Part 2

For those of you who attend other churches than St. John's UMC, or who had to miss today, here's a link to the sermon on light, "The Opposite of Darkness," by our guest and former pastor, the Rev. Jim Hawk.* If we all watch his excellent sermon, I don't have to do study tips for the next five weeks!

The bad news about Light is that it reveals our sins. I'm not a fan of porch lights that stay on all night, especially the bright ones across the street that shine into my bedroom. I suspect that a light that comes on when a robber sneaks onto the porch would be more effective at deterring break-ins, because the thief knows that he is suddenly visible to anyone who drives by. For the most part, our sins are secret, and we want them to stay that way. Light is the enemy of sin and evil.

* Just click the play button, and the video will start in the right place.

Isaiah 13:1-10; Joel 1:15, 2:1-2, 2:28-32, 3:14-15; Amos 5:18-20, The drawback of sin is that the Day of the LORD will plunge sinners into deep darkness (04/29/25)

The prophets tell us that Day of the LORD, also known as Judgment Day, will be a day of deep darkness for everyone. Isaiah says that sinners will be destroyed, Joel says that only a remnant will be saved, and both say that everyone will tremble and faint with fear when even the sun and the moon are darkened. Amos says, "You're crazy if you're looking forward to the Day of the LORD. There will be darkness and destruction everywhere you turn."

Zephaniah 1:1-18, The drawback of sin is that the Day of the LORD will plunge sinners into deep darkness (04/30/25)

The prophets have a reputation for predicting doom and gloom, and although that isn't the only thing they do, it is accurate most of the time. Why? Because God mostly sends us a prophet when we aren't behaving ourselves. We don't read the prophecies of Zephaniah too often, but he agrees with Isaiah, Joel, and Amos that the Day of the LORD will be one of deep darkness. I notice that his message of doom comes during the reign of Josiah, who was carrying out massive religious reforms - necessary because of massive religious corruption. Zephaniah isn't pointing to some future judgment, by the way; he's talking about what will be happening in the near future. And he was right, because the first wave of exiles to Babylon were deported from Jerusalem in 597 BCE, only 12 years after the end of Josiah's reign in 609 BCE. God's judgment is carried out in history, as well as at the end of history.

Matthew 24:1-3, 23-31, 36-44, The drawback of sin is that the Day of the LORD will plunge sinners into deep darkness (05/01/25)

So, prophets are just gloomy, right? And they were talking to a nation sunk deep into apostasy, right? It won't be all that bad for us Christians and observant Jews, right? Right? Wrong. Jesus says the same thing the prophets did about darkness on the day of the Lord's coming.

Notice that the disciples ask two questions: When will the temple fall? And what signs that you're on your way back to end the world should we look for? Jesus answers the questions separately, but he alternates back and forth a little; we read the answer to the second question today. Things you think might be signs, he says, aren't, e.g., wars, famines, false Christs, etc. As a matter of fact, no sign will be necessary, because when it happens, it will be obvious everywhere, like lightning or vultures that can be seen from horizon to horizon. And nobody knows when it will happen, not even Jesus himself. Our job is to be ready at all times.

Although it's not today's problem, Jesus' answer to the question of the fall of the temple is in vss. 4 ff. and 15 ff. It will happen when the Romans desecrate the temple (the bit about the abomination of desolation) and raze the city, forcing the inhabitants to flee and, by the way, spread the Gospel throughout the Empire. That will happen soon (vs. 34), as opposed to who-knows-when, like the second coming and end times (vs. 36).

Psalm 139:7-12; Daniel 2:10-22; Ezekiel 8:12-18, But God can see even in the dark (05/02/25)

God can see what happens in the dark. This is good or bad, depending on your point of view. For the psalmist and for the people Ezekiel is preaching to, it's bad news, because God sees even sins committed in the dark, and besides that, it's impossible to hide from God in the dark after committing a sin.

For Daniel, it's good news. When King Nebuchadnezzar has a troubling dream, he asks his magicians and astrologers to interpret the dream - but first he wants them to tell him what his dream was. Presumably he has dealt with them before and noticed that they just make things up to fit whatever he says. Daniel, one of the wise men who is also one of the Jewish exiles, says, "Let me try it, because my God can see in the dark."

Reading Together: Some of you may remember that the actual name of this study is "Reading Our Bible Together." In April 2026, the emails went to 126 readers a day, and the archive averaged 6218 file transfers a day. The archive was visited by people (or bots, who knows?) from 68 countries, ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Probably more countries were represented, because about 77% of the transfers are not identified by nation. No matter when you read, you are reading along with someone, somewhere. Pray for your fellow readers, and for me.

