Part of the struggle in my Christian experience, I’ve noticed, is a tendency to react negatively to negative events and positively to positive events.  In other words, I’m up if circumstances are up, and I’m down if circumstances are down.  I am subject to depression and anxiety over contrary circumstances, bad news on TV or by rumor, my own failures or the failures of people around me, or even things as simple as bad weather, winter and darkness.  And I’m equally subject to elation over agreeable circumstances, good news, my own success and the successes of people around me, and comfortable weather, summer and sunshine.  As natural and normal as this phenomenon sounds, I don’t think it’s consistent with my faith.  Just a couple of months ago, well before spring, I was sitting in my bedroom glumly watching darkness fall over a bleak, wintry world, and a verse I know well came to mind.  “Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (Psalm 139:12).  Now I know that the central point of that verse in its context is that physical darkness will not serve to hide me from God, because it does not hinder His vision like it does mine.  But the verse’s more abstract implications struck me that evening in the gathering dusk.  The inescapable fact is that darkness and light are described as being “alike” (KJV) to God.  An equally thought-provoking fact is that in certain portions of Scripture, darkness symbolizes adversity and light symbolizes well-being.  And I had to ask myself, “Why?  Why is darkness just like light to Him?  And if I consider the figurative aspect of this truth, why is adversity just like prosperity to Him?  Why is it all the same to Him?”  I have to tell you that the answer didn’t come right away, but only after a prayerful few days of pondering that question.  The conclusion I finally reached, however, is that darkness and light are the same to God because nothing has changed.  He’s good with either one because nothing changes—not really—whether day or night, good times or bad times.

You see, I put this concept together with the principle found in 2 Corinthians 4:18:  “As we look not to the things that are seen but the things that are unseen.  For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”  And I asked myself a second question—“If darkness and light (or adversity and prosperity) are both the same to God, why aren’t they both the same to me?”  The answer I came up with is this:  I am looking at things that are seen while failing to look at things that are unseen.  Darkness looks dark and foreboding, and so I naturally assume it is dark and foreboding, and I fail to consider what Elisabeth Elliot calls the “Great Realities.”[i] These are the things I can’t see—the knowledge of God and the certain facts of His loving loyalty, His good work on my behalf, and His faithful promises.  But that’s the world God lives in.  He is “our Father, which art in Heaven” (Matt. 6:9, KJV) and so He looks at everything—including darkness, ominous circumstances, and bad news—through Heaven’s perspective, through the lens of the eternal.  And so that is why darkness is not dark to Him—nothing has changed.  And that’s why adversity isn’t really adverse—everything that’s eternal, that really matters, is still the same; the Great Realities remain intact.  And if the Great Realities form the basis for my comfort and my stability as they should, then darkness will not be dark to me, and adversity will not be my undoing.

But they haven’t been the basis for my comfort or stability, and so I have lived a subject—a slave—to the changeful ebb and flow of the things I can see.  I have been just like Christ’s disciples out in a boat on the sea.  They had their eyes only on what they could see:  “a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling” (Mark 4:37).  They did not look beyond the situation with eyes of faith to consult the Great Realities, and so they came to a fatal conclusion.  They assumed that all this trouble must mean that God did not really love them.  “They…said to [Jesus], ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’” (verse 38).  That’s exactly how I react to circumstances far less threatening than those the disciples encountered.  I, too, “exchange the truth about God for a lie” (Romans 1:25) because I look only at the things I can see, like disappointing events, the failures of people around me, or just plain bad weather, and fail to let “faith pierce through reason.”[ii] You see, those disciples did the same thing I do—they made decisions about the unseen things on the basis of the seen things, instead of the other way around.  They allowed their experience—what they could see and what was happening to them—to dictate their view of God instead of using their view of God to rightly understand their experience.

And so I want to become very familiar and very at-home with these Great Realities, and become like Moses, who endured much hardship and many calamities because he could see “him who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27).  And that is how, like him, I apprehend these things by faith—my spiritual sight must be sharper than my physical sight, and I must give more weight, importance, and consideration to what I can’t see rather than what I can see.  This is precisely what Abraham did when he “did not weaken in faith” (Romans 4:19) in spite of the fact that every circumstance was against him and seemed contrary to God’s promise to him.  God had promised him a son by Sarah, but his body was “as good as dead” and Sarah’s womb was barren.  But these things did not make him “waver,” because in his mind, God’s word was the Great Reality and it trumped circumstances.  He “grew strong in his faith” as he gave more weight and more priority to the things he couldn’t see, and less weight to the things he could see.

This, I believe, is the “secret” that Paul came to know in Philippians 4:11-13, and what I must come to know as well.  Paul knew “how to be brought low” and “how to abound,” and he knew how to face “plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (verse 12), for he had learned “in whatever situation…to be content” (verse 11).  That word “content” carries the idea of being independent of the circumstances.  How could Paul be independent of such circumstances as he faced?  He could be independent of the most dire circumstances because he was focused on the Great Realities, and his stability and joy were tied to them.  And he could be independent of the most satisfactory circumstances because his hope was really in God, and his joy and comfort were derived from Him.  He was not so preoccupied with the plenty and abundance that he forgot the Great Realities, nor so obsessed with the hunger and need that he lost sight of the Great Realities.  And so, even on my small scale, when I face disappointment, failure, adverse events, or bad news, I want to be independent of them because I grasp the Great Realities, and I understand that they remain the same, no matter what.  Likewise, when I encounter success, enjoyable events, or good news, I want to be independent of them because I know my real strength comes from God alone.  In short, I want to be more like God and say it’s all good, it’s all okay—nothing has changed.  Not really.

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[i] Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart (Ann Arbor, MI:  Servant Publications, 1995), 123.

[ii] Ibid., 17.