Editorial
January/February, 1978
Volume 13, Number 1
Vance Havner, in the feature article beginning below, deals with several aspects of the darkness about us — the deep depravity of man, the tolerance of social evils, the approval of worldliness and immodesty, and the acceptance of light views of sin.
Religious and political forces in our day are frantically attempting to unite their energies in an attempt to build a man-made millennium. Ecclesiastical and governmental leaders repeatedly express a common faith in man’s capacity to save himself by his own planning and reason and scientific advance. According to the new theologians, this man-made human progress must replace the older faith in Jesus Christ as one’s only means of salvation.
The irony of it all is that when man receives better pay, better housing, and improved medical care — the problems still remain — for the simple reason that the drama of human depravity continues to go on. The Bible simply does not support the belief that one great worldwide brotherhood of love and justice will be established on earth through human effort. History will establish that the preaching of the message of personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, has (more than any other factor), influenced society in general (and individual Christians in particular) to help alleviate suffering, ignorance, and injustice.
Vance Havner points out too that we expose the darkness not so much by denunciation, as by the sharp contrast of our godly living. He says, “The early Christians did not dim their lights to match the times” — and then Mr. Havner encourages each Christian to beware of getting used to the dark, and to consciously work at turning on the light.
Jesus says that His disciples are “the light of the world.” The Christian is described as a lamp or a candle. He gives forth light. But he does so only because he first has been kindled by Jesus Christ who is the Great Light (John 8:12; 1 Peter 2:9). We need to look to Jesus and to spend time with Him, and thereby allow some of His light to be reflected from our lives to those about us. Jesus says that when others see our good lives and our good works, they will be constrained to glorify our Father in heaven.
Getting Used to the Dark
by Vance Havner
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).
Some time ago a friend of mine took me to a restaurant where they must have loved darkness rather than light. I stumbled into the dimly-lit cavern, fumbled for a chair, and mumbled that I needed a flashlight in order to read the menu. When the food came, I ate it by faith and not by sight. Gradually, however, I began to make out objects a little more clearly. My host said, “Funny, isn’t it, how we get used to the dark?” “Thank you,” I replied, “You have given me a new sermon subject.”
We are living in the dark. The closing chapter of this age is dominated by the prince and powers of darkness. Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. The night is far spent; the blackness is more extensive and more excessive as it deepens just before the dawn. Mammoth Cave is not limited to Kentucky; it is universal!
Strangely enough, man never had more artificial illumination and less true light. Bodily, he walks in unprecedented brilliance, while his soul dwells in unmitigated night. He can release a nuclear glory that out-dazzles the sun, and with it he plans his own destruction. He can put satellites in the sky, and left to himself, he is a wandering star to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.
The depths of present-day human depravity are too vile for any word in our language to describe. We are seeing not ordinary moral corruption, but evil double-distilled and compounded in weird, uncanny, and demonic combinations and concoctions of iniquity never heard of a generation ago. This putrefaction of the carcass of civilization awaiting the vultures of judgment is not confined to Skid Row; it shows up in the top brackets of society. Plenty of prodigals live morally among swine while garbed in purple and fine linen. A Bishop once said: “There is no difference in reality between the idle rich and the idle poor, between the crowds who loaf in gorgeous hotels and the crowds who tramp the land in rags, save the difference in the cost of their wardrobes and the price of their meals.”
Man lives in the dark and even his nuclear flashlight cannot pierce it. We not only live in the dark, we get used to it. There is a slow, subtle, sinister brainwashing process going on and by it we are gradually being desensitized to evil. Little by little, sin is made to appear less sinful until the light within us becomes darkness–and how great is that darkness! Our magazines are loaded with accounts of sordid crime, our newsstands with concentrated corruption. We are engulfed in a tidal wave of pornographic filth. Television has put us in the dark with Sodom and Gomorrah–right in the living room. We get used to it, acclimated to it. We accept, as a matter of course, its art, its literature, its music, its language. We learn to live with it without an inner protest.
Lot was a righteous man, but he moved into Sodom, lived in it, probably became its mayor. His soul was vexed from day to day with the Sodomites’ unlawful deeds, but he lost his influence with his family and had to flee for his life. He died in disgrace. I have met many Lots in the past few years! “…as it was in the days of Lot. . .Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (Luke 17:28-30). Modern Lots tell us that we should hobnob with Sodom and get chummy with Gomorrah in order to convert them. But the end does not justify the means. Such people do not turn the light on in Sodom–they merely get used to the dark.
The worst of all is that such people get so used to the dark that they think it is growing brighter. Sit long enough in a dark room and you will imagine that more light is breaking in. Men who dwell too long in darkness fancy the day is dawning. We call “broadminded tolerance” what is really peaceful coexistence with evil. It is an effort to establish communion between light and darkness, a concord between Christ and Belial.
This condition extends into the religious world and even into evangelical Christianity. It is possible to fraternize with unbelievers until false doctrine becomes less and less objectionable. We come to terms with it and would incorporate it into the fellowship of truth. We begin by opening doors to borderline sects who “believe almost as we do.” Others find overtures from Rome attractive. Still others would make a crazy quilt of world religions, a syncretism of “the best in all faiths.” “Syncretism” is only a big word for “hash.” These theological chefs who are busy mixing Mulligan stews,.think the darkness is Lifting; the truth is that they are merely getting used to it.