Isaiah 42:1-18; Luke 1:76-79, God brings light to the blind (05/05/25)

Several kinds of blindness are common in scripture: physical blindness, inability to see because of ordinary darkness, spiritual blindness, and the willful refusal to see. God wants to lead those who are in the dark and to cure physical or spiritual blindness, but there's not much God can do about refusal to see, unfortunately. We need to read carefully to see which one is being discussed in any given passage of scripture, especially when darkness or physical blindness are being used as symbols of spiritual blindness or refusal to see.

Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:1-10, God brings light to the blind (05/06/25)

All Methodists and many others will recognize Isaiah 35:56 as a source of "O For a Thousand Tongues":

Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ. Ye blind, behold your savior come, and leap, ye lame, for joy.

Jesus knew that John would also recognize these verses as a sign of the coming of the Messiah. He doesn't tell John's disciples, "Yep, I'm the one"; any messianic pretender could say that. Instead, Jesus says, "Go tell John what you've seen and heard, and he'll know the answer for sure."

And as long as we're on the topics of songs and God's light opening the eyes of the blind, let's listen again to this song from Terri Gibbs, who has been blind almost since birth.

John 9:1-17, God brings light to the blind (05/07/25)

You know that the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament had no spaces between words, let alone punctuation or separations between verses. Consequently I change punctuation without compunction when the traditional reading makes no sense to me, as in John 9:3. God does not harm someone for the purpose of "showing what he can do for him," which is similar to a common, more formal, rendering, "but that the works of God might be revealed in him."

I think it ought to be a lot more like Mark 2:10-11, where it's clear that the purpose of the miracle (besides curing the man, obviously) is to show the bystanders the power of God. Here in John, I'd translate vss. 3-5 as "Jesus answered, Neither this man sinned, nor his parents. But in order that the works of God might be shown in him, we must work the works of the one who sent me, while it is day. Night is coming, when no-one can work. As long as I'm in the world, I'm the light of the world."

I'm gratified that at least one modern translation, the Contemporary English Version, agrees. It has, "No, it wasn't!" Jesus answered. "But because of his blindness, you will see God work a miracle for him. As long as it is day, we must do what the one who sent me wants me to do. When night comes, no one can work. As long as I'm in the world, I'm light for the world." The CEV and I are totally consistent with the Greek and make a lot more sense: God brings light to the blind through the works of Jesus, the light of the world.

Mark 8:14-26, 10:46-52, God brings light to the blind (05/08/25)

Fellow reader Steve K. and I have been exchanging emails about sight. He sent me this quote from Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli (2022):

"One of the most fascinating recent developments in neuroscience concerns the functioning of our visual system. How do we see? How do we know that what we have in front of us is a book, or a cat? ... What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals toward the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain - only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do."

A long time ago, I read a Scientific American article about seeing in people born blind who for some reason received their sight. The interesting thing to me was that people who were familiar with bicycle tires would look at an automobile tire and draw a bicycle tire. Only after they felt the auto tire with their hands could they see it properly.

This particularly struck me in light of Mark 8:24, which shows exactly the same phenomenon for a person who has just received his sight. At first, his brain is telling him, "Hmm. There are trees walking around. How odd." Then he sees and feels the tree Jesus touch him again, and his brain says, "Wait, that's not a tree, it's a person. I know about people."

In today's readings we see three kinds of blindness. The man in Mark 8, from what we read above, may have been blind from birth, and it takes even Jesus a couple of tries to give him perfect sight. The blind man in Mark 10 can see at once, but notice he wants to "see again," so obviously he was sighted before. The disciples are blind in their minds, which is the greatest handicap of all.

Psalm 119:105-112; Proverbs 6:20-24, The word of God enlightens us (05/09/25)

I suspect that we Christians and Jews are so familiar with Psalm 119:105, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path," that we never even think twice about the fact that it's an idiom, or rather two idioms. We know that "path" and "feet" and "walk" and "way" are all talking about behavior. God's law is not concerned about how to keep from getting lost in the forest, but rather about how to live our lives, which is shown, in today's readings, by the emphasis on learning God's guiding principles, regulations, and laws. Nevertheless, it always pays to remember that babies are born every minute. When we're talking to children, seekers, or unbelievers, we need to keep in mind that they may be unfamiliar with our idioms.

Pray for the new pope and the nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics around the world who look to him for spiritual leadership. May God's light shine upon him and direct his path.

Shadows, particularly God's shadow, can be a refuge and comfort
Isaiah 4:2-6, 16:3-5, 25:1-5, 32:1-4, 51:15-16 (05/12/25)

In the Bible (as in many other faith traditions, even including pagan pantheons), light is almost always good in itself or as a symbol, and darkness is usually bad, either in itself or as a symbol. We shouldn't be surprised, therefore, when shadows can go either way.

