Musing050410, God is light by John

I John 1:5 says, "God is light; and in him there is no darkness at all."

God is spoken of as Light. Darkness, usually represents sin, rebellion, etc. in both the New and Old Testament. God is Spirit, and there is no comparison for Him.

Physical light has aspects that remind us of God. It's a fact that light is so unusual as to be an enigma to many because we haven't been able to plum the depths of it. For instance, scientists have discovered how glowworms and fireflies produce light by chemical reaction and can reproduce it. Human beings discovered ages ago that fire emitted light. From the beginning of our race, we have known the Sun, Moon and Stars are visible to us, but most us don't stop to realize that we only see light, not dark. Later in time, some of those heavenly specks were determined to be planets with no light of their own. They reflect light from other sources, mainly a star called a sun, but perhaps from more than one sun.

Still later, a technical team measured the speed light traveled in a vacuum at 286,200 miles per second. After that discovery, astronomers began to measure the distance to stars using the distance light could travel in a year. That works out to be 6 X 10 to the twelfth power, or 6,000,000,000,000 miles.

Other scientists worked with how we see light. We hear people say, "Put it down in black and white!" That may be used in reference to most anything, but usually it means to make something extremely clear and concrete. Our eyes see black when there is an absence of light, and in God's nature artists tell us there is no such thing as black. If you can see it, it has light in it. So where do all the colors come from? The answer of course is white. Looking at a rainbow reveals the light colors our eyes can see. When the different wavelengths of light are separated, we see those differences as colors starting with red and moving through the spectrum to bright blue/violet. Scientists discovered that all materials absorb various waves lengths of light, and those that are reflected to our eyes are one or more of the colors we recognize. Yep! Light is made up of waves of energy. The waves are of different length and they are traveling through air/space at different frequencies. When we see red, we are seeing the longest wavelength. It is about 780 nm in length. The shortest wavelength belongs to violet. It ranges between 455 and 390 nm. All the other visible colors have wavelengths between these in the order we see in a rainbow.

Light also has frequency, too. All of the visible colors fall between red beginning at 384 THz and ending with violet at about 769 THz. The latter means it changes from positive to negative 769, 000,000,000,000 times per second.

Most everyone knows our eyes are receivers of light, and cameras work something like our eyes do, but our eyes are so much more efficient. Some might doubt that, but it is a point I don't argue perhaps because my own eyes have been failing for many years.

I really enjoyed summertime when I was a child, and one of my favorite toys was a fine magnifying glass. I could see things with it that my myopic eyes could not see without it, but there was more. I could burn my name into a piece of paper using the light from the sun concentrated by that lens. I never dreamed that one day people would develop lasers. Laser is a coined word made up of most of the first letters of this phrase: Light Amplification Stimulated by Emission of Radiation. Laser beams can be narrow. Many of us have either used, or seen others use, a laser device as a pointer, but there are other lasers that deliver wide beams with a variety of colors. The intensity of laser beams have the power to cut through metal, and can be sensitive enough to reattach a torn retina in the back of a human eye.

Frequently we think of our eyes as being able to see certain distances. I once asked a fifth grade class how far they could see. Their answers ranged from five to twenty miles. I then asked how far the Sun was from the earth. Hands shot up, because we had just covered that in class. I asked if they could see that far, and the "light" of understanding sparkled in their eyes. One suddenly burst out with, "We can see a lot farther than that!" They began to realize their eyes were more like cameras than ray guns, and like cameras our eyes do not see all there is in light. We do see blends of the different frequencies. Yellow and blue blend to make green. Red and yellow produce orange, Blue and red produce violet, and yet with all the billions of blends, there are still other sorts of light.

Some glasses are treated to keep out UV, that's ultra-violet light. Invisible Black light is used to light up florescent materials in art displays, etc. The heat from light travels from the sun to us without losing any of its power. We would burn without the insulating effect of our planet's air diffusing that powerful light. Can you begin to see how something as simple as light is actually almost, if not, beyond our ability to know and understand? For instance, almost all if not all materials if heated sufficiently produce light. God is light.... Does that light show how much God has put Himself into our very creation?

God has told us He is all-powerful, omnipresent, omnipotent, and that his ways are higher than our ways. Yet, He loves us. That is incomprehensible to me. I accept it by faith, and He has stated in His Word, "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God, and so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him." (I John 4:15-16) Light is just one of His magnificent gifts of love to us. It challenges our understanding, and our Heavenly Father challenges our faith. We can understand what He does for us, but we will not fully understand Him until we stand in His presence as I Corinthians 13: 12 says, "Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully know."