Night can be beautiful when dreams of sugar plums dance through your head. When worries have wandered away and left you relaxed, the descending darkness comes like a billowy blanket of down. God has washed behind your years and you feel clean and content as you slip into the freshly washed sheets for a long winter’s nap. No doubt about it, night can be nice.
But it is not always that cozy and comfortable. Night can be blacker than a hundred midnights in a southern swamp. Anxiety, fear and pain become like giant mosquitos that attack you in hordes. You toss and turn and somehow the bed just doesn’t fit. You pace the floor and it does not pacify your plight. The ticking of the clock sounds like a time-bomb ready to explode. But even as it ticks, time seems as though it is standing still. The darkness drags ... the fever rises ... the light flickers ... and you are bathed in the despair of the night.
That happens individually and corporately. Seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, Assyria was reaching out and swallowing all the small nations within her grasp. She chewed them up, scattering the people. Families were split, ties were severed, hope simmered. It was nighttime for the people of Israel. They wondered how much longer it could last. When would the dawn break? And in the 21st chapter of Isaiah the cry comes, "Watchman, what of the night?" Is the night of oppression soon over? Will Babylon come tumbling down? They cry to the watchman hoping that he has seen some sign or indication of the dawn of their hopes for liberty. The vague answer later comes that the morning is not far off, a light is in the sky; but there is still more to endure. It sometimes seems to get darkest right before the dawn.
But in every dark situation of Scripture God the Father flings out a light. Isaiah phrased it this way:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined ...
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government will be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:2 and 6).
Today, too, people are crying, "Watchman, what of the night?" They are not requesting a weather report. It is more personal than that. They are agonizing in their individual or corporate hellish night hoping for a break in the seemingly impenetrable dark overcast. Oh, how they long for the morning with its resurrected promises.
Day is composed of morning and evening. Life gives us a serving of both darkness and light on our platter. Some seem to get a greater portion of darkness. It is certainly not very palatable; but man needs to learn how to digest it. Some men with a diet of darkness have somehow grown strong and healthy in spite of its threatening intimidation.
Scripture assures us that a pearl can be found in pressure. It promises that a star will be there in a dark sky as a symbol of hope. The poet Annie Johnson Flint portrayed it this way:
God hath not promised
Skies always blue,
Flower strewn pathways
All our lives through;
God hath not promised
Sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow,
Peace without pain.
But God hath promised
Strength for the day,
Rest for the labor,
Light for the way,
Grace for the trials,
Help from above,
Unfailing sympathy,
Undying love.
Through the struggle of the night countless men and women, night fighters, have through their torment won spiritual stature.
That first Christmas found darkness filling every crevice. Men had lost hope. The centuries had passed and it seemed as though the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had gone into hiding. Was he incapable of doing his thing of deliverance? Had he left an embarrassed mother nature with the job of trying to raise the children of men? It was like a black fog that impaired the eyes and was even filling the lungs so it was difficult to get a breath of hope.
But then it happened! There was a star in the sky! A light was shining! God was on his way! Some men from the East saw it and were drawn to it. The light beckoned them from the corners of darkness. Hope was being born again. God has always done it this way. In your blackest night a shaft of light will appear, and it can shift your attention from despair to hope. Robert Frost wrote the lines,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be stayed.
We all need it ... some kind of guidepost or hitching post, some kind of assurance that the world and ourselves aren’t falling to pieces. And in the vague and groping darkness of our world the Star of Bethlehem is always there.
Yet in the dark streets shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
Now two things must be said about God’s invasion of earth with the light of hope. The first is that often the light seems distant and dim. It seems utterly out of reach. At this point all we can do is hang on. Jesus talked a lot about enthusiasm but he had even more to say about endurance. He was more interested in the end than the start. "He who endures to the end will be saved" (Matthew 24:13). Also, "He who conquers and who keeps my word until the end, I will give him power over the nations ..." (Revelation 2:26).
Jesus had a dark Gethsemane; but he hung on until he could say, "It is finished." The Master never threw in the towel. Sure he was discouraged but he never was overcome with despondency. He was disappointed; but never to the point of defeat. His dreams became blurred at times but were never blotted out.
In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews there is a statement about Moses which says, "He endured as seeing him who is invisible ..." Enduring was not pleasant for Moses. For him it meant forty long years of loneliness in a wilderness tending sheep. Youth had faded, middle age was slipping by and Moses’ dreams were evaporating in the hot desert sun. But the story didn’t end there. The light came bursting in on Moses through a burning bush and Moses marched on into destiny.
To suffer through the night has never been easy. It is a tough assignment. But light will come and lead us out. We must not pull in our dreams and settle for second best. When weariness stalks us, let us stretch just once more. And remember that the Prince of Darkness, Satan, uses discouragement as one of his most formidable weapons. He tries to load us down with tomorrow’s troubles so we will be quitters today.
William Carey belonged to that noble order of night fighters. When the call came for him to go to India, every obstacle seemed to loom in his way. A lesser man would not have started at all. When at last he arrived in India, death took one of his children. His wife lost her mind. Carey hung on. After a life of service and accomplishment, he was talking to his nephew about the possibility of his life story being written. He said, "If he gives me credit for being a plodder, he will describe me justly. Anything beyond this will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything."
Secondly, when God gives us that star of hope we cannot afford to sit still. It is the time to muster courage and move out to meet the light. The wise men followed it or they never would have found the King of Light.
Supposing you were hunting out in the western mountains and you became lost. Night enveloped you and you wandered aimlessly through a world of shadows and strange noises. Then piercing the darkness a light is seen afar off on a distant hillside. Would it be wise to sit and say, "Now that I have seen the light I’ll just wait it out in this frigid cold"? No, you would rather increase the tempo of your step as the hope of shelter and food would pulsate in your heart.
To be sure when darkness has overtaken us we cannot always comprehend the inky blackness which has flooded our souls. We have no pat answers for the accidents and heartaches of life. We do know that sin has messed up the harmony. Its threads have been woven into the very fabric of life and has distorted the pattern. As we fight in the sea of darkness, we cannot fully understand it. But we act according to the light available. We cultivate what John Keats called "negative capability." He describes this as "the capability of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason, of remaining content with half-knowledge." We are becoming more accustomed to half-knowledge. The length of night we do not know; but we do know the dawn will come sometime.
Well, the Christian takes the light that God sheds and moves toward it. Jesus said, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness but have the light of life" (John 8:12). His presence with his Word helps make some sense of the puzzle of existence. Man will still have his nights of darkness but now he has a light in his heart that burns eternal, put there by God. And it warms his heart and stirs his feet to keep moving on for a closer vision of God.
And the Word of God becomes "a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105). And in the darkest depth that Light is there to enable us to endure and to walk on. Feelings will come and go and they are deceiving. But we have built on the Word of One who is greater than all, whose Word shall stand forever.
Let us ask God to help us come to terms with the night, and see ahead the light that leads us on our way. Let us trust him to give us the courage and strength to do what we are asked to do.
Let us join the great ranks of the night fighters!