Day 32 (Year 2)  

Understanding Spiritual Darkness  

“Consider the covenant; For the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.” (Psalm 74:20 NASB)

When God entrusted Paul with the gospel mission to turn people “from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18 NIV), we must first understand that “darkness” refers to spiritual darkness. In today’s verse, the word “violence” summarizes the meaning of this darkness. The word is chamas in Hebrew, which also means “wrong, injustice, cruelty, malicious, or damage.” In summary, this word carries several facets of meaning.

First, from God’s perspective, injustice, wrongdoings, and maliciousness are all characteristics of spiritual darkness. I understand that such injustice, wrongdoings, and maliciousness exist both in unbelieving societies and in individual mindsets. For thousands of years and in many places, evil has usurped the presence of God’s righteousness, profaned His name, and destroyed the covenant He established with His people. Collective injustice can appear entirely correct in the eyes of the general public, yet they deviate from God’s path of justice. Worse still, these injustices often seem outwardly reasonable and difficult to refute because they benefit certain people. And those beneficiaries will strongly defend them.

Furthermore, maliciousness and injustice lead to violence and cruelty, oppressing the afflicted (Psalm 74:19, 21). History has shown that under feudal, capitalist, socialist systems, or any form of dictatorship or authoritarian regime, such systemic violence and harm inevitably emerge. This is not about which kind of system is in place, but about human sinfulness and departure from God’s true and righteous way. Darkness produces violence, and violence brings destruction.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, humanity as a whole has been pushed toward destruction. Over the past two hundred years, wealthy nations have exported their pollution and damage they created to poorer, less developed regions. The city where I live at the time of my writing, Hong Kong, has also suffered from this. Yet those who harm others ultimately harm themselves. Developed nations are now experiencing irreversible global damage due to modern lifestyles, including global boiling and related crises. As a result, the psalmist cries out for God to remember His covenant with humans, to act, to reward good and punish evil. This also implies that believers must strive to leave behind dark ways of living and enter into the governance of His divine light.

Reflection questions:  

1) Do you think there is spiritual darkness where you live? If so, how do you respond to it?  

2) When believers seek to break free from violence such as maliciousness, injustice, cruelty, harm, and damage, where should the starting point be?