Years ago, my husband and I volunteered on a dinosaur dig in a deep arroyo. It was high summer in New Mexico, with a sky like an unbroken bowl of blue enamel. During a break, we wandered up the arroyo, where we came to a flat boulder near one wall, just right for sitting out of the sun. After a few minutes, I said, "Do you know where we are?" He asked where, and I told him, "In the shadow of a mighty rock, in the midst of a weary land." Isaiah compares God's rescue and blessing of his people to shade in the desert heat.

Today's Reminder. I watch too much YouTube, and because I watch several biblical scholars and pastors of one flavor or another, I am also inundated with uninformed, misguided, misleading, unbiblical ... wait a sec while I find a polite synonym ... claptrap. Be careful about this stuff, people. Just stick to kitten videos.

Psalm 17:1-15 (05/13/25)

David sings about the protection provided by the shade of God's wings. Since there's really no hint in scripture that God has wings, I think we can take this as a metaphor referring to the way a bird covers her chicks to protect them from harm. The chicks know this, and if there's an alarm of any kind, they run for mom (or dad - lots of bird species share parenting). We should be a smart as chicks.

Psalm 36:1-12, 91:1-10 (05/14/25)

Yesterday we saw that the shade of God's wings provides protection; today we see that it also provides mercy and a safe resting place.

Let's talk a little bit about psalms. Psalms are hymns, and in Hebrew, as in English, the lyrics to hymns are typically poems. We usually recognize poems in English by the meter and the rhyme scheme. Hebrew poems don't rhyme in the way we're used to. Often there is alliteration or some other type of word play, but only rarely will you see that in translation. What you will immediately notice once you see them are couplets (or triplets): pairs of lines with the same topic, sometimes almost the same sentence but with synonyms. Look at Psalms 91:5-6:

You won't fear

evil at night or arrows by day,

disease in the dark or destruction at midday.

Evil, arrows, disease, and destruction are all calamities, and they may occur at night, by day, in the dark, or at midday. Hebrew couplets are like the word you've never heard before, and suddenly it's in the paper, on the news, and in the sermon. Now you'll see couplets everywhere in the psalms and prophets, and sometimes in the other books, and you'll think, How did I ever miss such a common biblical convention?

Ezekiel 17:22-24; Hosea 14:4-9; Jonah 4:1-11 (05/15/25)

The prophets Ezekiel and Hosea, like Isaiah, see God's shadow as a source of protection, comfort, and blessing. The prophet Jonah - simultaneously the most successful and the biggest failure of all the prophets - has a different take on the shade God provides: it's good when God gives me shade, but it's terrible when God lets his shadow fall on you. Do we do well to be angry when God saves our enemy?

Judges 9:6-19; Mark 4:30-34 (05/16/25)

You know Aesop's fables, right? Did you know there's a fable in the Bible? It's about talking plants, not talking animals. Gideon was one of the judges. He led Israel against the Midianites who were oppressing them, and then he judged Israel for a generation, "forty years" (Judges 8:28), but he refused to be king (Judges 8:23). He had numerous wives and 70 sons, and he also had a son, Abimelech, with his concubine. After Gideon died, Abimelech led a raid and killed all his half-brothers except Jotham, who got away.

After Abimelech's followers make him king, Jotham - from a safe distance - tells them a fable. In it, the good trees (representing Gideon and the sons who died) refuse to be king. The bramble (representing Abimelech) says, "Sure, I'll be king, and you can take refuge in my shade." Jotham says, "Hey, if you think you acted in good faith with Gideon and his sons" - they clearly haven't - "then you and Abimelech may have the joy of each other." Have you ever tried sitting in the shade of a bramble? Shade isn't always good.

Jesus told many parables about plants, and in the familiar Parable of the Mustard Seed, the shade is friendly to the little birds. That isn't what the parable's about, but I thought I'd throw it in as an antidote to the bramble.

1 Chronicles 29:13-15; Job 8:8-9, 14:1-2, Psalm 39:1-13, Shadows can be a symbol for anything fleeting or dimly seen (05/19/25)

You know those days when upper winds are blowing scattered clouds, and the shadows on the ground just seem to flicker? Or the overcast days that seem real bright, but you can't really tell where shadows begin or end? Biblical writers often use shadow as a metaphor for anything fleeting or dimly seen. Our earthly lives are as fleeting as a shadow.

