Don: Since no man can see the true light of God and live, perhaps darkness is a place of grace, of temporary sanctuary for Fallen Man. After the Fall, Adam and Eve went into hiding, into a place of darkness. God had to come looking for them. They also sought to cover themselves from their exposure to light. Even more remarkably, when God found them he provided for them a covering to prevent their exposure to light, therefore saving them from the overwhelming brightness of his presence. A new covering—a robe—is also offered in the new heaven and earth of Revelation but it is itself a robe of supernatural light—the robe of righteousness, the robe worn by Jesus at the Transfiguration.
In the Parable of the Wedding Feast all the guests were offered a robe. The one who refused to put it on was bound hand and foot and thrown into “the outer darkness” where there would be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13). In the Parable of the Talents, the servant who hoarded the talent he had been given (rather than investing it wisely as the other servants did with the talents they received) was also thrown into “the outer darkness” where there would be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:30). The parables are metaphors for refusing and hoarding grace, respectively.
If there is a place of outer darkness, logically there must also be a place of inner darkness. This is the place that is temporary, a place where we may hide but whence we may be drawn back into the light, in contrast to the outer darkness whence there is no return.
We begin in the inner darkness:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me. (Psalms 51:5)
And so began the entire Creation—but not God:
“You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth,
And the heavens are the works of Your hands;
They will perish, but You remain;
And they all will become old like a garment,
And like a mantle You will roll them up;
Like a garment they will also be changed.
But You are the same,
And Your years will not come to an end.” (Hebrews 1:10-12)
To exit the inner darkness requires a spiritual re-creation, a re-birth into the light, as Jesus told Nicodemus when Nicodemus visited him (tellingly, perhaps) at night:
This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:19-21)
Re-birth suggests a sudden emergence, and it suggests that spirits born again have no more control over being born than human babies do. They don’t ask to be born. But another scripture suggests it is not a sudden event but rather a cumulative process:
But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,
That shines brighter and brighter until the full day. (Proverbs 4:18)
Jesus said he was…
… the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.” (John 8:12)
Later, when he healed a blind man (on the Sabbath, to the great consternation of the Pharisees), dispelling the prevalent myth that illness and disability must be the result of a sin of the afflicted person or the parents thereof, he told the disciples:
We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.” (John 9:4-5)
What the disciples really wanted to know was how to discriminate between good (people) and evil (people): Could you tell by looking at them? Jesus answered much as God told Job: That such discrimination requires omniscience and is therefore not Man’s prerogative; it is God’s. In the meantime, said Jesus, he will provide the light for us to live by.
There is much more in the story of the blind man. There is movement from darkness (the condition the man was born in) to light (his condition after meeting Jesus. There is a re-birth: Born blind; born-again sighted. The act, by God, is a creative one, separating light from darkness. It is both a physical and a spiritual rebirth. The faith of the formerly blind man in God and in himself is made new and strong. It is a recreation of what was lost in the Garden: The Oneness with God. The opportunity for rebirth is linked to that unity:
This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17:3)
Alice: Jesus said:
But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:23)
Kiran: We can be reborn out of inner darkness, but not out of outer darkness. So in a sense, inner darkness is a protective darkness, protecting us from the full force of God’s light until we can be reborn. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and other scriptural figures all needed that protection. Outer darkness is a place of our own choosing.
David: But the scripture talks about people being “thrown into outer darkness.”
Kiran: But as John told us, even though light came into the world, Man chose darkness. If we choose darkness permanently, then we are in effect being thrown into it, perhaps?
Charles: Lucifer fell twice: First in heaven before the Creation, then at the End of Time. It seems to me that when it is apart from God the heart of Man is more or less inherently evil. It seems that all sin has a spiritual, internal manifestation—a choice given before its external manifestation. I look upon scripture as always being a spiritual journey rather than a physical one. Scriptural descriptions of the order of the universe, which presumably included the creation of the heavenly host and of Lucifer, described Lucifer in terms that made him practically perfect, except that he was a creature and he developed an internal desire—a will—to rise even higher, which would have put him at least equal to the Creator. This internal act of will was the downfall of Lucifer, and of Adam, and indeed it is the downfall of ourselves. The will must precede the execution, the manifestation, of the will, of course. Things that happen during the Creation only became manifest after it. So God permits those things but is not the author of them. Logically, then, God must have known that the creature would choose its own will over the will of God. Lucifer insinuated his will onto the blank-slate will of Adam and Eve.
