The power of Light .................. Parables 407

February 8, 1994

What can be said about Disney World’s laser light show except dazzling? This spectacular display combines colored lasers with music and fireworks. It ends with shafts of light, beamed from at least a mile across a lake, dancing over Disney’s huge geodesic dome. The pattern formed makes Spaceship Earth appear to be a rotating globe, each continent outlined in light. Such remarkable, creative entertainment.

Light certainly has incredible power. The light of the sun provides the stuff that makes plants grow, gives warmth for life and vitamin D to keep us healthy. Even man-made light is proving itself versatile as well as invaluable. Light is used for aircraft guidance, communications, coding systems, cutting diamonds and enumerable home and business applications.

Light also solves a variety of detailed problems. It is used for repairing and reshaping corneas, growing plants all night, making three-dimensional television sets, storing data, improving the consistency of nylon strings, and helping cows digest cellulose. I’ve even seen men’s ties with tiny lights. How practical and helpful that might be is anyone’s guess, but they certainly attract attention.

How can telling time with a simple sundial even compare to the intricacies of laser technology, yet uses for nature’s light continually multiply as modern technology progresses. We are a long way from the first spark of lightning that lit Edison’s light bulb and we are far beyond the ancient Basques, who once pleaded with the sun and moon to “give us the light of life and death.”

Or are we? While our fires, candles, incandescents, florescents and halogens can penetrate the darkest night, none of these lesser lights have entirely replaced the sun. Not one of them can compete with the moon for the attention of lovers when they want to go for a walk. Yet with all the sun and moon give us, no one has discovered from either one (or from science) the mystery of life or how to avoid the certainty of death.

The Basques may have been primitive people but we have to give them credit; they were concerned about this important basic issue we often neglect. We are so easily taken up in the wonder of our own technology and filled with awe and pride in ourselves that we ignore or push aside these basics. However, those who stop and ask the same question, if they ask the right Person, will get this answer: “I am the light of the world. He who believes in me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life.”

No sun or moon replies with such a claim. It boldly comes from the One who created all of them, Jesus the Son of God. He calls Himself, not A light among many but, THE light of the world. He alone offers eternal life because He alone defeated the darkness of death.

I have walked in physical darkness along an unfamiliar path without so much as a candle or flashlight. It was frightening to say the least. I have also walked in spiritual darkness. It was worse. Jesus came to show the way for that more obscure path, the one where the deepest truth is hidden. Lesser illuminaries and our man-made “lights” are insufficient to expose it.

Other than that, what more can be said? Perhaps just that the wonder of His “light show” makes all our inventions and illusions of what the world is like grow dim as He reveals the brightness of His glory.