Sermons
The Bright Side to Dark Times
Judges 21:25 - We just finished the book of Judges in our adult Bible class, and it’s hands down one of the darkest, most disturbingly wicked periods in Israel’s history. Dwayne mentioned that you don’t hear too many sermons about the last few chapters in Judges, and I think that’s because it’s hard to talk about even among adults, let alone with kids in the audience. I won’t go into graphic detail, but let me paint a broad picture of what this period was like and as I describe it to you, see if you notice any parallels to our modern culture. In the time of the Judges, people were open to any and all religious beliefs and practices and all truths were treated as equally valid. Those who claimed to worship the one true God had completely customized their religion, tailor made so they could worship God in whatever way was comfortable for them. Women were treated as objects to be used and abused, men committed homosexual acts with each other, even in groups, and they weren’t ashamed of it at all, it was almost like they were proud of it and saw it as perfectly normal. There was very little sense of social cohesion, and the 12 tribes that were meant to be united were divided against each other, to the point of physically taking up arms to wipe each other out. They lost their group identity and became much more individualistic, and it was an every man and woman for himself kind of world. The streets weren’t safe at all at night. You couldn’t just hang out in the town square at night for fear of being jumped by gangs. And the book of Judges ends with one of those gangs brutalizing a woman until she died, and then she gets chopped into pieces and sent out to the 12 tribes to be used as a tool to get revenge because they glorified violence.
The parallels to our modern culture are everywhere in Judges, and we could add to the list things happening today that are even worse than back then, and I realize it can be discouraging to think about the evil times we live in. We talked a few weeks ago about not growing weary in doing good, and one of the things that makes us weary and discouraged is how evil the world is. Especially since over the last century it seems like people have been abandoning God and the church in droves. Even back in the 1800’s, the English poet Matthew Arnold was troubled by society’s general loss of faith in God with the emergence of modern skepticism and scientific rationalism. And in a poem called “Dover Beach,” he wrote this line… “The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” He pictured faith in God as a tide wrapped around the shore of the world receding back into the sea, it’s crashing waves only to be heard faintly in the distance.
Now, if we stopped here, I will have succeeded in thoroughly depressing you, but my goal this morning is to encourage you not to be discouraged by the dark times we live in, but to see this time as an opportunity for the gospel to flourish. In fact, Justin Brierley, host of the highly popular Christian Radio show called “Unbelievable,” just released a book in 2023 called, “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers are Considering Christianity Again.” He argues that new atheism has crumbled from within, and scientific rationalism has left people empty, creating more interest in Christianity. He’s not saying more people are affiliating with churches, that’s another hurdle to get over later, but that there’s a new attraction to the gospel story of Christ, and the receding tide from Arnold’s poem may be coming back in. And one of his points is that if we didn’t go through the dark times of the new atheistic movement, it wouldn’t have given rise to this new resurgence of faith! I’ll be referencing his book throughout the lesson because he has his finger on the pulse of our culture, and I want us to see the bright side of dark times this morning by showing us 4 ways dark times can actually work in Christ’s favor.
1. It Makes our Christian Light Shine Even Brighter!
- Illustration: Whenever stores put diamond necklaces on display, they hang them against a black velvet setting. Why? Because the dark setting provides a contrast that makes the diamonds pop, instead of just being washed out by the background. The same thing is true with stars. They’re always out, but we can’t see them until it’s night time and they’re surrounded by darkness, and even at night in the city, it’s hard to see them because of our artificial light, but if you go out into the desert at night, that’s when the stars look like brilliant, sparkling diamonds strewn across the sky and they’re so beautiful you just can’t look away!
- Ruth 2:4, 8-9 [In this book, we get a rare glimpse of people living during the time of the Judges who were actually righteous and cared about serving God] - Because the time of the Judges was so dark and disturbing, it makes Boaz’s attitude and behavior SO refreshing, because he greets people with “May the Lord bless you!” and instead of objectifying Ruth and treating her like his property like the men did at the end of Judges, he treasures her and takes care of her. And Ruth herself is like a sparkling diamond in this book with her example of love and loyalty and self sacrifice and when you read the book of Ruth right after Judges, it’s such a stark contrast that it’s like beholding a diamond necklace set against a black velvet backdrop. And Jesus tells us to go and be that kind of contrast in the world too!
