16 And
I, God, made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser
light to rule the night, and the greater light was the sun, and the lesser
light was the moon; and the stars also were made even according to my word.
17 And
I, God, set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And
the sun to rule over the day, and the moon to rule over the night, and to
divide the light from the darkness; and I, God, saw that all things which I had
made were good; (Moses 2:16-18)
I read this recently and I found myself asking what it meant
for a light to rule over a particular portion of the 24-hours—day or night. On
the surface it means that one of those lights will be the dominant light over
that particular 12-hour period.
And yet the astronomical reality is a lot more complex than
this. Happily, we can say that the sun always rules over the day. Where the sun
shines, there is light, there is day.
But the moon is different. In some parts of the month the
moon does shine at night, but there
are other parts of the month—during new moons—when there is no light from the
moon. Does the moon really rule then? Not really. It is as if the moon temporarily
abdicates its authority and takes a vacation. And only on full moons is its
light all the way there. At other times it’s waxing or waning.
It may be this gives us a little insight as to the
differences between celestial and terrestial obedience. (I’ve probably talked
about this before, but I’m going to talk about it again.) Celestial obedience
is like the sun—always there doing its duty, shining at full strength,
radiating the light within. But terrestial obedience is rarely at its
brightest, shines only reflected light from others more bright, and
periodically abdicates its duty.
Something else caught my attention here too. It was this
idea of dividing the light from the darkness. What is it that really divides the light from the dark
astronomically? Because if you
have light, there is no dark. Light chases the dark away.
Astronomically, darkness comes from distance from the light,
if you’re Pluto out on the margins of the solar system. And we have darkness on earth because
of the earth itself. The earth gets in the way and creates shadow. If we’re on the part of the earth
turned away from the sun, we’re in the darkness. Applying that to spiritual things, that teaches that in a
certain sense we create spiritual
darkness in our lives either by our distance from the light, or by turning away
from it.
The idea of a lesser or greater light also makes me think of
the quality of leader we choose to follow and the type of example we choose for
ourselves. If we didn’t have the sun, we might be happy with the moon’s light.
But having the sun, we see the moon is not so great after all. Do we choose the
best examples to follow? Do we seek for greater light? If we don’t we may be
one of those people the Lord describes as “walking in darkness at noonday,”
which would be tragic.
What do you think? Are there any additional principles you
draw from these verses about the creation of the sun and the moon?
0 comments:
Post a Comment