Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of just how drastic a division there is between light and darkness in this world.
We live in a time that pushes the attraction of the morally gray; in fiction, this is a character who’s labeled one way but acts in another. Usually it’s morally gray villains who are “bad but not that bad” and morally gray heroes who are “good but not too good.” While these can lead to some interesting stories and arcs, no doubt, as a reader and writer I often find myself sitting back and realizing what a slippery slope our embrace of the moral middle ground can easily be.
There are plenty of things once considered firmly in the camp of light or dark, good or bad, righteousness or sin now called to question in the cultural court. Couple that with the frequent teaching of a God who’s all love, no judgement, and a Jesus who was all “I do not condemn you” minus the “go and sin no more”, and at some point we wake up to find ourselves living in a world of skewed morality that treats good as wicked and wicked as good.
At times like these, when I’ve yet again been confronted with the moral grayscale in my novel-writing side-life, words like those in Psalm 26 stand out keenly to me. Herein the Psalmist openly invites Yahweh’s judgement, pleading examination down to his innermost parts—his kidneys and heart—with certainty in how he has walked uprightly in God’s righteousness. Furthermore, he lists the things he avoided…and here I find myself pausing, rereading the words again. There’s a sort of worship-parallel drawn in these words; “going in” with hypocrites and “the assembly” of evildoers paints a sort of antithesis to “going in” to the Temple and being in “the assembly” of God. Such a stark contrast is painted here, and the Psalmist adamantly refuses to sit among the wicked (the rasha— “morally wrong”). In other words, the Psalmist had no interest in mingling his righteous walk and worship of Yahweh with the immoral. He had his gaze and heart set where they belonged, which gave him such confidence he invited God’s examination with bold joy.
None of this is to discredit how Jesus sat with sinners, but while we share a meal with the sick, we are not called to share in the sickness. Too often it’s easy to put on the world’s clothes in a way that doesn’t make us stand out for Christ…it makes us blend in. If we want to make a difference and be a light, if we want to fulfill the Great Commission and spread the Gospel, it’s imperative we not become content with “morally gray”, living in the murky in-between, going in with hypocrisy and assembling with evildoers because it’s easier than standing against darkness for light. Let’s remember we are called to be tide-turners, not at the current’s mercy, and that when it comes to being judged righteous before God, we must do as the Psalmist did: wash our hands in innocence, walk in integrity, be redeemed by our Father, stand on level ground—and never stop praising Yahweh, who is Himself light, in every assembly we are part of. Even on the world stage. Even when everything calls for gray, let’s be light!
