In the New Testament letter of James, we find this reference to God as the, “Father of lights with whom there is no shadow or variation due to change” (James 1:17). Presenting God as changeless is a significant departure from the traditional view of a Deity bearing human emotions of likes and dislikes, moods and changing attitudes. We so routinely and casually ask for God’s special blessings or favors that we may not stop to realize we are indeed addressing a perception of a Creator whose attitudes and behavior are quite subject to change. Could James’ changeless Father of lights bless and not bless, or pass out serpents and stones when we really need fish and bread?
It is certainly easiest to think of God in terms of our human relationships. There are times when we feel close to those around us, and times when others or we seem more distant, depending on prevailing moods. For some we would grant favors without question. For others, our favors would come with conditions.
Many think of their relationship to God in much the same way we might think of our relationship to the sun. We have full sunny days and we have cloudy days. We have daytime when the sun is out and nighttime when the sun is not. We experience the sunrise and the sunset, the skin-burning summer sun and an icy cold winter sun. The sun, we might conclude, has many moods.
All of these variations, however, have less to do with the nature of the sun and more to do with our relationship to it. When you think from the perspective of the sun itself, you see a very different picture. How many days has the sun seen, for example? We say this closest star is something in the neighborhood of fifteen billion years old. How do we measure a year? That would be 365 sunrises and sunsets. Multiply that by fifteen billion and you have more days than most of us can wrap our minds around.
The sun itself has seen but a single day, and that day has stretched throughout the duration of its life. The sun has never risen, never set, never known the cold of winter or the dark of night. It has never seen a shadow or experienced the dark corner of a cellar. If the sun peers into the corner of a cellar, it sees its own light. Nor can the sun see the long shadows cast over the evening landscape. There is no variation due to change.
Like the sun, we cannot understand God from the ever-changing human perspective. Impossible as it may seem, we have to think of God from God’s perspective. From the sun’s perspective we can understand how it can never see a shadow, how there is only one condition and that condition is light. It is only as we think of God from God’s perspective that we can begin to grasp the truth that there is only one Presence and one Power. There is not good and evil, not light and shadows, but absolute good, as in absolute light.
Using this familiar example of the sun, the abstraction of a changeless God of absolute good does not seem so abstract. And the abstraction lessens even more when we consider that eternally shining light at the center of our being. We sift through our ever-changing moods, our senses-based definitions of God to find that true core where there is no shadow or variation due to change. As the sun sees only light, so we see only light when we view our lives from our own radiating center of light.
It is a comfort to me in my darker moments to think of God from God’s perspective. There are no darkened moments in God. Why should I succumb to shadows I see only because I have lowered my vision to the spinning earth and the affairs of the human condition and turned my back on the life that is the “… light of men”, the light that “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:4-5).
The light that you and I seek is here now, has always been here, and will always be here. As we commit to opening our minds and hearts to the God perspective, every shadow dissolves into the nothingness from which it came.
J Douglas Bottorff 