Truth Always Prevails

Human beings have a natural love for light. It is no wonder, for light and all it represents was the very first thing that God introduced into his creation.

The first two verses of the Bible proclaim,

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen. 1:1-2)

Creation was a structureless, lifeless, lightless, and watery chaos. And the Spirit of God hovered like a mother bird over the chaos. He loved the chaos, cared for the chaos, and was about to develop the chaos over a period of six days. Remember that we shouldn’t, strictly speaking, talk of “six days of creation,” for creation was achieved in a moment. Rather, Genesis 1 describes six days of God enlightening, ordering, filling, and enlivening his creation.

This is day one: And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening and there was morning—the first day (Gen. 1:3-5).

1. God spoke light into existence -

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (Gen. 1:3). Witness first the power of God: he speaks, things happen. In other words, what God wills happens. As Basil of Caesarea explained in his sermons on Genesis 1: “The divine will and the first impetus of divine intelligence are the Word of God.”

What happens, happens because God wills it to happen. There is no higher will than God’s, there is no will strong enough to compete with God, and there is no realm where God is not present and where his will does not rule. This is the doctrine of God's sovereignty, and it is inherent in the word “God.” God by definition is the eternal being whose will reigns supreme and unchallenged. Thus, we call God “Lord” or “The Lord Almighty” or “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

In the Greek Pantheon, each god competes with the others. Even Zeus—king of Olympus—is outwitted and manipulated and frustrated by the mischievous wills of both gods and men. Elohim is not at all like this. He rules, full stop.

Note especially the power of God’s words. For Paul, this underpins the gospel mission. The gospel is God’s Word, so it is inherently powerful. Mighty Rome might find it pathetically weak, and the philosophers might find it grotesquely foolish—but even the “foolishness” of God is wiser and mightier than the power and wisdom of humanity (1 Cor. 1:18-25). And when God speaks directly to the human heart and spirit, his word is invincible (2 Cor. 4:6).

2. Light is a marvelous thing -

For starters, light is very quick, moving just shy of 300,000 kilometers per second. If you drove your car to the sun at 110km/h (the speed limit) it would take you 157 years to arrive. But if you could ride a beam of light to the sun, it would take you only eight minutes and twenty seconds. I am always delighted by the thought that when I look up at the stars, not only do I see a glorious picture of the number of Abraham’s descendants, I see also the distant past, the light of far distant stars and galaxies that may have taken thousands of years to reach me. Our amazing scientists still do not wholly grasp the paradoxical nature of light. Physicists talk about “wave-particle duality,” or a “duality paradox”; for on the one hand light behaves like waves and has frequency and amplitude, but it also behaves like particles that can be amassed and focused into a laser beam that can cut through steel. The Jedi knight’s brilliant light sabre might be mythical, but the sheer awesome potential of light is not. These two distinct properties of light have not yet been harmonized. Albert Einstein said,

"It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do."(The Evolution of Physics, p. 278)

Light is built into the very fabric of our universe. For as Einstein (again) taught us, mass is but latent energy, and energy is unleashed mass; and the amount of energy contained in mass is represented by the elegant equation E = mc2, E standing for energy, m for mass, and c the speed of light.

3. Light is also truth and wisdom -

Moses, however, is not just talking about physical light. In the Bible, light is also truth and wisdom. God delights to shine truth into the darkness of ignorance, and wisdom into the murk of foolishness. Christianity is not a philosophy, a useful way of looking at the world that will get us through. It is not a system of rituals, following a set of sacred acts to manipulate God’s favor. Nor is it essentially a system of morality: doing this and not doing that in order to win the prize of heaven. The beating heart of Genesis and the Bible and Jesus and Christianity is truth. The truth about who God is. The truth about what God has done and what he is doing. The truth about humanity. The truth about the new heaven and earth that lies ahead. The luminous truth of the Bible delivers us from ignorance, superstition, obscurity, wishful thinking, and lies.

Many demur, “But how can finite humans discover the truth about God? How is this possible?” Indeed, left to ourselves, it is impossible, for our innate blind foolishness leads us down every false path. But if it is impossible for us to grope and fumble and discover the truth about God, God is entirely capable of coming to us, to shine his truth upon us. This is what makes Christianity unique. Whereas human religions grope for God, in the Bible God confronts humanity with the bright light of truth.

A word here about the common term absolute truth. First, truth is one of those words which needs no adjective. There is truth and there is error; and there are no shades of grey in between. Anything less than truth is not truth. Many say that “there is no such thing as absolute truth,” yet that statement is itself a self-contradictory claim of absolute truth.

These people would prefer a world where it is not possible to know the truth about God and humanity, where we are free to choose to live however we like. The religious decree, made ex cathedra from the throne of presumed self-rule—that “there is no absolute truth”—is not a noble philosophical contribution to human understanding, but the echo of the screaming toddler in the nursery, “But I want to!”

