Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Sun and the Moon

I really want to share this thought from bible study yesterday morning.

Me and the C Church band have been studying Hebrews for months now, and we just finished this incredible book describing faith, Christ's priesthood, Godly discipline and many other facets of the Christian walk. We are now moving onto John, and basically studied the first 18 verses of the first book yesterday. I cannot take credit for all of this imagery because Michael Olson shared this thought, and here is my response to it.

John establishes who Jesus is in the opening verses. I am sure many of you have familiarity with John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." But, after that, John begins drawing comparisons of light to Christ. He uses light to describe the character of Christ seven times from verses 3-9 (NIV). What's the significance of this?

Well, let's imagine a world without light? A world of darkness. The emotion I feel is sadness, hopelessness, something about the promise of the sun in the morning is reassuring to me. What does light do, really? This is fairly trite, but it illuminates things, yes? Or better said, it reveals things that were once dark. Take the moon for example. It's just a dark spot, unrevealed, sailing around our planet, until the sun hits it. When the sun shines on the moon, it reveals a beautiful, soft, white reflection that has spurned the imagination of kids and scientists alike. So, as Paul indicates, Jesus is light. Jesus is the sun. God the moon. When Jesus came into this world, as was planned from the beginning, he revealed the true nature of who God is, and the active relationship and love that God seeks with us and from us. Jesus essentially illuminates who God is and the hope is that it drives us to seek communion with God. The moon does not illuminate itself, it cannot, it needs the sun to reflect its beauty. So, God, the trinity, working in harmony, do the same. God is a reflection of the light Jesus brought to the world, he is the picture that Jesus painted.

Maybe the stars are the Holy Spirit?

2 comments:

  1. I think so..........they are inspiring and uplifting, transcendent, just like the Holy Spirit.

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  2. 2 Corinthians 4.6 is that !!! so true

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