Job explains to his friends how the wicked “rebel against the light.” He says, “The murderer rises before it is light, that he may kill the poor and needy, and in the night he is like a thief. The eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight, saying, No eye will see me …in the dark they dig through houses; by day they shut themselves up; they do not know the light…for they are friends with the terrors of deep darkness.”
Job’s simple phrase about being “friends of the terrors of darkness,” got me thinking about the modern resurgence of interest in vampires – the creatures of the darkness who get their strength by siphoning it away from the living. I did a search in my library for “vampire” and found that the “leech” or “horseleech” of Proverbs 30:15, is called a “vampire” in the margin of the American Standard Version. It is pictured as having two daughters who have an endless capacity for sucking blood. They are both named “Give.” Life is in the blood, you know! Anything that sucks away at our lives might be called “a friend of darkness.”
Our society is full of the distractions of the night that Job mentions; vampires, adultery, murder, robbery, etc. We are captivated by them and they suck away at our capacity for good simply by distracting us from our focus. We need not be adulterers, murderers, rapists, or thieves to be “friends of darkness.” We only need let them distract us from focusing on whatever is true, real, pure, holy, etc (See Philippians 4:8).
C. S. Lewis captured Satan’s schemes well in “The Screwtape Letters” where a senior demon instructs a lesser demon named “Wormwood” how to turn the new Christians attention from his new found faith. He instructs him to focus on little distractions rather than outright sin. He says, “You will say that these are very small sins, and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy [God]. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to keep the man away from the Light.… Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Chuck
“What are people that you should make so much of us that you should think of us so often? For you examine us every morning and test us every moment.” (Job 7:17-18)