Wisdom's Call: 30 Days in the House of LifeVoorbeeld

EVENING TO MORNING

God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” There was an evening, and there was a morning: one day. (Gen. 1:4--5)

In many cultures like my own, people clock their lives beginning with the morning hours and things concerned with awakening. Our eyes open after a night of rest to the insistence of our alarm clocks: sometimes music or chimes, and sometimes a rooster crowing outside our window if we’re rustic enough. We begin the rituals that mark the day’s passing, and as the sun sets, we wind down into the next night of rest.

Day descends into night, or so our bodies believe.

But this is not the order in which the writer of Genesis chose to mention the progress of a day; not dawn to twilight, but rather twilight to dawn. In the Bible’s telling of the creation account, things are different: the dark comes first, then the light. In God’s creation rhythm, night becomes day.

The writer of the creation account has one thing in view: marking our minds with the knowledge of God’s sovereignty not only over the natural world, but the pattern of our souls. Even time is perfectly calibrated by wisdom for all we need. It’s repeated with each day . . . erev, boker, erev, boker—evening, morning—repeated over and again, so that Wisdom establishes at creation a spiritual rhythm meant for understanding, our hope, and our growth as to how God sovereignly governs.

On the evening of His betrayal and sacrifice, Christ faced the manifold and collective weights of our lives—our sin, our fears, anxieties, worries, frustrations—the total effects of this fallen world. His own looming pain and suffering drove Him to pray in the darkness for our souls, gathering strength from His knowledge that dawn would come by His light, and by Him all shadows would disappear. He lays in the darkness of the tomb, and then comes resurrection morning for us all. Blessed dawn!

Zechariah prophesies of this thrilling moment of a new day when he beheld the Creator of the universe as an infant:

Because of our God’s merciful compassion, the dawn from on high will visit us to shine on those who live in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:78–79)

And so it is for us. Without an end to the darkness of sin and hell and the grave, we will not see the dawning of the new day in the new perfected city of God, our brilliant new Jerusalem. This movement from night to day is embedded in our salvation, in the cross, and in our basking in Christ’s glory.

Blessed assurance, that darkness is defeated, that wisdom has placed light as both the finale and the beginning, and that the troubles of the night won’t last always.

Even in darkness, we have the light of wisdom to mark the way. There is wisdom and hope in the evening times, so we take heart . . . whether in the smallest heart pain or the greatest sin of humanity, the new day is coming. And indeed, has already come.