Psalm 109:21-31, 144:1-15, Shadows can be a symbol for anything fleeting or dimly seen (05/20/25)

Here are two more psalms "of David," both saying that our days are like shadows, passing fleetly away. I'm interested particularly in 144:3-4, which stands in sharp contrast to Psalm 8:4-5:

4 What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

The question is the same, but the answer is very different. Are we seeing young David vs. old David? Innocent David vs. post-Uriah David? Or is David like me, whose thoughts and emotions are about as consistent as shadows? One thing to remember about the psalms is that they reflect the full range of human experience.

Hebrews 7:22-8:6, Shadows can be a symbol for anything fleeting or dimly seen (05/21/25)

Have you ever made animal shadows? Sometimes the shadows (like the ones I make) are pretty primitive, but sometimes they are complex. Sometimes I think you might be able to recognize the animal if all you had ever seen was the shadow. The writer of Hebrews says that the daily sin offerings made by the priests are a shadow of Christ's offering of himself. I suspect, though, that without the shadow, we probably wouldn't have recognized the real thing.

Ecclesiastes 6:1-12, 8:11-15, Shadows can be a symbol for anything fleeting or dimly seen (05/22/25)

One of my first bosses said you can never take a vacation. When you're young, you have the time and the energy, but no money. When you're middle-aged, you have the money and the energy, but no time. When you're old, you have the money and the time, but no energy. So you can never take a vacation. The Preacher, who wrote Ecclesiastes, says basically the same thing on 6:1-2: once you're wealthy, you don't have the power to enjoy it. My boss was philosophical about it, but the Preacher says it's a grievous evil.

David noted that our days are like a shadow, but he seemed to be a little humbled by it. The Preacher is just whiny. "What good does it do to live long and prosper," he asks, "if our lives are shadows, and we're just going to die in the end?" "Yes, the days of the wicked are shadows," he says, "but they get the same results I do! How is that fair??" He does tell us to eat, drink, and be merry, and that probably isn't such bad advice, particularly if we stick to tea.

Hebrews 10:1-9; Colossians 2:16-23, Shadows can be a symbol for anything fleeting or dimly seen (05/23/25)

Both Paul and the writer of Hebrews argue that the Levitical system of sacrifices, clean and unclean foods, and festivals are "shadows of things to come," i.e., the coming of Christ and a new covenant.

Psalm 44:1-26, The shadow of death is particularly bad news (05/26/25)

The shadow of death is particularly bad news. In this psalm, the people of God claim to be faithful, but they are rejected, disgraced, slaughtered, scattered, sold for almost nothing, derided, scorned, laughed at, taunted, reviled, killed, afflicted, and oppressed. They are "broken in the place of jackals and covered with the tsalmaveth/ shadow of death."

Psalm 107:1-15,The shadow of death is particularly bad news (05/27/25)

For the most part, Psalm 107 is a song of praise to God for his steadfast love and the many blessings he pours on his people. Those who rebel against him, however, are in trouble. They are prisoners bound in iron, sitting in darkness - and not just ordinary darkness, but the shadow of death. Even when we sit in the shadow of death, we are not beyond God's hearing or God's steadfast love.

Job 3:1-26, Job says: Why is the sun shining when I'm so miserable? (05/28/25)

OK, this kind of irks me. In the psalms, the ESV translates tsalmaveth as shadow of death, which makes sense, because tsel means shade/shadow, and maveth means death/be dead. Everywhere else, as here in Job, it's rendered deep darkness. I looked at all 18 occurrences of this word in the OT, and every one of them is in a life-threatening context. Now, is it just me, or is there a huge difference between "deep darkness" and "the shadow of death"? Back in 1999, six of us went to Alaska in June, and the only true darkness we had in three weeks was in a long, unlit tunnel. (We and our RVs were on a train with our lights off.) I can't nap during the day, but the other five promptly went to sleep. Were they concerned about the shadow of death claiming them? No, they were just glad to get out of the light for a bit.

Job is bereaved and sick. When he wishes that the shadow of death had claimed the day he was born, it's clear that he's talking about death, not the deep darkness of a tunnel.

Psalm 23:1-6, David says: God keeps me from being afraid of the dark (05/29/25)

We've all recited Psalm 23 hundreds of times, so it's important to actually listen to it once in a while. It's easy to believe that God is taking care of us in the bright, comfortable meadows of our lives, but is it easy in the dark, fearful places? David says he will fear nothing - even in the valley of the shadow of death - because God is his protector and comforter.

Revelation 21:9-11, 21:22-22:5, In the end, there will be no darkness, only light: the light of God and the Lamb (05/30/25)

The Bible begins and ends with the light of God. Genesis 1:3 says, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Revelation 22:5 says, "They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light." Light is good, but my favorite part is that the city's "gates will never be shut by day - and there will be no night there." We are never beyond the love or the light of God, and we can always come in.

More of Light and Shadow
Light and Shadow - Part 1

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