A few nights ago, I was walking around in my house, in the dead of night, without the lights on, to get a cup of water from the refrigerator and I could have walked from my room to the kitchen at least a million times and on my motor memory alone. But that night I hit an obstacle with my knee. I hit the side of a wall with such force, that my left knee bruised. As I exuded profanities from the sting and shock of hitting my knee, I realized what an idiot I had been! If only I had turned on the lights, then perhaps I wouldn’t have hit my knee on the wall! I had a better thought, I need a night light! Trying to return back to my slumber, after my thirst was painfully quenched, I thought about how this would never happen in the end days. Let’s look at today’s quiet time passage. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. – Revelation 22:5 We can look at this verse alone both figuratively or literally, depending on what you do or do not believe. Personally, I think there is a very literal meaning to this passage by which the author quite literally means there will be no night; and at the same time, a figurative meaning laying behind the literal meaning, reaching at saying that the things (in particular, the bad things) that happen at night (the dark times of your life) will be no more. It’s a very simple view on life itself and the coming end of the world as we know it. In fact, it’s a great hypothesis but we cant test its validity until the second coming, thereby rendering our understanding of this passage merely as naive hopefulness. So we beg the important question: how does that affect me now where my life has “night”? Whether or not you understand this passage in Revelations as figurative or literal does not matter because the implication for all us city dwellers is the same: if God is our light, then even our own darkness is affected by how much we want God to light our way. That is to say that even in the darknesses where most of us spend our time, all we really need to do is trust in God to be everything we need to navigate and be who we are called to be. Unfortunately, most of us who proclaim to be followers of Christ rely on things other than God Himself to allow us to be who God wants us to be. I’m guilty of this too. This is bad faith. It is having no faith and we need to stop. If you want the night to stop, then we all need to allow God to be the light of our lives.
