Article written by Clare Merry in June 1994, expanded in March 2025
KEY QUESTIONS
- Can you see divine light?
- What was the nature of the cloud in the Old Testament?
- When did the cloud reappear in the New Testament?
- Did the energy of the Resurrection consist of light?
Introduction
In 1994 I set myself the task of finding all the references to light in the Bible with the help of a concordance. I wanted to see what would emerge from looking at this theme in the Bible as a whole. I found it very enlightening and wrote up my article. I sent the first draft of my article to a priest to get advice. I was going to the parish church in the place where I lived in Chile at the time – the parish church was a Catholic church.
The priest very kindly wrote me a reply in November 1994. He told me that I had to find out what scholars have written about light in the Bible. He said that I was giving a spiritual answer to a scholarly question. Thus, I set about reading the notes at the bottom of the page in various Bibles and Bible commentaries.
I quickly found a lot of prophetless or profitless Bible scholarship. Any event in the Old Testament was deemed to have not taken place in the way described, or at all, and at any rate any foreseeing of it happening was re-dated to after the event had taken place, which maybe it hadn’t, with the author of the book reassigned to various committees of Bible authors known by acronyms! The ways of discrediting the Bible are very clever and ingenious. The rest of the faithful who read the Bible are apparently plain stupid.
I soon asked myself the question: is it worth wasting my time studying this profitless / prophetless academic tradition – illustrious as these scholars may be? What could any of them possibly have to say about light?
Today there are two types of writing about the Bible:
- Scholarly, clever discourses designed to disprove the authenticity of the Bible, ironically in the name of truth.
- Spiritual meditations on the Bible – taken as just a personal opinion. These are assumed to have a meaning quite separate from what the text really says and from what really happened.
My writing does not fit into either of the above categories.
I decided to study in order to make clear statements about what I believe and why I believe it, and quote from the Bible to support and illustrate my arguments.
My arguments are not simple opinions or poetic metaphors, they are a search for truth. This set the tone for the next 30 years of my writing; it became what I do.
Jesus did not want to put his ‘new wine in old wineskins.’ I don’t want to put my message into scholarly sclerosis. Let the dead bury the dead!
The manifestation of God both in history and in our lives is inseparable from real events. That is to say events which took place, things that were seen and experienced. The Bible is not just a metaphor; symbols of faith are often grounded in reality. Is the meaning more important than miracle? The meaning comes from miracle in the Bible.
Fundamentally, I believe that the spiritual and the phyical cannot be separated
For example, the meaning of my life cannot be separated from the events in my life.
The revelation of God cannot be separated from the historical events of the people of Israel.
I’ve returned to my article on light after 30 years as I am publishing articles on my website: merry and true.com
I have again searched all through the Bible for references to light, from the first day of creation in Genesis to the New Jerusalem of Revelation; from the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land which came to rest in the Holy of holies of the first temple to light manifested in the life of Jesus.
- Is light in the Bible symbolic or was it visible when it appeared?
- What did the appearance of divine light signify?
- Are there references to divine light that have been over-looked?
- Was divine light created or uncreated?
- If God’s light is unapproachable, what wavelength would it have?
Merry and True 