The Sun and God: A Comparison of Light

The Sun and God: A Comparison of Light

January 29th, 2008

It takes a power outage to realize just how much we rely on lights in our day-to-day life. When all the lights suddenly shut off and it is dark, the only light we can see is the light of the Sun. When there is power, however, we try to fill up our homes with the imitations of the Sun. We use lamps and light bulbs to imitate what the Sun gives us. But, none of these imitations could come close to the brightness of the Sun. We see this comparison differently with a power outage when we see just how much brighter the Sun is. That’s hard to see when our homes, offices, and schools are filled with imitations of its light.

Similarly, we fill up our homes and lives with imitations of God. Whereas the Sun brings us light of no comparison, God brings us peace, joy, hope, security, pleasure, beyond anything we could imagine. But we try to imitate these characteristics. We’re taught that we can gain those things for ourselves—we can create them. If we work hard enough at our jobs, we can make our own security. If we plan for an early retirement in the tropics, we’ll have peace. If you make enough money, you’ll be able to buy a new car, which will definitely bring joy. If you’re free enough to travel the world—that will bring you pleasure. Do you see what we’ve done? Just like the lamps and light bulbs, our imitations of God could never compare with his characteristics. If we were asked to compare the brightness of a lamp and the Sun, we would laugh at the absurdity of it. There is no way the lamp could ever come anywhere close to competing with the Sun.

There is no way that jobs, retirements, cars or travels could ever compete with the peace, joy, hope, security, and pleasure that is our God. The comparison is a joke—and yet, every single day, we compare them in our minds and—here’s the sad and scary part: after comparing them in our minds, most of the time we pick the imitation.