How often do we talk about the glory of the Lord? We quote with joy – Psalms 19. We even sing it as an anthem in our choir. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

We see the glory of God in sunsets and starry skies in majestic mountains piercing the skies, and rain-forests with rich, greens the like of which artists have never been able to capture on canvas.

But, let’s not forget that the glory of God may not just be in sunsets and starry skies. I sensed that frightful glory a few weeks ago driving home from church. It was the Wednesday night that the tornado came through. We got the warning at church, and we dismissed the classes. I was driving home alone. It was that time that people talk about when they speak of the calm before the storm. Ahead of me on Poplar, as I moved west, the sky was the most ominous black I’ve ever seen. But the black was all huddled together in one place, surrounding that hovering of black was an eerie orange sky like I’d never seen. It was not luminous orange, more opaque, more milky. The entire sky was a mixture of darkness and brightness. A torrential rain and violent whipping winds followed.

Normally, we would not tack the label “glory” or “the glory of God” to that phenomenon in nature. But the psalmist did. Listen to him in Psalm 68:

Sing to God; sing praises to his name;
Lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds;
His name is the Lord, exult before him!

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
God gives the desolate a home to dwell in;
He leads out the prisoners to prosperity;
But the rebellious dwell in a parched land.

O God, when thou didst go forth before thy people,
When thou didst march through the wilderness,
The earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain, at the presence of God;
Yon Sinai quaked at the presence of God, the God of Israel. (68:4-8)

Verses 7 and 8, is a reflection on God’s activity in the Exodus experience of Israel.

Hear verse 18 again. “Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled; and they stood afar off…

And that brings us to our text for the message today - verse 21: “And the people stood afar off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”

The psalmist put together a father of the fatherless, a protector of the widows - the God of holy habitation - the One who gives the desolate a home to dwell in, and leads out the prisoners to prosperity - He puts those same thoughts about God together with God appearing in the darkness on Mt. Sinai, and the people trembling in His presence.

Yes, we talk a lot about the heavens declaring the glory of God, but we don’t often talk about “the darkness where God was.” And that’s what we want to talk about today.

You can imagine the terror and the panic-stricken fright and flight. There was “thundering and lightning and the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, and the people were afraid and trembled; they stood afar off. Of course they stood afar off. They thought they might die. They turned to Moses, their mediator, and asked him to intercede. Listen to what they say to Moses in verse 19: “You speak to us, and we will hear. But let not God speak to us, lest we die.” You see, they were glad to participate in God’s merciful providence - happy for Him to be the sustaining but unseen background of their life. They had joyfully sung his praises on the shores of the Red Sea. They had appropriated the bread from heaven in the wilderness; they rejoiced as the shadow of that brooding cloud by day and that light of the pillow of fire by night guided them on their meandering journey through the wilderness. But they wanted it to stay that way - God removed - in the background. But they didn’t want to expose themselves to the naked beam of his glory, his light unveiled and undiluted - they didn’t want Him to speak to them directly, they did not want to come into His Shikinah glory without some mediator. “Moses, you speak for us, and we will hear: But, don’t let God speak with us, lest we die. “The point is this: We do not object to praying and worshiping God in His high heaven, but we shy away from even thinking about each common bush being aflame with divine fire. We relish, observing that the heavens declare glory of God, and the firmaments showing forth His handiwork - but we get nervous when the earth begins to tremble, when the skies turn dark, when that solid earth beneath our feet - all those things that we thought would last forever and would never change - family, experience, history – ordinary daily life – when that earth beneath us begins to tremble, we get nervous and we are not sure at all we want to explore where God might be in the situation. That’s what we need to talk about today: THE DARKNESS WHERE GOD WAS.

THE DARKNESS OF HISTORY

Look briefly at it from the widest possible angle – the darkness of history.

Skeptics in every age have told us in books, in plays, in devastating logic, in sarcasm and satire. “There is no living God, certainly no loving Father Almighty. They call our attention to millions of miserable starving people, slave camps, the colossal shadow of a hydrogen bomb, and they mock to our face, about the darkness of history. And we know that we can’t offer any cheap talk.

But we can move deeper, and get beyond the glib superficial reading of history.

God breaks into history. His light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never put it out. There came another time in Israel’s history, other than their Egyptian captivity, when they were taken into exile - made slaves again by the Babylonians. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land,” they groaned.

In the thick darkness of Babylon, God was. The heartbreak and humiliation Israel experienced in exile became a positive and creative force in molding her history. Jeremiah reminded then that in God was. Israel was renewed, she returned to the promised land, rebuilt the temple, and continued to be God’s depository of faith for the whole world.

There came another hour in history, centuries later, when Israel had become dust beneath the feet of mighty Rome’s haughty emperor. A baby was born in Bethlehem. There was the servile cry, “we have no king but Caesar.” There was the unanimous vote for Barrabas over Jesus. The execution squad on Golgotha caused the sun to hide her face for very shame, and even at noontime there was darkness over the face of the earth. But in that darkness, God was. At the place where He seemed most absent, He was redemptively present. The grim gallows, the cruel cross, became God’s altar of salvation. The thick darkness, where God was.

How we need to keep perspective - as Christians especially. It should not be in us to bemoan the world pessimistically. We dare not let ourselves be obsessed with disillusioning problems to the point that we forget the victory of our Lord. The God who came to Israel in the thick darkness of exile, the God who was reconciling the world to Himself in the thick darkness of Calvary the God who was there on Mt. Sinai where the darkness was, has not and will not desert the world.

