Not long ago, I walked into a small café
in Sydney. While I was ordering, I saw a newspaper sitting at the counter. There
was one prominent lead story on the front page. The story was about brothels in
Sydney: there was a government investigation going on into them. The newspaper
headline, in gigantic letters, very clearly indicated its moral outrage at
brothels, for “exploiting women”. But as soon as I’d read that headline, my
eyes moved upwards to a prominent picture at the top of the front page. It was
a picture of a woman in a bikini, obviously designed to be provocative,
advertising another story on page 10 of the newspaper. Do you see the irony? There
was a picture of a woman’s body being used to sell newspapers, so that people
could pay money to buy the newspaper and share in the newspaper’s moral outrage
against exploiting women’s bodies for money!

This is the world we live in. It’s a
world where money and sex, sex and money, rule the day. And yet, at the very
same time, it’s a world full of righteous moral outrage against injustice and
exploitation. Crazily, so often the ones doing the exploiting are the loudest
in their denunciations. The truth or logic or consistency of what’s being said
doesn’t matter. Rather, the person who shouts the loudest wins in the moral
outrage game, and that’s that. Of course, it’s much worse than hypocritical newspaper
headlines, isn’t it? Behind the headlines and the outrage and the denunciations
is real pain, hurt, and evil; often hidden, yet always there.

How do we as Christians react to this
evil? There are various options. For example, we can join in on the outrage and
denounce everybody around us. Or we can react in fear and withdraw from the
world, hiding from the horribleness of it. Or we can react by just trying to be
like everyone else: by assimilating and adapting so far that we are no
different from the world. What does the Bible have to say about our life in
this world? In
a previous post, I wrote about what Paul says in Ephesians 5:7: “Do not
become partners with them”. We shouldn’t become partners with a world under
God’s judgment. That is, we shouldn’t just become like the world in this regard.
That’s vital to hear. But if we just stop there, we might think that the
Christian attitude to the world is all about avoidance and withdrawal. After
all, isn’t that the safest way to avoid partnership with the world? We might
think that way. Yet that’s not where God’s word takes us. Rather, it takes us
to a very different place. The answer to the question about how to react to the
evil in the world isn’t about hiding. Instead, it has to do with a powerful
image: the image of light. Paul says:

For once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light: the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.Ephesians 5:8–9

Once darkness, now light

Paul says, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Our world is so often a dark place. It’s full of evil, and often doesn’t even know it or care to admit it. People want to be optimistic about human nature. Yet that optimism so often turns out to be a vain hope, flying in the face of the facts. When we honestly face the facts about our world and even our own lives, we can see that there’s so much darkness. There is envy, jealousy, hatred, exploitation, greed, broken relationships, lust, drunkenness, pain, abuse, and worse. That is darkness. But in Jesus Christ, says Paul, we are light. How are we light?