When Darkness Descends... Look to the Light

Some things can only be seen when it is dark.  The stars, for instance, are just as bright during the day as they are at night, but it takes darkness to reveal them.

Antares, pictured above, is one of the brightest stars in the sky at night.  The radius of Antares is more than 880 times larger than the Sun and it is 10,000 times brighter.  Antares is visible in the sky all night around May 31, so if the sky is clear tonight, you should be able to pick out it's distinctly reddish hew with the naked eye.

Though it is 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, Antares seems invisible in the daylight.  It takes the darkness to reveal it.  

So... when the psalm declares, "The heavens are telling the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1), does that mean that God's handiwork is more visible in the darkness than in the light?  Most of of the time for most of us the answer is YES.  Just as the light of a brilliant star is more visible in the darkness, God's glory is most visible against a shroud of darkness.

Psalm 27 begins with the exclamation:

The Lord is my light and my salvation—
    so why should I be afraid?
The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger,
    so why should I tremble?

I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote these words didn't come to this conclusion on a beautiful, sunny, carefree day.  It would be my guess that the author "saw the light" against a backdrop of darkness.  

Rather than cursing the darkness, we need to stare directly into the darkness with our eyes wide open.  In the darkness of night the psalmist wrote, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." If it wasn't so, Jesus would not have said, "I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life" (John 8:12).