In Lucifer’s second Fall at the End of Time, it is prophecied that he will battle with the archangel, lose, and end up in eternal outer darkness. But in the meantime he always has the choice for rebirth. As do we all. This is a spiritual battle, not a physical one. Evil is a mystery requiring the omniscience of the Creator to comprehend, but through its contemplation one is ultimately led back to a need for God, to a need for something that transcends one’s own ignorance and inability to comprehend; in short, to a need for rebirth and salvation. In the end, we need God to pull this all together for us. We cannot do it by ourselves. This is true for the individual, the civilization, the universe—for the entirety of Creation—and it is true of all points in time, from every split second to every aeon, from the beginning to the end. In the end, sin originates within Man, is permitted by God, but it serves God’s purpose in creating the need for reconciliation with him.
Robin: God does everything in his power to show everyone the way:
The poor man and the oppressor have this in common:
The Lord gives light to the eyes of both. (Proverbs 29:13)
What they do with that gift is up to them. The Old Testament shows that obedience to the law cannot be enough to get back to the Garden. The light of a Messiah is needed. This was planned before the foundation of the world—before the Creation. So the Messiah volunteered to suffer the punishment that disobedience deserves and offered us his grace in its stead. Love triumphs over justice.
Don: Can darkness really be good?
Kiran: It makes sense to me. Paul said that where there is more sin, there is more grace. If there is no sin, there is no need for grace. Without darkness there would be no grace. What’s bad is to prefer darkness while rejecting or hoarding God’s grace. The darkness itself is not the problem.
Charles: We relate to the temporal and the finite because we are temporal and finite. We have difficulty relating to the timeless (eternal) and the infinite. It seems to me that linear temporality has been overlaid by scripture on God’s plan for eternity in order to reveal (or at least make accessible) those aspects necessary for the reconciliation/salvation of temporal man who has become separated (by choice) from the creator. The temporal story begins at the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth. The linear story ends at the End of Age. This framework, understandable to Man, assumes a finite time exists between an ultimate beginning and end. But God is the uncreated infinite—a concept that is beyond the understanding of a temporally finite creature existing in linear time. For this reason, it is helpful (at least for me) to think of God’s Word as a spiritual guidebook organized chronologically for my benefit. (It is possible, in my opinion, that this is the only framework through which I would be capable of understanding even a glimpse of the master plan.) Nevertheless, from the Creation of Man up to the Fall, scripture gives the impression that the Garden met all of Man’s “needs”—physical, aesthetic, emotional (companionship) and a direct personal relationship with the Creator God (spiritual). Presumably then, before the Fall, Adam and Eve could stand in the presence of God and not be “destroyed” by his light.
At the moment they chose to eat the fruit they were exerting the will of the creature over that of the creator. Like Lucifer, they willfully chose to violate the order of creation that had been ordained according to God’s will. In both cases (i.e., the created perfect angel (Heaven) and the created perfect man (Earth)) it was the creature that “wanted” more than what God had ordained… enter Desire. Despite being literally “given it all” through the goodness of the creator according to His will, the creature chose to violate that predetermined order… enter Sin. A definition of the sin of Pride is a heart/intelligence that assumes it does not need God. In other words: “I’ll do it my way”. Desire and Pride on the part of the Creature seems inevitably to cause it to miss the mark and end up lost in darkness, separated from the Light/Creator. But an all powerful and all good creator allows this evil to occur to his ultimate purpose—especially if that purpose were to include a desire by the creator that the creature freely choose to abide in the will of the sovereign creator as necessary for ultimate good in his Kingdom. Enter the need for Reconciliation and, moreover, the need for justification, atonement, and salvation which ultimately comes through the sacrifice of the cross. It is a story being played out today in “linear” time until the End of the Age
Robin: If we are in darkness, we have a choice to remain in it or accept the grace that lets us out of it. To accept the grace you have to recognize that there is a source, a light, that provides it. The light that is within each of us is not that one true great light, but it is the pilot light for it. So while grace abounds in the darkness, one must recognize that one is in darkness before one can recognize grace and its source.
David: If God did not actually walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden (scripture seems to imply that he did) then it supports my theory that God was not present in the created Creation. If will precedes execution and manifestation (and I agree it must) then the will to Create was internal to God but the manifestation—the Creation itself—was the externalization of that will. It was outside God—he was not a part of it. His absence, as a being of light, necessarily created darkness.
