An argument for the creation of time is implied in this verse from First John. Time is measured by a star, the sun, and its relationship to the earth. When it is visible there is light. When it is not, there is darkness. Genesis has light and darkness appearing, soon after the creation begins. Later the sun was related to the day and the moon to the night. In using night and day as allegory, the day became a sign of good, or righteousness, or approval: the night significant of sin, or wrongdoing, or rebellion and disapproval. The analogy was rather easy to sustain in centuries when there were no electric lights, and dark night was a significant barrier to human activity. Progress into electronics and technology is changing various symbols of history.
The analogy did not make the night evil or the day holy. The story gave meaning for human understanding. Day and night just are in experience. They are neither good nor bad. They are in the nature of things. Either can be used in the wrong way. Where God reigns supremely, there is never darkness. Light is in the nature of God, inviting freedom and involvement, openness and honesty. All can be seen in perfect light. No one need guess at what is happening when that light is shed on reality’s truth. Reality in that light will not be measured in nature’s terms.
Isaac Newton was interested in light and studied it. He went as far as he could go and pushed back the walls of ignorance as much as any man. But even in that search there were those who deplored his success. Charles Lamb, John Keats and William Wordsworth lamented that Newton had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors. The rainbow was not destroyed, and the poets could have used the new knowledge and discoveries to enhance their ideas of beauty and peace, with freedom from disasters – as Noah was assured relative to flood.
The rainbow is a remarkable analogy to what we know about the functioning of the Trinity of God. It is reviewed on another of these Pages, but other trinity concepts have been used in attempts to explain the God Trinity. Here is one hand but several fingers, as there is one God but three persons. Human beings have singular bodies but several organs. To deny the concept of Trinity must have its roots in the pride of mankind. We tend to believe we are at pinnacle in personality. God is personality and more. This is accusative in that Scripture argues for the greatness and mystery of God far greater than we can imagine or find out. We may partly be arrested in the general feeling that God so great can be interested in humanity’s persons who are rather insignificant in the universe. How can he be so infinitely great and care about finite me? He says that he does care, even to the point of redemption, which changes the nature of nature’s self.
Even Trinitarians halt too soon with trinity, failing to realize that God is more than the persons of the God-head, larger than any Trinity theologians might recover from revelation. He has an essence that can’t be divided, a glory that is singular, that includes the Trinity of God and so much more. If we form God as Trinity only, God is too small. He is Trinity and more. We have biblical hints of the more. God’s nature is: Light, Invisible, Truth, Love, and much more. Happily, the extent of God need not be wholly understood for us to become friends of God in his redemptive plan. That greatness is sufficiently extensive to include life, principally human life with some ingredient of his image. He will not let that go without attention to those who wish to share its eternal meaning that is provided in the context of immortality. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020