And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Genesis 1:3
I have always loved this passage. I was dazzled, so to speak, when I first heard it and thinking back it was one of the strongest reasons why I became a Christian. Did I understand its meaning? Not really. Did I even understand a little of how powerful and central this statement was? Absolutely not! You might ask how could I love a passage that I had no idea what it meant? Silly you! Very good point and I’m pleased to say that after nearly 35 years, I think I might understand just a little bit more. I must be a very slow learner.
Now I’m really a New Testament kind of girl, so another favorite passage is John 1:1-4 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in darkness, but the darkness has not understood.”
This idea of light, so central to our faith, is combined here with the only thing that separates humans from all else on this earth – the written word. There are definitely other creatures that communicate, but there is no other that can write. Why is that so important? Because the written word preserves thought beyond the one who is initially communicating it, allowing it to pass from one generation to another, creating memory that is the foundation of knowledge. Many cognitive scientists believe without language, we could not have developed cognition or mind. Without cognition we could have no understanding of the divine, as revealed by God in the Bible
The Judaic Cabbalist believes that every Word revealed in the Bible is Light. The Torah, they say, was written in light. Every letter was light. And within this light all mysteries were contained.
Louis Kahn, a renowned Modernist architect (the designer of the Salk Institute) believed that the opposite of Light was not darkness, but lightlessness, and lightlessness for him meant silence. The time before creation was without the Light of God and without the Word of God.
Lightless and Silent.
The Light and the Word of God equals revelation, the illumination of divine truths, given in loving kindness from our Savior.
Revelation means, “to remove the veil” and therefore, must leave us with a sense that things of the deepest import and greatest urgency, once shrouded, stand before us in startling clarity, that we could not attain this clarity on our own, and no other human could have brought us to it. Revelation illuminates something hidden in our soul and only God can accomplish this Illumination.
He is our Light