- Matthew 5:14, 16 - I couldn’t decide whether to make this a separate point, but I think it fits as a sub-point here. One of the bright sides to dark times is to realize we’re not the only ones who have ever lived in dark times. The Bible is filled from front to back with God’s people trying to be shining lights in a dark world, from Noah who lived in a time so wicked God destroyed the earth with a flood, to Israel under their evil kings like Ahab and Manasseh, to Jesus and Christians who lived in the Roman Empire.
- In Brierley’s book, he mentions Tom Holland who wrote a book called “Dominion” in which he chronicles the way Christianity has shaped Western culture for the better, and he talks about how the world of Rome was completely foreign to our own in a terrifying way. He described one of Caesar’s campaigns where he slaughtered a million Gauls and enslaved another million just to boost his political career. There was no remorse for this, only pride, and even people in the streets carried billboards boasting about how many people he killed.
- He said, “This is a really terrifying alien world, and the more you look at it, the more you realize that it is built on systemic exploitation. In almost every way, this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking.” It’s helpful for to realize as bad as we think things are now, things have been WAY worse for God’s people in the past.
- In Brierley’s book, he mentions Tom Holland who wrote a book called “Dominion” in which he chronicles the way Christianity has shaped Western culture for the better, and he talks about how the world of Rome was completely foreign to our own in a terrifying way. He described one of Caesar’s campaigns where he slaughtered a million Gauls and enslaved another million just to boost his political career. There was no remorse for this, only pride, and even people in the streets carried billboards boasting about how many people he killed.
- But it was precisely against this incredibly evil, violent, cruel, power-hungry backdrop that Christ’s life and teachings about love and self-sacrifice and forgiveness and hope and equal human dignity for all shine so brightly and change people’s lives so profoundly, to the point where our entire Western civilization was built on ideals that came from the light of Jesus’ teachings in dark times!
- So rather than throw up our hands and say, “The world is too wicked for the gospel to be effective,” we should say, “Now the world can see the light of Jesus SO much more clearly because it’s such a stark contrast to the way they’ve been living without Him!”
2. It Wakes People Up to the Emptiness of their Worldview
- Judges 19:30 [After the incident with the woman who was brutalized and chopped up, the tribes were absolutely horrified] - It’s been said that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you realize how far you’ve fallen. They’ve hit rock bottom here, and I wish I could tell you in their case that it led to serious long-term repentance. It didn’t, but it was at least jarring for them and they had the right response in the moment when they said, “Let’s consider how in the world something like this could have happened! And let’s take counsel and learn something from this, and then let’s do something to correct it!” They reached this point because of their moral relativism, the idea that everyone can do whatever is right in their own eyes, and it was such an empty and vacuous ideology that not only didn’t satisfy people’s souls, it led them to do evil.
- This is what happened to the New Atheist movement that labeled people of faith as idiots and labeled God as a monster and religion as evil. It left people totally empty and confused about what moral values to live by. They talked about doing what was good for society, but people in the movement couldn’t agree what was good for society. Brierley put it this way: “New Atheism had been largely united in agreeing that religion was bad and science was good. But it turns out that life is more complicated than that. Once the community discovered they held radically different views about how life should be lived once religion has been abandoned, things quickly spiraled downwards.” One atheist blogger put it this way: “the atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists, and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists, there are pro-Trump atheists and anti-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.” Without God, you’re left with moral relativism and you get to decide whatever morality you want to live by, and while I’m not saying being an atheist means you’re going to be this horrible person and become an ax murderer, if an atheist chooses to be kind, that’s just a personal choice and there’s nothing inherently demanding of that choice to be kind in the atheistic worldview, so other atheists are free to choose NOT to be kind, and there were many reports of sexual harassment and misogyny among the new atheist leaders, leaving many of their followers disillusioned and discouraged.
