When the Light Reveals the Darkness
What if God sometimes lets us see how dark the darkness is—not to make us fear it, but so that when He reveals the Light, we finally understand what we were blind to?
I did not begin with the Cross.
I began with a question about darkness.
Not the darkness that falls when the sun disappears. Not the darkness of a room with the lights turned off.
Something deeper.
The kind of darkness a person can live inside without realizing he is there.
Perhaps that is the most frightening thing about darkness: it does not always feel dark when you have lived in it long enough.
We learn its shape.
We adjust our eyes.
We become comfortable with what we can no longer see.
And eventually, we stop asking whether we are blind.
We simply call what we see normal.
Then I began to wonder:
What happens when Light finally enters that darkness?
Perhaps we expect the Light to make everything beautiful immediately.
But what if it does the opposite first?
What if the first thing the Light reveals is not beauty, but something rotten?
The things we had excused.
The things we had hidden.
The pride we called confidence.
The bitterness we called justice.
The selfishness we called survival.
The sin we had become so accustomed to that we no longer recognized it as sin.
And suddenly, the Light becomes uncomfortable.
Not because there is anything wrong with the Light—
but because we finally see ourselves without the darkness protecting our view of us.
That realization can hurt.
There is a strange paradox in being shown the truth:
We can be grateful for the Light and still grieve over what it reveals.
Because sometimes we don't discover that the darkness was hiding the world from us.
We discover that the darkness was hiding us from ourselves.
And then the thought became even harder to escape.
If Christ is the Light, then perhaps His Light does not merely show us what is wrong.
It shows us what we could never have repaired ourselves.
And that brought me to Calvary.
The Cross.
The place where the Light of the world hung beneath a sky that became dark.
Scripture tells us that Christ, who knew no sin, was made sin for us.
And suddenly, the darkness at Calvary seemed different.
Perhaps I had been thinking about the darkness as something God was hiding.
But what if, at the Cross, the darkness represented something being borne?
Christ saw what we could not see.
He saw every hidden corner of the human heart.
Every sin we minimized.
Every rebellion we justified.
Every wound we allowed to become an excuse.
Every darkness we had mistaken for ourselves.
He saw all of it.
And He bore it.
That is where the thought finally became almost impossible to comprehend.
We spend our lives trying not to look too closely at ourselves.
Christ looked completely.
We hid.
He saw.
We denied.
He knew.
We could not bear the truth of what was inside us.
He bore it.
And perhaps that is one of the strangest mercies of God:
He does not reveal our darkness simply to condemn us for having it.
He reveals it because He intends to bring us out of it.
The Light exposes the wound—
but Grace is already there.
The Light reveals the chains—
but Christ is already reaching for them.
The Light shows us what we are—
and then shows us what He is willing to become for us.
So perhaps the darkness was never the end of the story.
Perhaps it was the place where we finally discovered that we needed the Light.
And perhaps that is why, after being uncomfortable with what the Light reveals, we eventually become thankful for the revelation.
Because the greatest tragedy would not be discovering that there is darkness within us.
The greatest tragedy would be never knowing it was there.
And so the thought comes full circle.
We thought we were living in darkness because we could not see.
Then the Light came.
And for the first time, we saw.
But what we saw was not what we expected.
We saw ourselves.
And somehow, standing beneath that unbearable Light, we discovered something even more astonishing:
He had seen us all along.
Comments
Post a Comment