Out of the Darkness and into His Glorious Light

When I was a child, I enjoyed watching detective television shows. I’m not sure why, but they always captured my interest. Perhaps it was because we only had one station, and that was only when the antenna was aimed in just the right direction, leaving us with little choice. One of my favorites was Dragnet. In that show, Sergeant Joe Friday consistently interviewed witnesses and often gave this advice during his conversations: “I’m sorry, sir (or madam), just the facts, please.” He emphasized that, as an officer of the law, he was only interested in the unadulterated facts. "Tell me your story without bias—only the facts of the story!"

As humans, we are natural storytellers, which I believe is primarily because our Creator is a storyteller Himself. Unlike Joe Friday, God is not just interested in the facts. In His effort to reveal the universe to us, He conveys a story to His creation—humans—and has them write down what they hear so we can understand and know Him. Of course, we know this story as Scripture, but it is also present in the natural world—in His creation. “The rocks themselves cry out in praise of the Creator.” It’s as if we are all characters in a play He has designed. We seek His purpose for our lives, striving to live it out according to the story He has written.

In his significant work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis imagines the story of the incarnation:

"Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life? Well, suppose you could really have brought them to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested in flesh: all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you. He will not be made into a man if he can help it.

What you would have done about that tin soldier, I do not know. But what God did about us was this: the Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself, born into the world as an actual man—a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.

The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from His Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus, in one instance, humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed,’ He chose an earthly career that involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time, we saw a real man. One tin soldier—real tin, just like the rest—had come fully and splendidly alive.”

Lewis often observed that many of us waste this life in pursuit of “pleasures” with little value beyond the moment—possessions, power, wealth, sex—while God offers us eternal joy. Yet, for reasons we call sin, we convince ourselves that we can find life in this material world alone. We miss the real experience for the fleeting one.

Have you ever thought, “If I could just have that—whatever that is—then I would be satisfied?” And when you finally attain it, the joy of possessing it lasts only a moment before a new desire arises. We struggle to understand that the only “thing” that can truly satisfy our deepest longing is God Himself. The only way to truly come alive is to accept the death He experienced and be raised to new, real life.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat with my father, as you know, and watched as life slowly ebbed away from his body. I cannot get out of my mind the rhythm of his breathing—normally steady throughout the day but becoming halting as death approached. His chest rose irregularly, struggling for oxygen. Eventually, his breathing ceased, and his heart gradually stopped. His body was dead.

It’s hard to convey how emotional that experience was—not just because it was my father, but because all of us will face death. Watching him, I saw a reflection of what awaits me. As I sat at his bedside, I more fully understood the words on Lewis’s gravestone, borrowed from Shakespeare: “Men must endure their going hence.” None of us escapes the pain and suffering of physical death.

But this is Christmas—why dwell on death? Because in Advent, we enter the experience of darkness but emerge in the brightness of Light! Because of Christmas—because of the incarnation—we have hope! God does not leave us suffering by the bedside.

In his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory, Lewis offers one of my favorite phrases:

"At present, we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”

Because of Christmas, I am confident that we shall get in—because of Christ. Yes, “Joy to the World, the Lord is come!”