- Jeremiah 2:13 - When you abandon God, you’re left with a completely empty worldview, and Jeremiah describes it like trying to drink out of a bottle with a hole in the bottom. Not only did atheism leave people empty in terms of a clear moral path, but they left us with a very odd story of humanity. The story is, we were not put here for a purpose, we’re descendants of fish, we have no souls, we’re just really advanced bags of chemicals, and when we die that’s the end, so make the most of your time here because this is all there is. There’s no spiritual realm, there’s only what we can see.
- Now, we shouldn’t say that story isn’t true just because it’s we think it’s odd or because we don’t want it to be true. But over the decades, deep thinkers have realized this story is odd because it doesn’t match up with human experience at all. If that story is true, why does every human have an innate sense that there’s something more to life and that we must be here for a purpose, why do we have longings in our heart that seem unmet even by the greatest pleasures in this world, why are we so driven to worship a higher power, and if there’s no unseen realm, where did human consciousness come from, and why do we so often ponder our own existence and ask why am I here and where did I come from? Why do stories of good triumphing over evil and of worlds beyond our own speak so universally to the human heart?
- I agree with Brierley that we HAD to go through this dark period where we tried to remove God and rely only on science and reason to answer the deepest questions of life, because it exposed the fact that science and reason CAN’T answer the deepest questions of life! They CAN’T tell us why we’re here and how we should live, and they can’t answer the deepest longings of our hearts. Only God can!
- And that’s what the new conversation about God in our culture is all about now. It’s not as much focused on evidences for the resurrection or proofs the Bible is God’s word. Those things do come up still, but mainly the conversation is about meaning, purpose, and identity. The new conversation is about whether we can flourish and make sense of our world at all without God? And we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if our society hadn’t TRIED to live without Him for so long, so the dark times led to the bright side of a new emergence of interest in God because atheism and secularism left people empty and longing to be filled with substantive, real answers to life’s problems.
- John 4:13-14, 28-29 [Jesus spoke with a woman who’s empty worldview led her to get divorced 5 times and to now be sleeping with a guy she wasn’t married to. How fitting that he found her drawing water from a well, because it was symbolic of the kind of life she was living, clinging to one man after another, trying so desperately to fill some void and quench the thirst of her soul. And when she met Jesus, he looked at her, not with anger or judgment, but with compassion because he saw a woman who’s worldview made her so thirsty for real soul satisfaction, and her way of finding it wasn’t working. So He offered to quench her thirst once and for all] - Once she found Jesus, the true source of satisfaction, she left her water pot behind, a symbol of leaving her old life behind, and now instead of drinking from bottles with holes in the bottom, Jesus gave her a spring of eternal water than never ran dry. The bright side to our dark atheistic times is that atheism has left people so thirsty for something real, and many are finding that Jesus has the answers.
- And that’s what the new conversation about God in our culture is all about now. It’s not as much focused on evidences for the resurrection or proofs the Bible is God’s word. Those things do come up still, but mainly the conversation is about meaning, purpose, and identity. The new conversation is about whether we can flourish and make sense of our world at all without God? And we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if our society hadn’t TRIED to live without Him for so long, so the dark times led to the bright side of a new emergence of interest in God because atheism and secularism left people empty and longing to be filled with substantive, real answers to life’s problems.
- I agree with Brierley that we HAD to go through this dark period where we tried to remove God and rely only on science and reason to answer the deepest questions of life, because it exposed the fact that science and reason CAN’T answer the deepest questions of life! They CAN’T tell us why we’re here and how we should live, and they can’t answer the deepest longings of our hearts. Only God can!
- Now, we shouldn’t say that story isn’t true just because it’s we think it’s odd or because we don’t want it to be true. But over the decades, deep thinkers have realized this story is odd because it doesn’t match up with human experience at all. If that story is true, why does every human have an innate sense that there’s something more to life and that we must be here for a purpose, why do we have longings in our heart that seem unmet even by the greatest pleasures in this world, why are we so driven to worship a higher power, and if there’s no unseen realm, where did human consciousness come from, and why do we so often ponder our own existence and ask why am I here and where did I come from? Why do stories of good triumphing over evil and of worlds beyond our own speak so universally to the human heart?
