Through the Twilight
Isaiah 50:11a
Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who equip yourselves with burning torches! Walk by the light of your fire, and by the torches that you have kindled!
My wife and I have recently started watching reruns of the old show ‘The Twilight Zone’ during quiet nights when the kids are asleep, and I’ve found some of the script-writing to be surprisingly edifying. I especially loved a moment in last night’s episode called ‘No Time Like the Past,’ where a man laments his life in the post-World War II era by saying, “Man … his bombs, his poisons, his radioactivity, everything he designs as an art for dying is his excuse for living.” I can’t help but hear in that cry the thundering echoes of Isaiah 50:11. To a time-traveler from the 1950s, the site of laptops and cell phones and smart cars might initially fool him into thinking we’ve finally become enlightened, but we haven’t. The city of man today is the same old fire-pit it’s always been, just a little more modernized. And we don’t have water to put out the flames. Only gasoline.
Oh how blinding the torches of modern idolatry that darken the streets. But oh how brilliant the light of Christ who lightens our steps!