The same danger exists with regard to worldliness. One may live in a twilight zone, in conditions of low visibility, until he finds the practices of this world less repulsive. He mistakes the stretching of his conscience for the broadening of his mind. He renounces what he calls the “Pharisaism” and “puritanism” of earlier days with a good word for dancing, smoking, and even cocktails now and then. Instead of passing up Vanity Fair, he spends his vacations there. John Bunyan tells us that his pilgrims were quite a novelty to the worldlings: “And as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech; for few could understand what they said. They naturally spoke the language of Canaan; but they that kept the Fair were men of this world. So that from one end of the Fair to the other, they seemed barbarians to each other.” How out of date that sounds! Operators of Vanity Fair would see little difference in the clothes, conversation, and conduct of most professing Christians today. If the proprietors of that Fair beheld the modern church member, especially in the summer time, wearing in public, a garb in which he should never have left the house or even come down stairs, they would not seem barbarians to each other! Bunyan’s pilgrims were not getting used to the dark.
Of course we do not get used to it all of a sudden. Alexander Pope described the gradual process:
Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Here is how it works. A secular journal says: “The desensitization of 20th-century man is more than a danger to the common safety. ..There are some things we have no right ever to get used to. One…is brutality. The other is sexual immorality. Both. . .have now come together and are moving towards a dominant pattern.” There was a time when sin shocked us. But as the brainwashing progresses, what once amazed us only amuses us. We laugh at the shady joke; tragedy becomes comedy; we learn to speak the language of Vanity Fair.
I heard a preacher tell a doubtful joke to a man of this world. Evidently he wanted to give the impression that preachers are used to the dark; actually he was accommodating himself to the dungeon of this age. The housewife who moves into suburbia and wants to go along with the group spirit of the community faces the same temptation. So does the organization man at the boss’s party or the student on a pagan campus. There are new techniques for socializing at Vanity Fair, but Bunyan’s pilgrims had the right idea. We are not here to learn how to live in the dark but to walk in the light. We are not here to get along with evil but to overcome it with good.
One of the signs of getting used to the dark is the way we excuse sin. We give it new names; adultery is free love; the drunkard is an alcoholic; sodomy is homosexuality; the murderer is temporarily insane. Church workers fall into grievous sin and move on to new positions without repentance or change of conduct. Parents let down in discipline, saying, “What’s the use?” Pastors give up preaching against sin, arguing that the world’s evils are here to stay and since church members are not going to be any better we might as well accept the status quo and live with it. We see this mixture of light and darkness in television programs that join worldliness with hymns. We see it in Hollywood portraying the Bible.
The world lives in the dark because it rejects Jesus Christ, the Light of the world: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The word here translated “condemnation” is “crisis” in the original. The coming of Christ precipitated a crisis. It compels men in the very nature of things to come to the light or abide in darkness. This light shines in the Saviour: “I am the light of the world.. .” (John 8:12). It shines in the Scriptures: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105). It shines in the saints: “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). “Every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved” (John 3:20). That explains why some people do not come to church services.
I remember a couple in my first pastorate. The husband, an unsaved man, brought his wife to church services on Sunday nights, but he sat outside in his car. He was in the dark in more ways than one because he did not like to face the Gospel light. His wife enjoyed the service because she loved the light and came to the light that her deeds might be made manifest that they were wrought in God. When you overturn a stone in the field and the sunlight strikes beneath it, all the hidden creeping and crawling things scurry for cover. So do our sinful hearts grow restless under the light of God’s truth. In an unlighted cellar you do not see the spiders and snakes and lizards and toads until the light breaks in. So men do not realize their sinfulness until they face the Light. No wonder some live in the dark all week and then blink their eyes and wince in church on Sunday morning when the preacher turns on the Light! They have photophobia–they fear the Light.
Our business as Christians is to let our light shine: “…have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove (expose, turn the light on) them” (Ephesians 5:11). We expose them not so much by denunciation, although that has its place, but by the contrast of our godly living. Alas, we are so afraid of being offensive that we are not effective! Our Lord said that two things would smother the light of our testimony, a bushel and a bed. Today we dim our light in the third way: we turn it low for fear of creating a disturbance; we shade it to match the dim dungeon of this age. We would rather grieve the Holy Spirit than offend the wicked.
The early Christians did not dim their lights to match the times. Paul exceedingly troubled the places he visited, and even in prison at midnight he turned night into day. The saints in Rome lighted the streets with their burning bodies. Christians met in the catacombs, but they illuminated the world.
We are a city set on a hill, not hidden in a dungeon. We are to shine as lights in the world. This is no time to get used to the dark; it is time to turn on the Light! Too long have the caverns of this world been undisturbed. Of course some cave dwellers squirm, but others will see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven. Light has no communion with darkness. We are not here to commune with it but to conquer it, and “this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (I John 5:4).
Early Christianity set the world aglow because absolute Light was pitched against absolute darkness. The early Christians believed that the Gospel was the only hope of the world, that without it all men were lost and all religions false. The day came when the church and the world mixed light and darkness. The church got used to the dark and lived in it for several centuries, with only occasional flashes of light. Today too many Christians think there is some darkness in our light and some light in the world’s darkness. We half doubt our own Gospel and half believe the religion of this age. We are creeping around in the dark when we should be flooding the world with light. We need to get our candles out from under bushels and beds, take off the shades of compromise and let them shine in our hearts, our homes, our businesses, our churches, and our communities with that light that shines in the Saviour and in the Scriptures and in the saints.