Utumishi Blog

If you’re a night watchman you long for the dawn.  If you’re worried that the strange clanging in the night is someone trying to break into your house you long for the dawn. If you’ve been worrying all night or fevering all night there’s something about a bright sunrise that lifts you, calms you, puts things back into proportion, injects hope and energy. Without light there is no colour, no clarity –everything is blurry grey or invisibly threatening.  Bathed in light the world bursts into a beautiful spectrum – the disordered shadowland has gone, reality has come.

It’s wonderful to trace themes through the Bible and there are few lovelier than the theme of light.  It’s the first thing God pronounces good.  It burns ceaselessly in the tabernacle.  The prophets catch glimpses of blinding light streaming from the throne of God. In their writings there is a growing longing for the dawn – for the first rays of the sunrise. 

But there’s another theme running through – deep darkness. Darkness so thick it can be felt. The darkness of curse and plague and the shadow of death. The distress and fearful gloom of a land where the Word has been rejected in favour of mediums and spiritists. The darkness where plots are made and traps are laid and violence and terror rule. And, incredibly, we prefer that darkness to light. Where darkness is our cover and the light exposes us then like bugs found under a rock we run to the darkness.  Like a teenager enjoying the warmth of the duvet we fight the light.

So when The Light comes into the darkness, Light of Light, the very radiance of the glory of God, he is not welcome.  The darkness tries to snuff out the light. The light enters the utter darkness. So that he might become the Light of Life. The star returns to heaven. The awesome light that the prophets glimpsed appears again to Saul and John. The light-wrapped Alpha-and-Omega turns out to be the risen-and-exalted Jesus.

As we see Homs we see a world still terribly dark. As we look in our own hearts we find they are still terribly dark. We still wait for the full dawn, the rising of the morning star. We see the Light now only by faith, only through the prism of the Scriptures… until The Day comes, when there is no more night, no lamp or sun because the Lamb of God illuminates the whole of creation.

Come Lord Jesus!