For the past week, those of us living in Minnesota have been dealing with tundra-esque cold. It is a bitter cold, the kind so abrasive that to leave any bit of skin showing will, within moments, less like winter than being electrocuted by dozens of tiny exposed wires. Cold. It is so cold that it has sparked a metaphor for life as a Christian in a decidedly un-Christian world.
Cold is an interesting designation, as it were. It seems insufficient to refer to something as 'cold' simply as a comment on it having the property of 'cold' as an attribute of its being. This would be like calling today cold; the designation of today as it being cold is predicated not as much on the 'coldness' perceived as it is dependent on the lack of that which is un-cold, namely, heat. This is to say that the more accurate way to speak of 'cold' is to say that it is an absence of heat.
Now considering that cold, in this regard, is no longer to be thought of as a possessed quality of the thing that is cold but is, rather, a designation regarding the thing's absence of heat, we can begin to recognize more aptly how one thing may be cold versus another that is un-cold.
For a thing to be considered cold and the coldness is not to be thought of as an inherent property of the cold thing, then, there is something else at play determining whether such a thing is, in fact, cold. This 'something else' that imprints itself upon a thing to make the thing cold is, to be sure, a manifold of factors. However, as it pertains to physical cold the two most prominent factors that determine a thing's 'coldness' is distance and angle. This is to say that a thing's coldness, in its status as being cold, is determined by the thing's distance and angle related to that which is un-cold, that is, hot.
The concept of distance is too obvious as to talk at length. Simply think of the heat felt from a candle's flame at two feet away versus two inches. As for the concept of the relevance of angle, this can be seen in the seasons of the earth. Because the earth spins at a particular 23.5 degree angle, when the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun the heat radiating from the sun hits the earth like a flashlight angled at a plane. This renders the sufficient heat of the sun unable to heat the parts of the earth that are tilted away. Hence, the cutting cold of Minnesota winter.
Now think of this spiritually. God is light, light being the very essence of heat. The proximity and angle of anything to God, then, dictates whether it will be warmed or frigid. For humanity, this means that if we are are nearness to God, a spatial analogy of our spiritual estate, is the determinant of whether the person is hot by their closeness to God or absent of heat by his/her distance. Or, the person who lacks heat is due to their relative angle away from God.
But the metaphor goes on. Coldness exposes that which is hot; think of the heat radiating off a fire or the condensation of warm breath in the cold winter air. Spiritually, this is to say that the cold of spiritual darkness reveals most profoundly the heat of God's light. For a Christian this is what it means to be "in the world but not of it."
But beware of the warning. Things that are hot naturally devolve into things that are un-hot (think 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: the Law of Entropy). This means that if something that is heated is separated from the source of its heat and put in a heat-less environment, it will lose its heat until it itself is cold. Spiritually, this is the Christian who is lit in God's presence but when they leave God's closeness they lose their light and their affective heat. The longer the believer stays in the cold world and away from the permeating heat of God's presence, he may actually cease being light and heat because he does not possess the heat in and of himself for his heat is derived from God. Let us never forget this spiritual reality that creation speaks about!
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