Day 37: Clear-cut opposition - light or darkness

Yesterday I've explained what I believe to be the primary spiritual category which God uses as He looks upon humanity as it's revealed in Scripture, and that is, faith or unbelief. God looks primarily upon man and says, "Does he believe, does he not believe in Jesus, the Son of God and the message of the Gospel in the Word of the God." Race or other attributes are secondary to that primary category of belief or unbelief.

Today I'm going to share on what I believe to be God’s moral categories and I'd like to say that there isn't necessarily a hard and fast distinction between spiritual and moral - it's just a kind of guideline, that's all.

For an insight into God's moral categories, I would like to turn to the First Epistle of John which is as clear and as thorough an example of these categories as I think you can find anywhere in the Bible. In a certain sense, this is one of the main themes of this Epistle of John. It's to unfold God's categories to us and in every case, they are in clear-cut opposites. There's hardly any room left for compromise. God's categories don't leave any room for what has come to be known as "the relative morality," where if you look at a think one way, it's this way and if you look at it another way, it's that way. Nor do they leave any room for what has come to be called "the new morality."

A friend of mine who's a fellow preacher, was once asked, "Do you believe in the new morality?" And he paused for a moment and thought carefully and then he said, "Well, if you can think of one new sin I could believe in the new morality." The truth of it is, there's no new sin and there's no new morality. So let's look at some of these clear-cut opposites in God's categorization as they're illustrated in the First Epistle of John. First John, chapter 1, verse 5:

“This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” (NKJ)

Notice, it's clear-cut opposition - light or darkness. And then he goes on in the very next verse to say:

“If we say that we have fellowship with God, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” (NKJ)

Notice again the clear-cut opposites there - lie or truth, light or darkness. They are absolute terms in which God thinks and divide the things. He wants to change our minds to look at the world in the same way. And we will see sharper how much God's mercy is needed, which through our testimony to this world can penetrate.