As James Stewart has rightly reminded us, the basic fact of history is not the Iron Curtain, but the rent veil; not the devil’s strategy, but the Divine Sovereignty.” In history, the thick darkness –where God was.

II

THE DARKNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Let’s scale it down now, down to a narrow focus, more intimate and individual - the darkness of human experience. I could talk about that darkness from the perspective of the devastating trials that occasionally strike us like a tornado. Those come to us all the time - a failure in business, loss of health a shattered romance, divorce. A child violates all we have taught him or her – trampler in our love in calloused, unending ways, desolation and bereavement that have come to many of you here today because of the death of loved ones during this past year. In the midst of the darkness, we cry out – we ask why? We become frustrated because we don’t seem able to do anything about the situation. We often want to stand afar off from God – we cry helplessly at unleashing emotional anger, we tremble, and usually feel that we have to tread this darkness alone.

The witness is that in that darkness, God

But I want to look at this darkness from another perspective - what spiritual writers through the ages have called “the dark night of the soul.” There is an old story about a temperance speaker who started his congregation one night by saying, “This evening I’m going to preach on the evil of rum, and I’m full of my subject.” That’s true to some degree with me as I come to the point because all of us know about the dark night of the soul at some lead. Quite apart from specific tragedy that invades our life, devastating trials that occasionally strike us - quite apart from that, there is the dark night of the soul, which is a kind of eclipse of faith. We get the wretched feeling that nothing is meaningful, all is empty and futile.

I’m talking about times that come to us all - days when we want to pray, but we don’t feel like praying. Days when the wear and tear of daily life makes us dreary, and for anyone to even suggest that we ought to praise the Lord grates on our nerves. You’ve been in those places, haven’t you? To be good is an irksome task. Instead of believing joyfully, we feel like crying.

Nothing seems to have any vibrancy about it. Our enthusiasm is gone. It’s the doldrums - not only of mind and body, but the doldrums of spirit. We want to believe. We want our faith to be vital and alive. We want to praise the Lord with the Psalmist and bless the Lord’s name, but we can’t even get a single joyful note to come from our dry throat.

That’s the ordinary expression of it. But it goes even deeper than that. Some of us find ourselves in the midst of a true “dark night of the soul”, when depression wraps its boney fingers tenaciously around our spirit, and begins to squeeze the life out of us. When despair is like a wet blanket, smothering out the breath of our souls.

Those times may not come often, but they come. When the outer circumstances of our life, combine with the inner dryness of our souls, to give us a dark night. The night becomes so dark that we feel no presence of God, and are convinced that the morning is never going to come. But it will come.

In the darkness, we’re in good company. All the great saints, without exception, have had that experience. “And they all with one unanimous voice bear witness: The thick darkness where God was.” The saints are not liars. This thing is true.

Don’t lose heart in the dark hour! For the God who himself went through the darkest hour of all to redeem the world is quite certainly there.” (James S. Stewart, The Wind of the Spirit pp. 98-99)

III

THE DARKNESS OF DEATH

We’ve talked about the darkness of history, the darkness of the human experience in the catastrophic events that invade our lives as well as that dark night of the soul through which most of us at one time or another pass. We’ve talked about the fact that that is the darkness where God was and where God is. Now we talk about the last dark valley of all - the darkness of death.

This is Memorial Sunday in our church. We’ve celebrated with joy the memory of those that we have loved and lost. Celebrating that does not mean that we diminish in any way the fact that death is a dark valley, perhaps the darkest of all valleys because we have to pass through it alone.

It would be an insult to our hurting hearts - the hurting hearts of those of us who have lost loved ones during this past year - to talk about death casually, or to assume that we can take it lightly. The New Testament didn’t do that. It called death “the last enemy.”

But the New Testament did something else about death. It proclaimed death as “the thick darkness where God is.” It did that, not by talking about immortality and the possible survival of the body - it did it by pulling the sting of death, annulling the victory of the grave by the shattering glory of the resurrection of Christ.

I shared in my column in the Courier this week, portions of a letter I received from my dear friend, John Birkbeck.

John closed his precious letter which brought joy I to my heart with a sentence, “Maxie death is not a period, but a comma, in the story of life.” Isn’t that beautiful and true?

Here is that truth in a beautifully poignant story. Sigurd Olsen was a naturalist, an environmentalist, who lived all his life up in the northern part of Minnesota. He was an author, and he wrote about conservation and the beauty of the earth. In January, 1982, while at his home near Ely, Minnesota, he put on snow shoes and went out in the woods for a hike. He never came back. He died walking. He was 82 years old. They discovered that just before he went for that walk, he had been writing, and the last words he wrote were still there in the typewriter. This is what he wrote: “A new adventure is coming up, and I know it’s going to be a good one.”

So it in death is – a good adventure – Because what Paul shouted is true, Now is Christ risen from the dead”, the valley of the shadow of death is really the gate of heaven. The darkness where God is - the darkness of death, becomes the place of light where all the trumpets sound and we are ushered with joy into the presence of the father.

Tremble and grudge as we will at the darkness, we stride on in confidence, knowing that in the darkness in the light, God was and is…And underneath us are his everlasting arms.