Written by Jared C. Wilson |
Friday, March 11, 2022
Leadership of all kinds is lonely and costly. It is tiring. For every person with a problem, he or she is essentially all that exists. Affliction has its way of self-centering. But all the problems that exist are the leader’s. And for spiritual shepherds who take it all seriously, there is “the daily pressure on them of their anxiety for the whole church” (2 Cor. 11:28, par).

But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.— Exodus 17:12
Once upon a time, when I was a pastor, I sat with a dying friend and read to her from 2 Corinthians. This was our second time through the letter together. She was resonating a lot with Paul’s talk of afflictions and “jars of clay” and thorns and weakness. But I began to think something else was at play here, and my friend might not have even been conscious of it. See, she was a leader. And while her illness, which eventually did claim her life, had by necessity caused her to withdraw from the fray of church service and thrust her into a fray of a different kind, when I read Paul saying “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Corinthians 12:15), I think it described her to a “T.”
She had poured out immeasurably over the years for her family, her friends, her church, and her community. She seemed a tireless servant, sacrificing constantly to live simply and therefore generously. She had been our church’s “queen” of benevolence. And she had been a tireless evangelist, maintaining several long-term relationships with unbelievers very dear to her, whose salvation she  labored for over decades. (She had high hopes and prayers that her illness and perhaps even her death would serve as a turning point for their receiving the gospel.) Given all of the hard work she had engaged in for so long, it bothered her somewhat to be in that vulnerable position. She had always been the one who helps, the one who takes charge. But sometimes leaders need to be carried too.
Paul assumes so. Continuing in 2 Cor. 12:15, he writes, “If I love you more, am I to be loved less?” Elsewhere: “We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open . . . In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also” (2 Cor. 6:11,13).
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We can all rejoice that God is the God of light and that his Son Jesus is the Light of the World and the glorious fulfillment of Day One of Genesis. “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:4-5).

Human beings have a natural love for light. It is no wonder, for light and all it represents was the very first thing that God introduced into his creation.
The first two verses of the Bible proclaim,

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen. 1:1-2)

Creation was a structureless, lifeless, lightless, and watery chaos. And the Spirit of God hovered like a mother bird over the chaos. He loved the chaos, cared for the chaos, and was about to develop the chaos over a period of six days. Remember that we shouldn’t, strictly speaking, talk of “six days of creation,” for creation was achieved in a moment. Rather, Genesis 1 describes six days of God enlightening, ordering, filling, and enlivening his creation. This is day one:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning—the first day (Gen. 1:3-5).

1. God spoke light into existence.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (Gen. 1:3). Witness first the power of God: he speaks, things happen. In other words, what God wills happens. As Basil of Caesarea explained in his sermons on Genesis 1: “The divine will and the first impetus of divine intelligence are the Word of God.”
What happens, happens because God wills it to happen. There is no higher will than God’s, there is no will strong enough to compete with God, and there is no realm where God is not present and where his will does not rule. This is the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, and it is inherent in the word “God.”  God by definition is the eternal being whose will reigns supreme and unchallenged. Thus, we call God “Lord” or “The Lord Almighty” or “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
In the Greek Pantheon, each god competes with the others. Even Zeus—king of Olympus—is outwitted and manipulated and frustrated by the mischievous wills of both gods and men. Elohim is not at all like this. He rules, full stop.
Note especially the power of God’s words. For Paul, this underpins the gospel mission. The gospel is God’s Word, so it is inherently powerful. Mighty Rome might find it pathetically weak, and the philosophers might find it grotesquely foolish—but even the “foolishness” of God is wiser and mightier than the power and wisdom of humanity (1 Cor. 1:18-25). And when God speaks directly to the human heart and spirit, his word is invincible (2 Cor. 4:6).
2. Light is a marvelous thing.
For starters, light is very quick, moving just shy of 300,000 kilometers per second. If you drove your car to the sun at 110km/h (the speed limit) it would take you 157 years to arrive. But if you could ride a beam of light to the sun, it would take you only eight minutes and twenty seconds. I am always delighted by the thought that when I look up at the stars, not only do I see a glorious picture of the number of Abraham’s descendants, I see also the distant past, the light of far distant stars and galaxies that may have taken thousands of years to reach me.
Our amazing scientists still do not wholly grasp the paradoxical nature of light. Physicists talk about “wave-particle duality,” or a “duality paradox”; for on the one hand light behaves like waves and has frequency and amplitude, but it also behaves like particles that can be amassed and focused into a laser beam that can cut through steel. The Jedi knight’s brilliant light sabre might be mythical, but the sheer awesome potential of light is not. These two distinct properties of light have not yet been harmonized. Albert Einstein said,

It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do. (The Evolution of Physics, p. 278)

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Next time you’re tempted to sin, to fall into the sinful patterns all of us have in some parts of our lives, tell yourself this: sin is serious. Sin cost the life of the Son of God. Sin will eat away at us and enslave us, and the short-term reward from sin will not be worth the long-term impact on our faith. Run from sin and never take it lightly. Sin is far worse than any of us think it is.

When Christians think about sin, often it is in the context of our sins being forgiven. We know that we are sinners and that we do all kinds of things that disobey God, some of them unknowingly and some of them intentionally. But we have been forgiven for our sins, right? Jesus died for our sins in our place, our debt is paid, and we are free. That is great news and foundational to what it means to be Christian. With the knowledge that our sins are forgiven, and that we have been shown such grace, we can start to think that sin is not really that bad. After all, if I make a mistake, Jesus will forgive me, right?
Yet, in places like Matthew 18, Jesus says very harsh things about sin. Here’s a brief excerpt:
8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. (Matt. 18:8-9 ESV)
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