Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Living in the Light

The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes (Psalm 19:8).

An artist must go out into the world to see colors as God has made them. Artificial lighting is no substitute for natural sunlight. If an artist spends all his time in a studio lit only by incandescent or fluorescent lights, he will eventually lose the ability to mix true reds, greens, and blues. His resultant paintings will have a tint that is a bit off and will look wrong if exposed to the true light of the sun. An artist must go out into open spaces and see true colors as God has made them.

In a similar way, you and I can become morally colorblind. Everything in our world has been tainted by sin; the only untainted light that we can use to make moral decisions is the light of God’s pure truth. When we live our lives with limited exposure to God’s light, it is like trying to match clothes in the pre-dawn darkness using artificial illumination. What looks good together under an electric bulb often looks bad when true colors are revealed in the pure light of the sun.

Human philosophers, teachers, and thinkers tell us what they believe good behavior is, but their sense of color is off when they do not do their work in God’s true light. For example: lately, Political Correctness has come to dominate American moral thinking—anything is acceptable except intolerance. And what does intolerance involve? Among other things, you are intolerant if you tell someone that what they believe is right is in actuality wrong.

The problem with this teaching is that although it claims to be based on loving respect for others, in practice it results in lovelessness. If you truly love and care for another person and see that they are following a life path that will end in misery for them, is it loving to keep your mouth shut? Of course not—love demands that we do all we can to help them see clearly the consequences of their actions, so that they might turn their lives around before it is too late.

This is the love of Christ Himself—a love that led Him to come into our sin-darkened world to show us, by heaven’s light, the hell our bad decisions lead to. It is not loving to hold your tongue and let a loved one walk blindly into eternal death—but without the true light of God, many people cannot see how their concept of love, viewed through Political Correctness, is off-hue. This is just one example of why we need to be in the presence of God’s light much more than we are in the habit of being.

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