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Since the dawn of human civilization, light and darkness have been the metaphors which depict this core aspect of our human experience. These binaries persist because we can’t seem to get beyond them in our oversimplification of the subject. We remain “in darkness” (without understanding) of darkness. It’s too easy to conflate darkness with evil.

In today’s post I will provide the logic which proves that darkness is God’s loving negation within the created order. This will be hard for the mind trapped in binary frameworks, but do your best.

The problem of human darkness is complicated by the fact that our world has grown bored and apathetic in seeking to understand the dialectic of light and darkness within us. Spiritual discovery has been relegated to the sphere of personal preference for so long that we no longer trust anyone but ourselves to teach us spiritual things, and most of us couldn’t care less about it anyway. “How great is the darkness!“ This series is an attempt to reengage all comers back into the conversation and exploration of our darkness. I don’t want us to just talk “about” darkness, may goal is for us to be with it and be shaped by it.

Last week I showed that darkness is equated to lacking understanding or perception, i.e. “Not being able to see.” Today we journey beyond this in order to apprehend what is behind our “bad eye” or inability to see. The metaphor is that the human eye needs light in order to function. There is no seeing in darkness. and despite it being so dark, we still think we can see. That’s our constant delusion. Darkness is our confusion because none of us possess perfect truth. Thus we all possess some measure of darkness.

We are all delusional. How does that sit with you?

A person struggling with darkness and losing is far better off than those who give no thought of it. Of those who struggle with their own darkness, some just succumb to it, while others may seek a resolution to it, and both options reveal we lack wisdom. Religion continually equates our darkness with evil or immoral behavior. It is true that all evil is darkness, however, not all darkness is evil…these are not coextensive realities. Our tribal beliefs are not nuanced enough, they’ve been dumbed down for too long.

The minority of people who seek illumination will go about it in many different ways. Depending on where we grew up, we will consider the offerings of our mainline religion. If we are Middle Eastern, we’ll enter Judaism or Islam, the West gravitates toward Christianity and the East toward Hinduism or Buddhism. Moderns bypass institutional religion and go after nebulous spirituality, New Age philosophy or some other unaffiliated, illogical, science based spirituality we might find on Oprah. Each promises enlightenment, yet none cure, stop, nor prevent our darkness. Do you know why?

Here are four considerations about those who have tried to reconcile their darkness:

1. If we employ religion to remove darkness, only a few will take the endeavor seriously enough to run the full course of religion unto its end…where we discover that it did not deliver as promised. Religion trains us to double down in our rituals and process and then blames our failures on demons, immorality or disobedience. The religious pretend their darkness is behind them, diminished or overcome by their religion, and avoid or dismiss facts that prove otherwise.
2. A few on this spiritual journey will attain to a place of sobering acceptance which eventually humbles the seeker. When the darkness is not overcome, the Good News or Gospel can finally be seen and believed. Darkness is a necessary precondition to believe the Gospel.
3. The darkness then is the confusion about darkness itself, primarily it’s source. The methods of eradication don’t work, because the conflation of darkness with evil obscures that this darkness comes from God.
4. In our darkness, we essentially ask God, who has given us the darkness, to remove it, which is a prayer against the will of God. This points us to the purpose of darkness (next week).

This confusion results because we do not understand darkness only as a negation. We mistakenly “see” it as a positive, measurable entity. Light is the measurable entity and when no light is measurable, darkness is the term for light being absent. In this way, darkness is not a thing… it’s a no-thing.

Darkness is the will of God to not-be in some things and to be in others. Thus darkness is experienced as God’s distance from us. Darkness is our delusion that God is absent. God’s proximity be it near or far cannot evil.

Darkness is the will of God to love in proximity to the beloved.

“I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity;  I am the Lord, who does all these things.” (Isaiah 45:6-7)

Since God’s omnipresence comprises both positive and negative space, there is a darkness from God, which manifests according to his will to be proximate either as light or as darkness. God can be objectively proximate in the positive sense as light, or by negation, subjectively as darkness. There is no darkness in God, darkness is the negation of one means of proximity. God can and does manifest infinite, immediate proximity by any means of His choosing, be it light, a dark cloud, or any aspect of creation.

“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” (Genesis 1:2)

The Hebrew word “khoshek” (darkness) is the absence of light and is differentiated from “araphel” which refers to “God’s darkness” which shows up dozens of times in scripture:

“The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.” (Exodus 20:21)

“Then Solomon said, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.” (1 Kings 8:12, 2 Chronicles 6:1)

“He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water.” (Psalms 18:11)

“Clouds and thick darkness are all around him” (Psalms 97:2)

“…even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” (Psalms 139:12)

“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” (Lamentations 3:1-3)

“He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him.” (Daniel 2:22)

The scripture is replete with numerous verses all of which reveal that darkness is not the antithesis of God, but is an equal and opposite position to His light and goodness. As a no-thing, darkness is more subjective than objective. Our darkness is the negative space which immediately exists by the positive position of any created thing in the universe, thus it remains completely within God’s sovereign will and design without being an attribute of his own, since darkness is a negation.

“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

“Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you.” (1 Kings 22:23, 2 Chronicles 18:22)

“Therefore thus says the LORD: behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be a time of disaster.” (Micah 2:3)

These passages unravel modern milk-toast theologies and reveal the biblical view that God’s sovereignty extends to include all things, including those acts which on a human plane are evil. Darkness is the will of God to love in proximity to the beloved. The pulling back of God is the dimming of the light or the increase of human darkness, out of which comes all evil.

So is God responsible? Yes, God is the architect. Any other claim seems to violate God’s sovereignty. Let this stretch our theological wineskin. But God’s responsibility is not all…we also bear responsibility. God is glorified by our struggle with darkness, not only its ultimate eradication, and God uses darkness to purge us of pride and our impotent faith, which for many of us, is stuck in the fetal stage of development. Darkness, as God’s loving proximity, is a tool, a gift to the world to grow us up, and yet, we fail almost every time. Our darkness is the lens through which the Gospel can be believed and lived out.

Is this a poor design on God’s part, or are we darkened to the beauty baked in it? Come back next week as we unwrap how darkness either brings layers of destruction in our lives, or it purges and purifies us depending upon a vital consideration. We’ll discover as Thomas Merton said:

“…there is in fact, no spiritual life as such separate from life itself. There is only one life, and that is God’s life which he gives to us from moment to moment, drawing us to himself with every holy breath we take.”

Consider how our life will change when our darkness, which is ultimately God’s life, becomes our teacher rather than our enemy. All great art is an interplay between darkness and light. Our life, our true name, is great art and the image bearer of light and dark, object and subject, universal and particular, a treasure encapsulated in a jar of clay. This is not surrender to our dark appetites and tendencies for that ends in the worst of evil. The art of life emerges moment by moment as we treasure in increasing conformity to the light refracting off of every aspect of our lives, and the darkness which purges us of our captivity to our infancy.

If we treasure the seeing, light works through our darkness and the captive is set free.