God Is Faithful….Even in the Dark

By: Alaina Mankin

During my middle school years, back in the 1990s, my family moved into a 19th century house in Illinois. It was a fixer-upper with a kitchen that had last been remodeled in the 1970s (orange countertops, navy blue linoleum, a weird tiki hut roof over the oven --- yuck!). My mom spent her limited spare-time restoring the house to some of its pre-Civil War charm. Despite the kitchen, there were aspects of the house I loved: a gigantic backyard, a library with built-in bookshelves, and a window seat the size of a sofa. But there was one room in the house I avoided – the basement.

The basement door stood at the top of a set of wooden stairs that descended into a windowless, musty darkness like a gateway to the Abyss. There was no light switch on the wall. In fact, there were barely any lights at all! The only illumination was a lone light bulb with a pull chain suspended in the middle of the room. I hated going into the basement during the day, but I refused to make that descent after dark. Years later, I learned my mother also refused to go down to the basement at night, despite that fact that it doubled as our laundry room. It was too creepy!

Was there anything dangerous in our basement? Not that I ever saw. But it was DARK. My over-active imagination associated darkness with spooks and ghouls and other unsavory creatures of the night. Nothing good could be found in darkness. All things good belong to the realm of daylight.

But then I come across verses in the Bible like Exodus 20:21, when Moses is preparing to meet with God on Mt Sinai: “And the people remained standing at a distance as Moses approached the total darkness where God was.” We read in Genesis, in the first sentences of the Bible, that “the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” (Gen. 1:2) Flip ahead to Psalm 139:8, and David writes that even “if I make my bed in Sheol” – the darkest dark David could imagine – the land of the dead – “You [God] are there […] Even the darkness is not too dark for you. The night shines like day; darkness and light are alike to you.” (Ps. 139:8,12)

The same God who created the sun’s blinding brilliance also created the soft glow of the moon and the distant beauty of planets and stars. He suspends the Earth in darkness. But darkness doesn’t equal emptiness. Even before He spun galaxies into motion, the black nothingness was filled with His presence.

Why do we fear the dark? The basement I would enter in the daylight didn’t change because the sun disappeared. But the darkness caused the basement walls to vanish, prompting my mind to conjure images of what might be lurking in unseen corners. Darkness is unknowable. Navigating the darkness requires a degree of trust—a mustard seed of faith that what we experienced in the light hasn’t been changed by the dark.

When David wrote about “making his bed in Sheol,” we know he didn’t literally spend the night in the realm of the dead. But he had spent time in an emotional pit of despair just as deep and dark. And who did he acknowledge was right there with him? God.

Our God is intimately acquainted with the darkest depths of human emotion, as demonstrated in the agonizing hours Jesus spent in the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest and crucifixion. He even prayed, “‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me – nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him. Being in anguish, he prayed more fervently, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (Luke 2: 42-44) Jesus – God incarnate – knew what it was like to be afraid, to be misunderstood, to be betrayed, to mourn loss, to suffer unimaginable pain, to be hungry, thirsty, homeless.

God doesn’t just understand the darkness that can invade our lives; He has experienced it. He doesn’t only encourage us through difficult times; He walks us through it. We read in 1 John 1:5 that “God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him.” But when we are in darkness – spiritually and emotionally – we can trust in God to bring us into His marvelous light. As David writes in Psalm 19:28, “LORD, you light my lamp; my God illuminates my darkness.”