Of all the photographs of celestial events, none is quite so popular as the sunset. We seem to never tire of the luscious red-orange rays that we behold at the ebbing of each day. The sunrise offers similarly spectacular colors as it comes up in the east, but more of us are sleeping when it does, so that beauty often gets missed, except by birds and beasts and workers with early shifts. In countless places around the world, watching the sunset is even something of a ritual, a sort of celebration of the dying day. Why do we love the sunset so? Why does something so familiar not get old? What is it about that golden hour that seems to cast a calm reflection on every gazing face? Let’s muse a moment on it, shall we?
“Day is dying in the West, Heav’n is touching earth with rest…” These are the opening words of a hymn I learned many years ago. Its lyrics and melody seem to capture the soothing sweetness of that most peaceful portion of each day. Peace is the first aspect of the sunset that comes to me when I think of its calming glow. That span when the once harsh light of noon seems now to smolder like an ember as it sinks behind the western line. The heat of mid-day is passed and with it all the harried movement of the hours that went before. It is that sense of impending rest, of the exhaling of the day, when it seems to settle down in a fiery reclining that marks that time for me. Sunsets are peaceful.
It’s a curious thing that the days of creation, as recorded in the book of Genesis, all begin with evening, not morning, as we’re accustomed to. We think of each day as beginning with the sunrise. God, apparently, starts His timer when the sun is going down. This tradition is still carried on by Jewish communities today. Their day begins at sunset. Think of what this pattern teaches us: our days should begin with rest, not labor. In Creation, God works through what to us is darkness and we awaken to enjoy the bounty of all that He has done. Would not this older way of measuring time remind us of the Gospel better? Imagine if we thought of each new day as beginning with a buffer of serenity, heralded by these vivid hues.
And at the end of that miraculous week of making all we see, it seems reasonable to me to think that Eve was made just before the sunset on that final day. After all, Adam had spent what one would assume was a significant amount of time earlier that day naming all the animals. I suppose the entire lot had to pass before his nascent eyes before he fully felt the weight of loneliness. It’s not hard to imagine the Creator placing Adam into that deep and death-like sleep to extract the rib that would become his wife just as the sun was sliding toward the distant hills. Waking from his slumber he would find the woman, his companion, and the bearer of more exquisite beauty, bathed in the warm shades of the setting sun. They would enter the Sabbath in the dark, but not alone.
Of course we know now that the sun doesn’t truly set at all. For though the eastward spin of earth seems to pull the sun down in the west, it never really goes away. Just as Adam and Eve were driven eastward out of Eden, away from the presence of God, the true Light of Life, His light was not diminished by their leaving. The fact that their eyes could see the sun returning with each new and dawning day meant the sun and mercy were both still in their places. What if the sunset reminded us that though we have often turned away and denied the light of God, His faithfulness is still unmoved? “If we are faithless; He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.” (2 Tim. 2:13) The recognition that this backward dawning was the start of day, and not its end, would remind us that the light had been here first and would be still when the dark had passed.
And sunsets seem especially linked to covenant in Scripture. When God first made His covenant with Abram, it was as the sun was sinking low (Gen. 15:12 & 17). Like Adam, he was placed into deep sleep while the glowing torch passed between the pieces of slaughter animals, in the dying light of dusk. He awoke to find the promise ratified and the line of believers on its way. And surely the splattered blood of the new covenant, still drenching the rocks in the garden and Golgotha must have been a darker tint of red in the light of that waning day. For His body, not just sleeping, but truly dead, was placed inside the tomb just before darkness enveloped all the world. His first believers may have tossed and turned those next two nights, but the true Sabbath rest had started as the sun went down.
Scientists tell us its the longer wavelengths of the gold and reddening rays that enable them to pierce the dusty atmosphere of the earth and make it to our eyes at the close of the day, but I think our Heavenly Father has a host of other reasons too. The red is meant to remind us of the blood that bought our peace, the gold to soothe our aching for His kingdom yet to come. “Wait and worship while the night sets her evening lamps alight, through all the sky,” the hymn continues. And may each sunset be a fresh reminder of the rest His labor won.