- Jeremiah 2:13 - When you abandon God, you’re left with a completely empty worldview, and Jeremiah describes it like trying to drink out of a bottle with a hole in the bottom. Not only did atheism leave people empty in terms of a clear moral path, but they left us with a very odd story of humanity. The story is, we were not put here for a purpose, we’re descendants of fish, we have no souls, we’re just really advanced bags of chemicals, and when we die that’s the end, so make the most of your time here because this is all there is. There’s no spiritual realm, there’s only what we can see.
- This is what happened to the New Atheist movement that labeled people of faith as idiots and labeled God as a monster and religion as evil. It left people totally empty and confused about what moral values to live by. They talked about doing what was good for society, but people in the movement couldn’t agree what was good for society. Brierley put it this way: “New Atheism had been largely united in agreeing that religion was bad and science was good. But it turns out that life is more complicated than that. Once the community discovered they held radically different views about how life should be lived once religion has been abandoned, things quickly spiraled downwards.” One atheist blogger put it this way: “the atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists, and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists, there are pro-Trump atheists and anti-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.” Without God, you’re left with moral relativism and you get to decide whatever morality you want to live by, and while I’m not saying being an atheist means you’re going to be this horrible person and become an ax murderer, if an atheist chooses to be kind, that’s just a personal choice and there’s nothing inherently demanding of that choice to be kind in the atheistic worldview, so other atheists are free to choose NOT to be kind, and there were many reports of sexual harassment and misogyny among the new atheist leaders, leaving many of their followers disillusioned and discouraged.
3. It Wakes People Up to the Need for Community
- Judges 21:25 - Any time people in the Bible are serving God, whether in the Old or New Testaments, it brings them together in community. God understands part of human flourishing is social cohesion, so He unites us together in purpose, in identity as a family, and in the activity of service. But because the people in Judges had no king to lead them in God’s law, they became the gods of their own life and determined their purpose, identity, and activities for themselves. As a result, they become FAR more divided and individualistic.
- And this is what’s happened in the modern world. We’ve been told by atheism that there is no inherent meaning in life or shared identity. You can create your own meaning and identity, and while that sounds like freedom, it’s incredibly unsettling because it leaves you confused about who you should be and what you should be doing, and it leaves you lonely because everyone is doing their own thing. GK Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” This describes our culture so well! It’s hard to feel any sort of shared identity or cohesion with people who believe things that aren’t rooted in truth or reality at all.
- So we try to root our identity in how we present ourselves on social media, or based on our sexual orientation, skin color, or gender, or in what political candidates we support, but ultimately these things just divide us from each other because these false sources of identity apart from God focus far more on our differences than our commonalities.
- Plus, our culture is so politically charged because we’ve defined our identity by politics, so if you question or attack my political views, you’re attacking ME, and we’ve redefined love to mean validating everyone’s views as equally true, so now people are afraid to disagree with each other for fear of being politically incorrect or being cancelled or labeled hateful. There’s absolutely no grace or forgiveness in the identity groups people form today; if you don’t tow the line, you’re ostracized and branded a traitor forever, and even if you apologize, it’s not enough because without God, all you have to cling to for meaning and identity is your own narrative, and if someone threatens it, they’re threatening your whole world and it cannot be tolerated.
- Add to all this the fact that many people’s attempts to form communities happens online, which also leaves people feeling lonely because online connection simply isn’t the same as personal connection!
- Brierley references a book written by Graham Tomlin called, “Why Being Yourself is a Bad Idea.” And Tomlin argues that since we’ve lost our belief in God or any sense of cosmic order, there’s no longer any overarching sacred structure that holds the world together. So we’re left on our own as individuals in a world with no predetermined order to tell us who we are or where we fit in the grand scheme of things. And he argues that our isolated individualism is in large part what’s led to the mental health crisis in our country.
- “An increasing number of studies, especially during the pandemic, tell us that happiness and wellbeing are found not in isolated individuality but in social connection. It is through strong relationships with family, friends, and community that we truly flourish. In other words, focusing on my own unique individuality is the wrong place to look.”
