While I still keep the Flashlight app on the home screen of my phone just in case, a friend of mine said something a few years ago that gave me a new perspective on darkness. He said, “darkness does not exist.” Apparently, he has never heard of blackout curtains…and he did not watch UK play football last Fall.
Actually, he had a good point. It is 100% impossible to produce darkness. What we perceive as darkness is simply the absence of light. Light, I might add, is very powerful and even the least bit of it can overcome a vast amount of so-called darkness.
At the risk of being painfully obvious, allow me to directly apply the light versus darkness paradigm to the good versus evil discussion. While saying “evil does not exist” feels wrong and even a bit scary, it seems fitting that anything we perceive as evil can be more aptly described as a lack of good. Or, for us Christians, evil can be thought of as the lack of God’s presence in any given situation.
If you are saying, “but God is everywhere, Jamie, there should be no evil at all according to your argument,” hold your horses. I’m getting there. Of course God is everywhere. However, due to the free will He gives us, we can choose to exclude God from our lives. We can choose to remove Him from the situations we are involved in. When we do that, evil starts to creep in. The lack of God’s presence in any circumstance leaves the door open for evil to have a fighting chance against us.
Luckily, God desperately wants to be a part of our lives. He wants to be close to us so badly that He sent His only Son to die and be raised again so that we can have a relationship with Him. Just like light, the presence of the Lord in any situation can easily eradicate any amount of evil. But it is up to us to invite God into our lives. It is our responsibility to put God first and be as Christ-like as possible so that the only true good, the only pure light in the world, can eliminate all darkness and evil that tries to latch onto our lives.
What have you done to help brighten the place up lately?