Light in the Darkness?

“You are the light of the world…”

— Matthew 5:14

Where do Christians get the audacity to call themselves the light of the world anyway? Surely they can’t be the only light, right? What about all the other religions and philosophies that people have? They can enlighten, right?

Well, the short answer is the Bible (Matthew 5:14-16); but that would just be self-affirming wouldn’t it?

“The book my whole faith is centered around decreed it, therefore it must be true!”

While this might be a good enough argument for most believers, I think a deeper analysis is needed.

In order to get a proper answer, however, we should explore the conditions in which Christianity first appeared: the Roman empire.

Basically the whole world practiced pagan religions. Each region had its own cults, gods, beliefs, and stories. These collections of faiths were not as united as modern society would believe. Sometimes there was overlap between religions, sometimes there wasn’t. Nothing was really written down in the sense of a “bible," and many beliefs changed over time. None promised comfort, peace, or love the way we are used to hearing about it in Christianity. All demanded sacrifice to appease the gods and dissuade their wrath. There was a constant fear that the world would end; and none of these gods really cared for human beings or loved them. The creation simply existed to serve, appease, and entertain their masters. Essentially, the human race was created to be subservient.

While these ancient beliefs are often romanticized in the modern age, the actual history paints a very different picture. Many of these religions involved ritual mutilation and violent sacrifice. Sometimes the gods demanded wars be fought or even human beings to be slaughtered in rituals of appeasement. The sanctity of human life was nonexistent. To make matters worse, these religions also generally promised meager rewards and a bleak outlook on what happens after death. Human beings would suffer much in this life, only to suffer slightly less in the death. Unless one did heroic deeds or somehow earned some sort of favor from a god, there was no real hope of escaping this dismal fate. Even then, that hope was miniscule. Human beings were essentially just slaves to their gods and passions. (Including academic references for these statements is beyond the scope of these meditations, but I would invite you to read some of the literature for yourself.)

Then some men and women from Judea came along and started preaching a radical new message. Human beings were not created to be subservient slaves, but had merely fallen from a highly exalted existence. There was also only one God; He has a Son; this Son became a human being, while remaining perfectly Divine, in order to redeem that fallen race; and He promises freedom from this bleak existence to anyone who believes in Him.

The creator to creation dynamic was completely flipped. In Christianity, the Creator loved the creation to such an extent that He became a creation, along with them, without changing His status, in order to bring this creation back to its exalted existence. This point is key. Rather than simply existing and working for their gods, human beings could now work and be with the one God. In fact, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that God serves His creation just as much, if not more, than His creation serves Him. This companionship between God and people is something uniquely Christian.

Rather than fearing the wrath of many supernatural beings, people could now relish the love of the One Being. Rather than constantly offering sacrifices to ungrateful gods, the one God offered Himself as an eternal sacrifice to liberate humanity from its former chains.

Death was no longer something to be feared. Life after death became something beautiful. The end of the world, arguably the most fearful event for pagan religions, was something to be looked forward to.

Everything was to be made brand new.

That is the message early Christians were preaching and late pagans were hearing.

How would it have sounded to someone who was just hearing it for the first time?