Wearing Light

The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. (Romans 13:12)

I am always looking for the contextual meaning of the words used in a passage to pick up the broader and deeper implications and connections. Clearly here there is a lot of reference to night and day, darkness and light. As I look at the surrounding verses I see that Paul lists a number of activities associated with the night that we are to move away from as Christians. But in the previous verse he also gives the reason for this – that salvation is closer than it ever has been before.

The word salvation I have come to learn means much more than getting into heaven sometime in the future. It primarily has to do with the healing of the deepest malfunctions of the heart and soul, the lies and pain that motivate most of our sinful behavior. But in this verse I believe that Paul is using it more along the line of rescue which is also a meaning of the original word. Rescue is part of our healing process, for it is also important to get someone away from the hurtful environment that continues to damage the heart, mind and body as well as bring healing to those hurts and truth to those lies.

But God has chosen to begin and accomplish a portion of our healing process while leaving us in this world. It is part of His great wisdom and His strategy for resolving the sin crisis that Lucifer brought onto the whole universe. We may not agree with this strategy or like it, but when it is all over we will realize fully that it was the very best decision, and that it will enable God to assure that sin will never again enter the universe a second time while still preserving the perfect freedom of choice by every intelligent being.

But there is a major point of transition coming soon that will separate those who submit to God's healing process and accept His authority from those who insist on living independently from His authority. As I have observed over the past few years, the Second Coming of Jesus is not the great climax of all ages as many have taught in Christianity, but it is a major transition point and shift in the arrangement of things. It is the initiation of a 1,000-year period of time where all those who have chosen the Lordship of Christ in their heart (even if they never heard the name of Jesus) and have responded to His love in their conscience will be removed from the miasma of sin and suffering on this planet and be taken to an incubator at God's home and allowed to grow up fully to prepare them for the great climax of the Great Trial.

It is this transition point of rescue that I believe Paul is referring to in this verse. It is certainly a hope that we can cling to with eagerness and pray for with passion when we are assaulted with fear and discouragement. In this verse Paul is telling us that the reason we need to release ourselves from the dysfunctional behaviors that flow from unrepaired inner problems is that we need to focus our attention more on God's plan to rescue us than on our desires to mask our pain with selfish, sin-based tranquilizers.

I find the list of things that Paul considers deeds of darkness to be interesting when I look them up in the Greek. But I will save that for another time. What is clear is that the causes of these external behaviors is an internal emptiness of the heart that drives a person to seek ways of numbing their deep pain and attempting to fill the inner void they cannot escape. But that parallels the very nature of darkness itself.

I received an email forward about a month or two ago that I found very enlightening. I usually have little interest in forwards as they are generally mindless and either useless or very biased in some way. But this one, though I doubt it may have really happened the way it was constructed, had a very important point that I found helpful for better perspective. It told of a classroom where an atheist teacher was being very confrontational about God and religion in his attempt to shame and discredit any Christians who might be in his classroom. He managed to outsmart one student who attempted to answer his challenging logic and smugly took on the second. But the second student gave some very compelling answers that completely undermined all the logic that the professor relied on to discredit the existence of God and the problem of evil.

The main point that the student presented was that many things don't really exist as we often assume they do. We simply give them names and even give them a great deal of power in our minds, but in reality they are simply vacuums of something that we were designed to need.

He pointed out that cold is really only the absence of heat. It does not really exist in and of itself.

Darkness is simply the absence of light.

Just because something cannot be seen or proven scientifically does not mean that it does not exist or is not true. Science is not the arbiter of reality. Faith is required to believe in things that we cannot see – even the fact that we have a brain within our own cranium.

And finally he pointed out that in just the same way, evil is not an entity of itself but is just the absence of God who is love.

All of the deeds of evil are simply symptoms of a vacuum in our hearts that has not received the needed life and peace that it was designed to thrive on. We cannot escape that our hearts and minds were created to interact and depend on God our Creator with deepest intimacy. We can deny it, fight it, resist it and run from it; but our hearts were created for love and will never rest until we return to the only Source of love that exists.

So the metaphor of darkness and light that is used in this passage is very powerful. The resistance and the deeds of darkness spoken of in the surrounding verses are symptoms of an emptiness of soul that needs to be filled with the presence and life of the One who designed it. The deeds of darkness are our attempts to substitute other sources and activities to fill the emptiness in our hearts, but they will never accomplish what sin suggests they can do for us. They only tend to numb us to the pain temporarily while making the hole in our heart even bigger and more painful in the end.

What I find fascinating at the end of this verse and in conjunction with verse 14 is the imagery of putting on, or clothing ourselves, with armor of light/the Lord Jesus Christ. The Greek word translated for put on literally means to “sink into a garment”. I like that imagery. It carries with it the idea of rest, of relaxing and falling into the safety and protection and comfort of nice clothes that fit well.

We are created in the image of God. When we put on, or clothe ourselves with Jesus Christ we are amazed to discover that He is a perfect fit. But that is no surprise really for He is the mold from which we were created. We find that when we return to our original source we finally find real fulfillment and all that we were designed to enjoy. Only by abiding in Christ and resting in Him will we ever find the peace and joy and vibrancy that our heart craves for and refuses to rest without.

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