God was absent while Adam and Eve were making their fateful choice. He only became aware of their internal will when it became manifest through their behavior in hiding from him. To me, this has tremendous explanatory power and it is an example of God’s Perfection, this time with respect to faith: In creating the Universe and the free will that is an essential element of it he knew the odds: The odds were roughly 3:2 in favor of good (himself) prevailing in the end, but that still left the possibility that evil would prevail and that goodness (himself) would be destroyed. It seems to me it must take a supremely perfect act of faith to create Creation, knowing this.
Chris: I don’t doubt that darkness existed in the Garden—it was the place where Lucifer was allowed to go. In a way, he brought the darkness with him. But it did not exist in the rest of the Garden. I think there is an outer darkness that exists outside of us individually and if by exercise of our will we choose to let it in, we extinguish our inner light and are “thrown out” and separate fatally from God.
The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23)
When Eve stumbled into Lucifer’s darkness, that was the beginning of the end. But before that, I fail to see why Adam and Eve could not have communed directly with God and basked in his light.
Charles: Lucifer was at God’s right hand before his fall. It seems that the darkness he fell into was the inner, temporal, darkness and that therefore he has the same opportunity as all of us to get back into the light before the End Time.
We temporal, finite beings use philosophy to try to explain the inexplicable: Eternity and infinity. My problem with process theology is the process of God Becoming is a scientific process but it cannot deal with the Beginning and the End and science points not to any basis in goodness and righteousness but only to evolution through “survival of the fittest”, which is antithetical to any moral framework.
David: I understand process theology not as a linear process but as a quantum process. There is both a chicken and an egg. There is both God the Being and God the Becoming, simultaneously. God the Being creates God the Becoming (along with all of Creation, including darkness) in the gap between alpha and omega, and God the Becoming creates God the Being at the End of Time—at Omega, which is also (as scripture tells us) Alpha. In this way, the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite, are One.
Evolution is not simply “survival of the fittest”. Kiran told us last week about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game that proves that altruism—an especially high level of goodness—is the best evolutionary survival strategy. It is not just a matter of fitness. This appears to be the view held by many evolutionary scientists. There is no guarantee, no certainty, that the strategy will succeed every time in every case and there is a statistical possibility that people—and even Gods!—who practice it will lose. That is why I see it as a Perfect demonstration of faith by God that he takes this risk—as Jesus must have seen it as he pondered his crucifixion: “I’m about to die for this wicked lot, so what are my chances? Actually, I have faith that the chances are perfect, so I’ll take them.”
Charles: It just doesn’t seem tenable to me that an omniscient, omnipotent God would choose to create a situation that could potentially lead to his own demise.
David: To me, it’s his Perfect faith that makes it tenable.
Robin: The more we study, the less we know.
Alice: It seems we’re doomed to keep searching.
Don: I think we can always retreat to some baseline.
Charles: That’s the beauty of it. We are all led to a point where explanation no longer suffices, and beyond that point, there can be only faith to sustain one. It is an acknowledgment of our creaturehood, and I think it is part of the design: We were given dominion over the earth, but no more.
Don: I see the exercise of seeking explanation as faith-building. I never feel that it is leading me astray, though some people—who prefer answers to yet more questions—may feel that way.
Robin: We’re never told that knowledge will save us, only faith in God.
Don: Indeed, Paul said it very beautifully in the Love passage.
David: Adam and Eve seemed to have the same problem as we do! They wanted knowledge, explanation, answers. The Garden was a “nice” place, and Adam and Eve’s dominion over it was a “nice” job to have, but “nice” things tend to leave one wanting. What we want is not the Garden restored: We want the absolutely magnificent new Jerusalem—which you would need to be pretty jaded to describe as “nice”—promised in Revelation.
Don: There do seem to be some imperfections to the Garden.
Charles: It seems to me that before God’s sovereignty—his will—was challenged by Adam and Eve’s will, the Garden was perfect.
Don: When there was Oneness with God, before the Fall, indeed it seems perfect. Yet I can’t ignore the presence of the Tree of Knowledge, the Darkness, the serpent, and so on—all things that are absent from the new earth. It is at least puzzling.
Charles: That scenario opens up the opportunity and the realization of the need for a different choice—believing, following, accepting etc. The new heaven and earth is a gathering of believers, of people who chose the will of God rather than their own.
David: If Adam and Eve had decided not to exercise their will and had stuck with God, what then? Would there never be a new earth and a new heaven and would that matter?
Charles: That’s the kind of speculation that gets you (and me!) into trouble! 🙂
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