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Bearing the Light

Blog - Light

In last week’s newsletter I wrote about putting our hope in God’s word and waiting for the Lord like watchmen waiting for the morning (Psalm 130:6). While the emphasis of the verse may be on the longing one has for the Lord as we look to him for redemption, I tied the morning imagery to the dawning of Christ at his return. I had said that we are on the night watch and that we live in the night.

If you think at all like I did when I wrote the newsletter, perhaps you felt some cognitive dissonance with those statements. After all, haven’t we been (past tense) called out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9)? Doesn’t John say that the darkness is already passing and that the true light is already shining (1 John 2:8)? Aren’t we who were once in darkness now light in the Lord (Eph. 5:8)? It seems as if the morning has already dawned.

Well, it has and it hasn’t. If you feel the tension between what I said in the last newsletter and what I have said in the previous paragraph, you are feeling the tension between the now and the not yet. In Christ, we have a foretaste of what is to come. We have the Holy Spirit guaranteeing that we will be heirs of the glory to come (Eph. 1:14). Nevertheless, we groan and long for his coming because our salvation is not yet complete.

What this means in terms of the morning/light imagery we find in the Bible is that while we live in darkness we are not of the darkness. We live in a dark world, but we bear the light of Christ. His light has dawned in our hearts, but will dawn one day in full consummation. We are children of the light, children of the day who await the dawning of the day and who put our hope in God’s word that that day will be the coming of our glorious inheritance in Christ.