the absence of a thing. We know what darkness is because we know what light is. On the other hand, light does not depend on the existence of darkness. That is why the apostle John said, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it” (John 1:5). Something can block the light of the sun, creating a shadow that darkens the surroundings, but that obstruction cannot extinguish (overcome) the sun.
What the Shadows Prove
As I told my friend that evening, this reality does not answer all the difficult questions or eliminate all doubts, nor is it even particularly Christian as an apologetic, but it does point to the nature of ultimate reality and I believe it is valuable to those who walk in darkness.
We have eyes because we have the sun. So why do we have spiritual “eyes” that crave spiritual light? How do we distinguish between the shadows when we walk through the valley of the shadow? How can we distinguish between day and night when “Surely darkness shall cover me, and the light shall be night round about me” (Psalm 139:11)?
I believe it is because the experience of spiritual darkness is itself evidence of the existence of spiritual light. The shadow itself is evidence of the brightness of the sun. And if that is true, then if we seek the sun rather than the shadow and all the questions it raises, what we will find is the light of the world, the light of life (John 8:12).
This has helped me through a dark time, it has helped a friend through a dark time, and maybe it will bring some much needed light into your life or the life of a loved one.