4. God saw that the light was good -

Note also that light was the first thing that God made. The blackness could not long endure before God flooded it with light. God is good, so everything that he makes is good. He is incapable of mistakes, of lying, of fumbling, of misdirecting, of mismanaging, of failing, of botching. This applies to history, and this applies to you.

It is a tremendous thing when a person takes up the Bible and reads it and sees the truth for the first time. Ignorance and obscurity are banished. Wrong thoughts scatter like the bugs under the old paver that you lift up in the garden. I have seen again and again that when a person comes to Jesus, ‘the Light of the World,’ they begin for the first time in their lives to question and think hard—and reason. The light is good.

5. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” -

Parents name their children because the children are their children who are in their care. Parents will, for better or worse, determine a great deal of their children’s character and future. Indeed, names are considered to be strangely powerful predictors of personality and success.

In any case, God names the light and the dark “day” and “night.” They are his, and he determines their function and future. For if the day is manifestly good, God also has a good purpose for the night: that it be a time of rest, recuperation, sleep, and peace.

6. Light can exist without the sun -

Notice the extraordinary fact that day and night are at this point utterly independent of the sun and the moon. Some think Moses blundered here. “Didn’t he know that there can be no light when there is no sun!?”

But Moses didn’t miss this. God’s prophet wanted us to get this: that light—and all it stands for—comes not ultimately from any created thing, but from God himself. God is the source of illumination, wisdom, knowledge, and truth. By creating light three days before he created the sun, moon, and stars, he made this crystal clear. The sun is merely God’s tool, God’s torch. We could say that in the same way the moon dimly reflects the light of the sun, the sun dimly reflects the light of God. And that is why in the new heaven and earth there will be no sun, for it will have fulfilled its purpose: “They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light” (Rev. 22:5).

We can all rejoice that God is the God of light and that his Son Jesus is the Light of the World and the glorious fulfillment of Day One of Genesis. “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:4-5).

Let us come into the light . As I watch the unfolding of events around us and all over the world, I've noticed a pattern emerging. I see this pattern as an undercurrent reality which certainly is present in today's chaotic world. But I also see it in our history, where our past blunders and mistakes litter the historic landscape.

This pattern exists in each individual lifestyle and at the national and international level as well. This pattern is no respecter of persons: It operates among the rich and the poor, the black, the white, the Latino and Asian. It is manifested in businesses, both small and great, and is present in our nation's politics.

This pattern is really a truth, a universal fact that works all the time in all places and among all peoples. This pattern is not only a general truth but a biblical truth that God himself has incorporated into the very fabric of existence. God has spoken it to us in his holy word, the Bible, and ensures its operation.

This pattern is the Law of Hypocrisy Unmasked. It is a part of judgment. This truth and operational principle declares and forces all secret things to eventually come to light. The question is not if things will come to the light but when?

Therefore, as I watch events unfold in all over the world I know that what is done in the dark will come to light — even if the events are historical in nature, such as the Medgar Evers murder case and other civil rights injustices, the Armenian genocide, the Bosnian genocide or the mass murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis.

The truth is that whatever one seeks to hide and cover up will eventually work its way up to the light and become known.

In Genesis chapter 4, God says to Cain, "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground!" Even Abel's blood is shouting out this principle for us to understand. You cannot hide injustice. It will surface sooner than later. What is done in the dark in the countryside or in the closet will eventually come to light.

Finally, one could argue that the reason for so much being unveiled today is our technology. It is the proliferation of cameras everywhere, it is our space-based satellites and other surveillance systems which give us the ability to see, search out, and find things that once remained a secret.

But we need to remember and recognize that God uses us and our technology as his means to accomplish his principles and will. God has determined as he said in Luke 12:2-3, that the secrets will be uncovered, the truth will come forth, and God's thought about every behavior and action will be vindicated.

What's done in the dark will come to light, and thank God he has created it to operate so!

2 Peter 3:9 -

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. ( John 3.21 ) .

Life never hands out things that you can't handle. How you approach it will determine how you come through the other side. You can assume the victim role and feel sorry for yourself, or you can reach into the essence of who you are and find your inner strength. Then demand the self worth and ability to rise up and meet your challenges heart on. You need to believe you can do this -- you are powerful, you are amazing and you are inspirational!

I am sure you have heard many stories of people saying that they feel blessed to have gone through their hardship as this defines who they are today. This is not something that people just say, this is something they know.

Through darkness comes light, through fear comes love and through pain comes triumph.

This is the triumph of the human spirit; it is not in a select few, it is in every one of us.

Your struggles and hardships are your gifts so that you can reach deep down inside of yourself and discover your inner power and the glory of who you are. Use them to share your message of hope and love with the world.

The world needs your voice, your message and your experiences so that they can resonate in the hearts of others and give hope and courage to show that it is possible to overcome anything.

Let us share our gifts with each other as we will be far richer for the experience , because we are light of this world .