The Dark Is Not Dark to Him

He is a plain-spoken man and he has one plain-spoken sentence for it, which he has said to precisely one person.

There is nothing there.

He does not mean it as a theological claim, and if you pressed him he would immediately back off it. He means it as a report. He looks, and he sees nothing, and he is honest, so he says what he sees.

He is sixty-two. Retired eighteen months. He was a foreman for thirty-one years and he is not a man given to moods; his wife would tell you he is the steadiest person she has ever met and that this has been its own problem occasionally.

The trouble started, as far as he can date it, at about the point the work stopped. He does not think that is coincidence and neither do I, and I am not going to make anything of it, because a man's dry season is not a puzzle for somebody else to solve out loud.

What has happened since is quiet and it is thorough. He prays. He gets nothing. He reads. He gets nothing. He sits in the service on a Sunday with everybody around him apparently receiving something and he gets nothing.

And a steady, factual man has done the steady, factual thing with that. He has treated his own perception as a survey. He looks, he sees no one, and the natural conclusion for a man who trusts his eyes is that there is no one to see.

The psalm separates the two things

David goes at this exact problem in Psalm 139, and he goes at it as a man who has tried the experiment.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12

Notice the two halves and how carefully they are kept apart.

The first half is the man's experience. Surely the darkness shall cover me. That is what it looks like from inside. He is not scolded for saying it and it is not called unbelief.

The second half is not about the man at all. The darkness hideth not from thee. Whatever the dark is doing to the man's ability to see is not doing anything whatsoever to God's.

Those are two different facts about two different parties, and the psalm sets them side by side deliberately so nobody confuses them.

You have been reading your own blindness as information about the room, and Scripture keeps those two things in separate sentences on purpose. That is not me arguing you out of what you see; Psalm 139:12 puts the dark beyond God's reach entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old psalm and stands it beside a steady man who trusts his eyes.

What a survey can and cannot conclude

Now let me talk to you the way you would talk to somebody on a site, because I think it will land better than anything gentler.

You are a man who knows the difference between I did not find it and it is not there. You would never have accepted the first as the second from anybody working for you. You would have asked what light they had, what they were looking with, and whether the conditions allowed the finding.

Apply that to yourself for one minute. The conditions for the last eighteen months have been: no work, a routine gone, a body that is aging, and a whole structure of purpose removed at once. Under those conditions, a man's ability to perceive anything at all is degraded, and that is not a spiritual statement, it is an ordinary fact about people.

You have been accepting a nil return from an instrument you would never have trusted in anybody else's hands. The written word says darkness and light are both alike to God rather than both alike to us, and the Holy Spirit is not limited by the visibility a retired foreman has this year.

And let me be plain about the eighteen months themselves. Dry feeling is not sin. It is not disobedience and it is not the consequence of anything you did or stopped doing, and I am not going to tell you what it is for, because I do not know and neither does anybody who has offered you a reason.

You are seen continuously by Someone the dark makes no difference to. Scripture says the night shineth as the day to Him, and the Holy Spirit has kept that true through every Sunday a man has sat in a room getting nothing.