On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. (Revelation 21:25, NIV)
May I wage a complaint against our fair game? Here it is: we can rarely play it at night.
Oh sure, there are executive courses with enough lamps to light tees and greens. But the full-length course with lights illuminating every dark corner? You find few of these. (The self-advertised longest lighted course in the world, at nearly 6,800 yards, is Beacon Lakes Golf Club outside Houston, Texas. Maybe I need to move!)
The Bible may not be on my side when it comes to my desire for night golf, however. It may surprise you to find that Scripture speaks in several places of the misdeeds of the night.
In previous generations, before the proliferation of electric lights, the hours after dark belonged to two notorious kinds of people: revelers and thieves. “Drunkenness, orgies and the like”—a snippet of Paul’s list of acts of the flesh in Galatians 5—these were activities that belonged to the night, when a person’s sins would be covered by cloak of darkness. Any citizen of good repute would stay behind the doors of his house after dark, and the gates of the city were locked against all enemies.
Even the good man, Nicodemus, understood the principle of cover. He came to Jesus at night with his questions of salvation.
On the other hand, the Bible speaks of the lighted nature of good deeds. Jesus’ people, Paul, Silas and Timothy wrote, “do not belong to the night or to the darkness…we belong to the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:5, 8). Indeed, any person whose deeds are representative of love, kindness, and self-control (among other Holy Spirit-instilled traits) has no need to worry, for “against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:23).
All of this is confirmed in John’s vision of the new Jerusalem in Revelation. In that day, while the light will expose every deed, no deeds will be “exposed” in the way that they are uncovered now as sinful. Repelled by its light (the light of God’s own glory), nothing “shameful or deceitful” will enter the holy city.
It is unlikely that Paul was ever aware of John’s revelation, but he certainly would have stood by it. For what John saw in the future, Paul encouraged even now: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:8-11).
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Jeff Hopper
April 23, 2012
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