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The Borrowed Light of God

candles reflected 400SXRegular columnist James Knight asks to what extent our lives reflect the light of God.

This year sees the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, where he provided a description of how gravity is explainable by objects warping space-time, rather like how a heavy ball would warp a rubber sheet when rolled across it. Funnily enough, it’s an illustration that could only be literally demonstrated thanks to gravity itself.
 
Einstein’s general theory of relativity came ten years after his research on special relativity, where he confirmed that reality cannot be confined to a single perspective. For example, the faster an object moves, the more compressed it becomes, and the slower time becomes. Einstein himself was aware of something like this phenomenon in everyday life – for example, watching a kettle boil for three minutes will seem longer than having a three-minute chat with a fascinating person. Whether you’re travelling at very fast speeds in a spaceship, or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, time, like reality in general, is about perspective.
 
Arguably even more fascinating than relativity is the nature of quantum mechanics, which tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. This was famously demonstrated with two mirrors bouncing light back and forth, creating physical regions in which each cancels the other out. The cancelling effect occurs when an incoming wave cancels out the outgoing reflected wave as energy passes through.
 
When I first learned of the two mirrors phenomenon, I thought of how it could easily be applied metaphorically to humans being like mirrors that give off the kind of light of that which we face (be it God, self-worship, greed for money, desire for power, or whatever). We frequently reflect onto the world the things to which we attach ourselves.
 
Central to the Christian message is that we should be attached to Christ, because all instances of goodness, love, grace and kindness in this world are really reflections of God’s goodness, love, grace and kindness bestowed upon us. Alas, we humans constantly stain our mirrors so that those reflections are harder to see. Yet we can be encouraged by the apostle Paul who reminds us that we are being transformed as Christians into the Lord’s image with ever-increasing glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). The more Christ-like we become, the more we are like mirrors that reflect the borrowed light of God’s awesomeness and impact those around us.
 
The reflected candles image is courtesy of John de Boer at http://www.freeimages.com/



James Knight is a local government officer based in Norwich, and is a regular columnist for Christian community websites Network Norfolk and Network Ipswich. He also blogs regularly as ‘The Philosophical Muser’, and contributes articles to UK think tanks The Adam Smith Institute and The Institute of Economic Affairs.

 
This article first appeared in The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity journal, and is reproduced with permission.


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