Part 1 – Light and Understanding

This Article is part of a multi-part Study Series called Light and Understanding.

“The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple (Psalm 119:130).

3But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: 4In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2 Corinthians 4:3-4)

Satan blinds people largely by using false religious ideas and the traditions of the spiritual darkness of works-based religion. Most always religion is based upon what you must do to fix yourself, neglecting the work of God in the believer’s life.

Many unbelievers reject God and His gospel of grace without having heard the gospel. Often, they do this because of what they’ve seen from organized religion’s blatant hypocrisy and TV preachers with their extortion system for money as a means to either earn salvation or blessing. Others are bond and stay bound within hierarchical religion’s teachings and traditions that fosters the false idea that you can earn salvation and blessing from God.

However, when God’s words do enter the soul, there is the “light” of the truth.

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face (the person) of Jesus Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6)

God’s words give “understanding unto the simple.” The word “simple” here means “silly, foolish, seducible.” In other words, this uninformed person is actually naïve, believing anything and everything heard. The soul that has not been grounded in God’s Word “rightly divided” as to what applies to Israel versus what applies to the members of “the body of Christ,” so such a one is vulnerable to constant shifts in thought and belief – they are unstable. Imagine someone spending an entire lifetime jumping from religious group to religious group, or bouncing from theological idea to theological idea to theological idea.

I myself, after being saved from Roman Catholicism in 1968, was then a Baptist, then Pentecostal, then the Christian Missionary Alliance, then a Charismatic, then on and on, until I found rest in knowing Christ as the all-sufficient Christian within me. God used this journey, but it was never God’s intention that we live in obscured truth... He will give us “light.”

In the first centuries, God the Holy Spirit gave “the Church… the Body of Christ” gifted men who wrote, collected, copied, and distributed the completed canon of Scripture. Their ministries culminated in the Holy Bible that we have preserved today (in English, it is the King James Bible, Authorized Version). God did this;

“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying (building up) of the body of Christ: 14(so) That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;” (Ephesians 4:13-14).

Of course, the cunning one behind the craftiness is Satan himself… proffering all sorts of rabbit trails for ungrounded believers to follow, only leading to more darkness. But, God’s words give light, and they give understanding to the simple, God gave us His words in a written and preserved form. Darkness remains until the soul walks in the light that he or she has heard and received.