- Plus, our culture is so politically charged because we’ve defined our identity by politics, so if you question or attack my political views, you’re attacking ME, and we’ve redefined love to mean validating everyone’s views as equally true, so now people are afraid to disagree with each other for fear of being politically incorrect or being cancelled or labeled hateful. There’s absolutely no grace or forgiveness in the identity groups people form today; if you don’t tow the line, you’re ostracized and branded a traitor forever, and even if you apologize, it’s not enough because without God, all you have to cling to for meaning and identity is your own narrative, and if someone threatens it, they’re threatening your whole world and it cannot be tolerated.
- So we try to root our identity in how we present ourselves on social media, or based on our sexual orientation, skin color, or gender, or in what political candidates we support, but ultimately these things just divide us from each other because these false sources of identity apart from God focus far more on our differences than our commonalities.
- And this is what’s happened in the modern world. We’ve been told by atheism that there is no inherent meaning in life or shared identity. You can create your own meaning and identity, and while that sounds like freedom, it’s incredibly unsettling because it leaves you confused about who you should be and what you should be doing, and it leaves you lonely because everyone is doing their own thing. GK Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” This describes our culture so well! It’s hard to feel any sort of shared identity or cohesion with people who believe things that aren’t rooted in truth or reality at all.
- Acts 2:43-47 - [With that bleak, dark picture in mind, look at the beautiful diamond necklace of God’s community in Acts] - Whether they realize it or not, this is what the world is desperately craving. The darkness of isolation in a lonely, confusing, divided, unforgiving world, tills the soil of people’s hearts to be ready for Christ to unite them and place them in an eternal heaven-on-earth community where we’re NOT doing what’s right in our own eyes, but we’re all united under ONE benevolent King, and we don’t have to wonder who we are or where we fit in the grand scheme of things, and we don’t have to figure out our meaning, identity, or purpose on our own. Those things have been revealed to us by our King; it’s our job simply to have the faith to walk in that purpose, embrace our true identity in Him, and live in a community of hope, joy, love, unity, honesty, and yes, grace and forgiveness!
4. It Wakes the Church Up to their Watered Down Presentation of the Gospel
- Whenever we talk about dark times, it’s easy to point the finger out there to the world around us, but in the book of Judges the darkness wasn’t just outside, but from within God’s own people. They were supposed to be the diamond necklace against the dark backdrop of the evil Canaanite world, but they became just as dark and so they weren’t a light to the world around them at all.
- Revelation 2:13-16 [This was another extremely dark time in history when Rome was persecuting Christians, and listen to what Jesus said to the church in Pergamum] - Jesus is telling this church that they need to wake up to the fact that they’re compromising with their culture and teaching things they shouldn’t. There’s no way they’re going to succeed in shining Christ’s light in a dark world if they aren’t actually teaching truth.
- Brierley pointed out that part of the reason the new atheism movement was so successful is because before that time, many churches were trying to be more seeker sensitive, to be more contemporary to appeal to younger audiences and throw off some of the more traditional aspects of worship, and what happened is that many of them gave themselves over to shallow emotionalism. They lost the robust intellectual teaching of God’s word and the conviction of the gospel and it became much more about good feelings and entertainment. So when intellectual giants like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens came along challenging Christianity, many churches had no answer. And what’s even more sad is that when atheists told a different story about humanity, many churches couldn’t express to their members and visitors why the story of Christ was far superior because their presentations of the gospel had been so watered down. They basically turned Jesus into a politically correct, loving hippie who tolerated everyone and didn’t make any demands on your life.
- One journalist named Ben Sixsmith, who’s not even a Christian, chastised churches for doing this!
- “I am not religious, so it is not my place to dictate to Christians what they should and should not believe. Still, if someone has a faith worth following, I feel that their beliefs should make me feel uncomfortable for not doing so. If they share 90 percent of my lifestyle and values, then there is nothing especially inspiring about them. Instead of making me want to become more like them, it looks very much as if they want to become more like me.”
