Speed of Darkness

It's an interesting observation that when you turn on the light, the darkness has to leave first. Therefore, the darkness must travel faster than the light. Right?

Yeah, I know. It's a silly spoof on the laws of physics. And every time I hear it, I imagine this light spreading out from the center. Rushing forward in bright rays as the darkness races, frantically, to find a place. And I wonder, what happens when there is no place?

It made me wonder if this is how it works in the next age, when God returns to our universe in all His glory. He pours Himself into Jesus, spreading from Jesus into us, and then out into everything. Where will the darkness go?

I use darkness as a metaphor for evil. Light, of course, being righteousness. When God's righteousness is front and center every place You look, where will evil go? We know that God is true. When we're in His presence, we can't even lie to ourselves. He knows too much. Friends tell me I'm a good person. And I know there's so much that I'm ashamed of. Plus all of the stuff I don't know yet. Imagine having that shame put front and center before you every second of every day. Knowing you could never be good enough, and knowing that it's absolutely true. Soul crushing.

Hell - the place without God - goes hand-in-hand with judgement and punishment. What if it's not? Those words carry an undertone that God chose to hurt us. What if that hurt is a natural consequence of sin? We long to hide from the truth of God's presence. He puts us to shame. Not just with what we did wrong, but our attempts to cover it up too. When God's light fills the universe, where would you hide?

I think of punishment in terms of reconciliation. I punished my children in an attempt to replace a long term pain with short term pain. The purpose being to teach them right and wrong, bringing them back into our family and to God. That's not what will happen here.

In this scenario, the dark is driven out by the light. It's not reconciling, not balancing. The light takes over. Period. It's all light. So what does that mean?