Was God living in the dark?

I think I might be able to clarify the Christian position.

The bible begins with the words: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and the darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:1, 2). The phrase “in the beginning, God created” can also be translated roughly from Hebrew as “When God began to create.”

St. John’s Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:1-5) In Greek the word for “word” is “logos” which was also understood at the time to mean the whole of being, or the whole of existence.

You are correct in saying that darkness is in fact absence of light. Darkness as we find it today is not made, but rather exists when the light does not shine in a particular place. However, the dualism that you suggest is not compatible with the logical proofs of the existence of God that St. Thomas Aquinas developed. (In order for the Universe to exists, everything had to come from somewhere, and in the beginning there had to be one source from which the universe as a whole would draw its existence.)

Even if, as you suggest, the two were contained within one being, that logic still does not hold because “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand; and if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand?” (Mt. 12:25, 26)

What the 1st section of Genesis suggests is that God, by his own power, created something outside himself. The darkness that existed “in the beginning” “when God began to create,” is indicative of the separation of the world of the earth from God, who is “the word” and “the light.” We are separate, because God created us separate from himself.

Our free-will is not a God unto itself, but rather a manifestation of the created reality that we are created separate from God the creator. The purpose of that freedom is that we have the ability to truly say “yes” to God. As G. K. Chesterton said in his book Orthodoxy, it’s like the Christian God cut off his own hand so that the hand might shake hands with him by its own free will.

You also asked about Satan, and the existence of dark or fallen angels. The word angel means messenger. God created the angels as rational creatures, which mean that they have an intellect and a will, but they are purely spiritual beings; they do not have physical bodies. Satan is a word that means enemy or adversary. Satan and the other fallen angels used their gift of free-will to oppose God, and were cast out of heaven (Rev 12:7-9). As an angel, a messenger, “he is a liar and the father of lies,” set in opposition to God, who is truth (Jn 8:44; Jn 14:6).

The mystery of evil that you allude to is the result of the exercise of his free will in a way other than what God intended. “God did not create death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” (Wis. 1:13) There is a difference between God’s divine will, and his permissive will. His divine will is what he wants to happen; his permissive will is what he allows to happen. However, his permissive will is always ordered to his divine will.

He allows evil to exist because he intends to bring out a greater good from it. Good things can come out of bad situations. Suffering can build character like weight training can build muscle. The mysterious part about the mystery of evil is how exactly he intends to bring the good out of evil. That is the question humans can’t answer.

The Good News is that God is not just a passive observer in all the mess and the evil that abounds in the world. As Christians, we believe that God sent his only begotten son to Earth in order to suffer and die in order to conquer the power of sin, death, and evil as a whole.

It looks like sin is victorious in this world, but that is an illusion, a lie from the lying devil. God allows it to persist because of his permissive will. He will unveil the truth when the time comes. (By the way, the word “Apocalypse” is the Greek word for unveiling.)

Until then, we need to recognize that God is still present among us. The Church is the Body of Christ (Col 1:24). I don’t mean the Church as in the building, but the communion of believers. The people aren’t perfect, but in striving together to fulfill Christ’s commands, we are all working together towards holiness, making the world more like heaven one good deed at a time.

Christ is already victorious; the battle has already been won. Christ’s calling is to trust God, while loving our neighbor as ourself in order to demonstrate to the unbeliever the loving nature of the God who lives in us, so that they may come to believe (Jn 15).

Sorry to take up so much space, but I thought this might help shine some light on the topic. I hope this helps