- Brierley adds to this sentiment and says, “Many churches have made it their mission to appear ‘normal’ and as unthreatening as possible in their efforts to bring people through the doors. But those who walk through the doors are looking for something completely different to their ‘normal,’ everyday life. They want to be transported into another world, a different story!…While there’s no advantage to creating unnecessary barriers, churches shouldn’t dumb down their worship or their doctrine in order to win new converts. They should demand more, not less, of the people who come through their doors.”
- “I am not religious, so it is not my place to dictate to Christians what they should and should not believe. Still, if someone has a faith worth following, I feel that their beliefs should make me feel uncomfortable for not doing so. If they share 90 percent of my lifestyle and values, then there is nothing especially inspiring about them. Instead of making me want to become more like them, it looks very much as if they want to become more like me.”
- One journalist named Ben Sixsmith, who’s not even a Christian, chastised churches for doing this!
- Now gratefully God used the dark times of the new atheism movement to wake churches up to their shallow emotionalism and it sparked a MASSIVE apologetics movement among Christians to write books, create online courses, lecture on college campuses, and start websites and Youtube channels devoted to presenting clear, intellectually solid defenses for the faith! That was a wonderful bright side to the dark times, because it forced us to find answers to the attacks against God.
- But as I wrote about in today’s bulletin article, it’s not enough simply to appeal to reason and logic. We have to appeal to the heart and the imagination, and the gospel of Jesus Christ appeals to all of it, every part of us, in a way nothing else can! If we want to shine the light of Christ in a dark world, we must not water down the gospel by making Jesus sound like just another politician promising to make our lives better, or by presenting a Jesus who never says anything offensive or challenging to us, or by removing any notions of Hell or our need to repent, or by presenting the gospel as just one truth among many. No…
- People are SO exhausted from drifting around in a sea of subjectivity where everyone lives their own truth. They’re ready for a worldview that gives them objective truth, beauty, virtue, identity, purpose, and hope. They’re ready for the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if that wakes us up and makes us more ready and motivated to give it to them, that’s a pretty bright side to dark times.
- Rather than being discouraged by dark times, let’s see this moment in history as an opportunity to embrace and live out the gospel even more clearly in our lives to shine the light of Christ into a world that’s tired of groping around in the dark.
- People are SO exhausted from drifting around in a sea of subjectivity where everyone lives their own truth. They’re ready for a worldview that gives them objective truth, beauty, virtue, identity, purpose, and hope. They’re ready for the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if that wakes us up and makes us more ready and motivated to give it to them, that’s a pretty bright side to dark times.
- But as I wrote about in today’s bulletin article, it’s not enough simply to appeal to reason and logic. We have to appeal to the heart and the imagination, and the gospel of Jesus Christ appeals to all of it, every part of us, in a way nothing else can! If we want to shine the light of Christ in a dark world, we must not water down the gospel by making Jesus sound like just another politician promising to make our lives better, or by presenting a Jesus who never says anything offensive or challenging to us, or by removing any notions of Hell or our need to repent, or by presenting the gospel as just one truth among many. No…
Invitation:
If you’re not a Christian, I want to tell you the good news that Jesus is King, which not only means all of your sins can be completely forgiven, it also means there’s hope of a world beyond our own where all suffering, injustice, and even death itself will be done away with and all wrongs in this world will be made right. There’s hope to participate in the joy of an eternal kingdom we’ve dreamt about since we were kids and didn’t realize it, a kingdom where the good guys win and good triumphs over evil, where love triumphs over hate, where we live forever and never die, where we’re surrounded by beauty, where we’re completely safe in the arms of a loving Father who always takes care of us and never hurts us, and where we all live happily ever after in a loving family. Jesus came to unlock the world we locked away deep inside us as adults because we were told it’s foolish to believe in such things; a world we once knew but chose to forget. That world is real, and Jesus is calling us home.
- The_Bright_Side_to_Dark_Times.pdf (91.73 kB)
- The_Bright_Side_to_Dark_Times.pptx (3.45 MB)
- 04-13-25-AM.mp3 (2.05 MB)
