Read Genesis 1:1-5
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” (Exodus 20:21 NLT)
Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we’ll look closer at the sacred signs that shock, unsettle, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.
Part 13: Black / Darkness. From the first page of Scripture, darkness gets a bad reputation. We read that God speaks light into being—and assume darkness was evil. But Genesis doesn’t say that. It says darkness covered the deep, and God called light into existence. Darkness came first, not as sin or failure, but as the fertile soil of creation. The cosmos was conceived in shadow. Before there was form or breath or blessing, there was black. The light was not God’s escape from the dark—it was God’s revelation through it.
Still, we’ve long feared what we can’t see. We’ve turned darkness into a synonym for sin, ignorance, and danger. “Light equals good,” we were told; “dark equals bad.” That language shaped centuries of theology—and violence. Women were accused of signing Satan’s “Black Book,” while the Bible condemning them was bound in black leather.
Colonizers called Africa the “Dark Continent,” as if God had never walked its soil. Even our stories and art absorbed the bias: bad guys in black hats, good guys in white hats; villains cloaked in shadow, heroes clothed in radiance. In Renaissance paintings, Jews were rendered in dusky tones, caricatured with shadowed faces and exaggerated noses/features and shadowed, while Christians were depicted as fair, radiant, and pure. Skin, soil, and soul alike were graded on a false scale of brightness. Racism, misogyny, and empire baptized metaphor as truth—and the Body of Christ learned to fear its own shadow.
Our suspicion of darkness didn’t stop at color. It crept into the mind. We label people with depression or anxiety as “in the dark,” as though despair is a sin instead of a symptom. We tell them to “look on the bright side,” when Scripture tells us even the darkness is light to God. We shame those whose minds move through midnight, when in truth, many prophets did too. Elijah begged to die beneath a broom tree; Jeremiah cursed the day of his birth; Jesus sweated blood under a moonless sky. To call these experiences “unholy” is to forget how holy shadows can be.
We’ve also turned on artists who dwell in shadow—the ones who name what others hide. Goth culture, heavy music, black clothing, and the haunting beauty of lament get written off as “darkness” and, consquently evil, as if Christ doesn’t speak fluent minor key. Yet those who linger there often see what polite piety refuses: the ache beneath our veneers, the longing in our loss. When the Church fears them, it only betrays its fear of truth. The Gospel was never meant to be sanitized—it was meant to shine in the dark.
Science and Scripture tell the same story: apart from God, all is night. The cosmos is mostly black—endless silence between small burning stars. Light is the rare thing; darkness is the default. Earth itself drifts through that night eternal, kept alive only because one star still burns. So it is with us. Without the Son, our souls freeze in their own shadow. But when Christ enters the darkness, we see what light really is.
Darkness, then, is both tomb and womb. It buries, but it also births. The tomb of Jesus was no less dark than the womb of Mary—yet both held the miracle of life. Faith does not demand we flee the dark; it invites us to trust God there. “Children of light” are not people who refuse to touch the night—they are those who enter it carrying flame. We are called into the world’s pain, prejudice, and mystery, to bear witness that God is not absent in the shadowed places. God is already there, waiting to be seen.
We are not meant to fear or curse the dark, but to step into it—bringing warmth, justice, compassion, and truth. The task is not to make the world brighter by our own brilliance, but to reflect the One whose light no darkness can overcome.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The dark mind, the dark room, the dark season—these are not proofs of God’s absence but invitations to find God’s hidden fire there.PRAYER
Light of the world, enter our darkness. Teach us not to fear what we do not understand. Expose the lies that have shamed your shadowed children. Kindle mercy where fear once burned, and help us carry your light with humility into every night we meet. Amen.
Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).