John M. Hull
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:9-12)
I feel certain that the author of this Psalm was blind. Nobody else could have described so powerfully the religious experience of the blind person, or could have interpreted so perfectly the presence of a blind person before God. Sometimes I feel I am being buried in blindness. I am being carried deeper and deeper in. The weight presses me down. Such knowledge as I have is disappearing, is so limited, so fragile, my hold upon it is so feeble. Should I then wish this? Should I accept it with some kind of spirit of sacrifice? Should I plunge myself in the inevitable, so that even my remaining knowledge will sink into ignorance?
Just as blindness has the effect of obliterating the distinctions, so the divine omniscience transcends them. Because I am never in the light, it is equally true that I am never in the darkness. I have no fear of the darkness because I know nothing else. Nobody can turn the lights out on me. So it is with God. God is indifferent alike to both light and darkness. He does not need the light in order to know, and the darkness cannot prevent him from knowing. In that sense, it is true that if darkness is as light, then light is as darkness. The older translation of the Authorized Version [of this Psalm] brings out the point more vividly: ‘Darkness and light are both alike to God’. This is not the image of a beam of light penetrating the darkness and banishing it. God does not overwhelm the darkness by his light; he represents that pure knowledge to which both light and darkness in their different ways point.
Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness
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