Darkness at Home

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. (Genesis 15:12)

Sometimes even when we’re doing the right thing, and going in the right direction, things get worse instead of better. In our most difficult times, that “worse” is not because of bad things happening “out there” in the big bad world, but because of things happening right where we live. Sometimes in the place where we most want light and comfort—in our own home—we find darkness and brokenness instead. These are the times when we are most severely tested. And that testing—these temptations—can go on for years.

Both Abram and Jesus faced that kind of trial and temptation. Their struggles are pictured in Genesis 15:7–21 and Luke 4:22–30, which I invite you to read in your Bible or using the links provided. As we have been discovering in this series, the outward trials that Abram faced also give us a symbolic picture of the far deeper trials that the Lord faced while he was here on earth.

A strange ritual

Among the many stories of covenant in the Bible, the story of God’s covenant with Abram in Genesis 15 is among the strangest to our modern ears. The famed voodoo rituals of sacrificing chickens have nothing on this story! Animals are cut in half and arranged with their halves opposite each other, and Abram must drive the birds of prey away from their carcasses. It’s all so gruesome! It reminds us that this was an ancient, and in many ways primitive culture in which God appeared to Abram and his descendants. Today, rituals of animal sacrifice are the stuff of tabloids. To Abram, animal sacrifices were as ordinary as going to church is for religious people today.

Yet even for Abram, this particular ritual was not a pleasant one. Slaughtering animals was all in a day’s work. But driving away birds of prey was not. And as darkness fell on the land, a nightmarish vision took hold of him: “Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.” Then, “when the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking brazier with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.”

A distant promise

What all of this is pointing to is that while making a covenant with God offers a tremendous promise for the future, it can be a difficult and even disturbing experience in the present. At the time, Abram was “a stranger in a strange land,” to use Moses’ autobiographical phrase (Exodus 2:22; 18:3). It would be many generations before the wonderful promises God made to Abram in this chapter would come to fruition. It would be many generations before his countless descendants would not only live in this land, but be sovereign there and consider it their homeland. When God made the promise to Abram, it was still “the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.” Abram himself was a foreigner living among these settled nations.

In Genesis 15, God renews his covenant with Abram, and strengthens his earlier promise to Abram that he would become a great nation, telling him that he will give to his descendants this land, in which he was now a foreigner. Yet God also said that before this happened, his descendants would be enslaved in a foreign country, where they would suffer and be abused. In other words, God made Abram a wonderful promise, but also told him that in order to enjoy that promise, he and his descendants would have to suffer many harsh things for many years.

Isn’t it often the same for us when we listen to God’s voice, and set out in a new direction in life? We would never make a change if it weren’t for the promise of a better life on one level or another. But if we knew from the beginning everything we would go through to get there, I suspect most of us would never even start out on the path. We would just stay right where we were, in our flat and uninspired lives.

Foreshadowings of struggle

Yet just as God told Abram in general terms the struggles his descendants would go through, so the Lord does give us some inkling, as we move forward on our new spiritual path, of the struggles that lie ahead for us. The moment we start trying to change our lives for the better, we begin to become aware of all the foreign and hostile nations that inhabit our own mind and heart. We become aware of our wrongheaded ideas, our less than noble desires, all the excuses we make up to justify our own self-centeredness and lack of concern for others, and even our own depressive and self-defeating ways of thinking, which hold us down. These things and more are represented by all those nations that inhabited the land where Abram was a mere stranger.

These wrong ideas, attitudes, and desires are not somewhere “out there,” so that we can point the finger and consider the problem solved. No, they are right in our own home; they are right inside of us. And they are often manifested in darkness and coldness right in our own household, among our own family. The warm and loving home that we wish we could come home to is not the home that we actually have. Where there should be a fire in the hearth, there are instead burnt-out ashes.

Jesus rejected in his hometown

This was certainly the experience Jesus had when he went to his hometown of Nazareth. Not long before, he had started his public ministry. By the time he headed to his hometown, he had already begun to show his power. And at first, things seemed fine for him in Nazareth. As we saw in the previous article in this series, Jesus went to the synagogue and read a prophecy from the prophet Isaiah. The people were hanging on his every word as he said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

Yet he knew that they were listening raptly not to be taught by him, but to test him and discount him. He was a hometown boy. How good could he be? Reading this attitude with pinpoint precision, Jesus named it—and brought their fury down upon himself. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,” Jesus told them, and proceeded to illustrate this with stories of two of their own prophets who gave their healing and sustaining blessings, not to Israelites, where the reception was cool, but to foreigners, who were more receptive to the message.

When the people of Nazareth heard this, they proved just how accurate Jesus’ reading of them was. Instead of admitting their own skepticism and the accuracy of his portrayal of it, they drove him out of town, intending to kill him by throwing him off the cliff at the edge of the hill on which the town was built. But in some mysterious way, he managed to thwart their wrath. “He walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” I can think of a few times when the ability to walk right through a hostile crowd would have been very useful!

But think of the experience Jesus was having. He had already begun to achieve some initial success and recognition in his divine calling. Then he went to his hometown, where he would be among his family and friends and all the familiar faces from his youth. There, instead of getting a warm reception, he encountered faces that were walls of skepticism and disbelief—which quickly changed into murderous fury. And this was right in the synagogue!

Even this story of Jesus’ experience of rejection in his hometown has its deeper tale to tell. For Jesus, who was God in the flesh, the whole earth, and all its nations and peoples, was his “hometown.” He came to the people he himself had created, and instead of getting a warm welcome, most of them rejected him. The earth was his, and the fullness thereof, and yet where there should have been light and warmth and love for their Creator, he found blindness, skepticism, coldness, hatred, and a desire to snuff out his presence from among them.

And these were the people he had come to save.

Darkness and struggle along the way

Not long before, at his baptism, Jesus had experienced the inner comfort and joy of having the Spirit of God descend on him like a dove, and of hearing God’s own voice speaking words of love. But immediately afterwards he had undergone forty days and nights of fasting in the desert. Then at the end of the forty days he was severely tempted by the devil—and came through the temptations victorious.

Abram heard the promise from God’s own lips. But he was still engulfed by a nightmare, and he was told that it would be generations of struggle before the promise would be fulfilled. On a deeper level, Jesus, who had just heard the divine promise, was plunged even more deeply into the coldness and hostility of those who should have been his family and friends. These, of all people, were the ones he would most love to reach out to on a personal level, and find openness among them. But of all people, they were the most resistant. He found that he no longer had a home in Nazareth. He saw the darkness in his hometown. And in the end, he walked right through that hostile crowd, and went on his way.

Where is our true home?

Sometimes we are faced with the same darkness at home. It may be coldness in our literal household, among our family members. This is one of the most painful ordeals that any of us can face: longing for warmth and comfort at home, and finding only coldness and emptiness.

But perhaps the real coldness and emptiness is in our own heart. Perhaps we have been looking for home in the wrong place. As long as we are here on earth, we are strangers in a strange land; we are foreigners sojourning in a place that is not our true home.

Perhaps the times of dark emptiness that we experience in our home and in our own heart are God’s message to us, calling us forward, through struggle, to our true home.

(Note: This post is an edited version of a talk originally delivered on February 22, 2004. For the next article in this series, please see: “A Critical Question.” To start at the beginning of the series, please go to the article, “What Child Is This?”)

For further reading:

• A Promise and a Mission
• Is it Easy or Hard to Get to Heaven?
• If God is Love, Why all the Pain and Suffering?
• Why Is Life So Hard? Why are there So Many Struggles?
• Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth

About Lee

Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.