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Then God said, 'Let lights appear in the sky...

Then God said, ‘Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth.’ And that is what happened. God made two great lights—the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, to govern day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And evening passed and morning came, marking the fourth day.

(Gensis 1: 14-19) There are several important things happening in this passage and on this day. One of the most important and subtle is the refrain of separating light from darkness. If you recall God’s first creative act was to call into being light. In Christian theology, this Light is Christ. God essentially calls forth the creative Light from within the Father to spill the loving light of world into all that will come into being. Here, though, we see the small reference to God further separating light from darkness. On one hand, we could simply accept this means sunlight from nighttime, but the Bible is infused with meaning and I think we can say that god reinforces that the Christ Light is distinct from the darkness of chaos and the enemy. Christ supersedes the power of evil in the lives of all creation to come. Thus we are seeing Christ’s job is to shine a light on dark places within creation.

I don’t know about you but when I feel despair I liken it to being in the dark. I have a black mood or a dark cloud hanging over me. These are moments when the enemy is stretching out its tentacles to pull me down. When I feel this darkness sweep over me I know that I can turn to Christ to spill out his Light upon me and destroy the enemy’s grasp. Here in this passage we see that God sets into motion the triumphal nature of Christ and his capacity to rule over darkness and subsequently the enemy.

We also see in this passage God is ordering time. He is setting the cyclic nature of our lives in motion. Life has a flow to it. It is not about isolated moments, but rather viewing time as a process of many moments moving together to form the passage of days and seasons. When I read these verses, I begin to think of my problems as transient, each day eroding the potency of a problem as I reset my inner clock to the newness of the day. When I am in a season of sorrow or poverty, I know that God made the universe to move forward to new seasons and new days. In this, not only does God establish time, but hope as well. We can hope for a better tomorrow and fruitful season. And with Christ’s light surrounding the flow of time was can turn to Him for his guidance, love, and peace. We can turn to Christ’s power to make our seasons bountiful and rich and our days bright with sun and nights bright with starlight.
Heavenly Father, you who have set time in motion and you who has given us Christ’s light over our days, guide me to be a light in the lives of others so that I may bring brightness to those struggling through their days and their seasons of sorrow and want. In Jesus’s name, Amen

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