Sunless

Yesterday was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the one on which modern druids and pagans derive particular pleasure. Unfortunately, it was very much overcast, and the sun could not be seen, neither here nor at Stonehenge (I am told that December's Winter Solstice was actually warmer than the Summer's!). There were no rays of light emerging by the Heel Stone and our pagan friends must have arrived and departed a little deflated. Still, there’s always next year.

Nature worshippers find her a querulous and callous deity. Rivers flood, seas rage, the ground hardens, the mud swallows. The Sahara is too hot, the arctic too cold, the jungles too sticky. Approach a majestic lion, and it will swipe you with its paw; the translucent jellyfish will sting your curious hand; the magnificent birds of paradise will fly off rather than suffer your approach. Our own bodies desert us and die, developing lethal lumps or simply wearing out. Nature, or ‘creation’, to use its biblical nomenclature, is cursed by Adam’s fall. She ‘eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God’, that is, the full number of God’s redeemed people to be saved, that the new heavens and earth might be ushered in. The Fall corrupted humans, angels and the physical fabric of the cosmos, including animals. In no way, however, was the Creator Himself compromised, retarded or damaged. Although the Fall elicited His wrath, which is described throughout scripture, but shall be fully felt on the final Day of Judgement, this is not a suggestion of alteration, but expression. God was righteous from the start; His wrath is merely an expression of His righteousness, an expression we might never have witnessed had Eve not taken the fruit.

The day is coming when the sun shall not be seen even on a cloudless day. In the midst of the new heavens and earth, ‘the city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light.’ (Rev 21:23). I too am disappointed that the sun did not cast its rays onto our land yesterday. Yet I look forward to the time in which it never shines again, for One brighter and more radiant will be the source of all light.

Image by NT Franklin from Pixabay