Divine Guidance Through a Dismal Swamp

A swamp is no place to wander without a guide. We open with the Great Dismal Swamp—its stagnant waters, hidden paths, and sudden dangers—and follow Peter’s bold claim that the world can feel just like that: murky, forbidding, and full of pitfalls. The answer, he says, is not a thrill of new experiences but a steady lamp: the prophetic word. We walk through Peter’s defense in 2 Peter 1, where he contrasts his unforgettable moment on the Mount of Transfiguration with something even more reliable than sights and sounds—the written Scripture that outlives every critic and survives every age.

Together we explore why attacks on Christianity so often zero in on the Bible’s trustworthiness, from the serpent’s “Did God really say?” to modern campaigns to erase Scripture from public view. We look at the preservation of the Old and New Testaments, the witness of manuscripts and history, and the irony of efforts to silence the Word only amplifying its reach. Along the way, we share stories from global listeners tuning in where owning a Bible risks everything, and we reflect on how a book others fear can become the light we keep closest.

Then we get practical. Peter urges us to pay attention—to bring the Word near—because a lamp only helps those who hold it. We talk about Scripture shaping identity, ethics, work, and hope when culture drifts in confusion. And we lift our eyes to the promise that the lamp is not the sunrise but the sign that dawn is coming: the morning star rising, Christ returning, darkness scattering. Until that day, we keep the lamp lit, step by step, confident that the path ahead is clear enough for faithful feet.

If this conversation steadied your steps, share it with a friend, subscribe for more, and leave a review with the verse that lights your way.

Transcript

From Dismal Swamp To Spiritual Metaphor

SPEAKER_00 0:26

I grew up in the southeast corner of Virginia in the town of Norfolk, located along the Chesapeake Bay. We often traveled on Highway 58, which passes alongside the eastern edge of the largest remaining swamp in the United States. It's called the Dismal Swamp. Got its name from the Old English word Dismal, which means forbidding, haunted. It's a place that breeds all the allergies I have to this day. Thank you for that. Well, legends, as you can imagine, grew up around this swamp nearby. If you were like me, you'd go to church summer camp, and invariably around the campfire, some youth leader would tell some really scary story about creatures emerging from that swamp. Stories like that, you know, we we got saved every summer. I mean, it was it worked like a charm. Originally, the swamp was the size of Rhode Island, a million acres. Much of it would be drained, beginning with the personal efforts of President George Washington, who wanted some more farmland. Today, what's left is a hundred thousand acres. It's called the Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, untouched by, for the most part, civilization. Still the home of black bears and poisonous snakes and cypress trees and stagnant water. I could tell you some scary stories. If you want to go explore, you'd want to follow an experienced guide or stick on the pathways that have been laid out for those hiking around the swamp. But those paths don't eliminate the danger. They, however, do show you the way in and the way around, and more importantly, the way out. The Apostle Peter is about to compare the unbelieving world to a swamp. A dismal, murky, forbidding, dark place full of pitfalls and poison, darkness and danger. You'd better know your way around it. You'd better know your way out of it. The psalmist writes in Psalm 119 that the guide, it doesn't remove the danger, but it will take you in and around it and out of it is this lamp, God's word, which illuminates your path. It's really no surprise to me, probably not to you who are older in the faith as well, that the most concentrated attacks on the gospel, the most persuasive arguments against Christianity, focus on this guide, this inspired word, the reliability, the trustworthiness of the Bible. In fact, it became the very first attack recorded in human history. Satan questioned Eve. Did God really say that? Don't you understand, Eve? That what God said, if he did say that, is tainted. He wants to keep you down. He doesn't want you to experience freedom in life. Don't trust his word. The attacks have continued. Just like that to this day. Now, the Apostle Peter has been called to the defense stand to defend the word of God, specifically in this case, according to his letter, the message of Jesus Christ, is pre-existent deity. At a point in time, the incarnation took on flesh and blood, rose from the dead, ascended. But to Peter's point, the promise is that he will come back. He's going to return and establish his kingdom after judging the world. Peter, you've got to be making that up. You're just trying to scare us. You're trying to keep us from experiencing the freedom of how we want to live. Peter is accused then of teaching myths and fairy tales. Now we began to look at Peter's response to that charge, and I invite your attention back there to 2 Peter chapter 1, where he began his opening defense. Let's go back there and just refresh our memory for a moment. Peter writes, for we did not follow cleverly devised myths. In other words, I wasn't making this up. When we made known to you the power and coming, that is the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, that voice was born to him by the majestic glory. This is the voice of God the Father called the Majestic Glory. Here's what the voice said: This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. Now Peter is referring to the Mount of Transfiguration, where he saw that explosion of light emitting from the body of Jesus, where the Lord kind of pulls back the veil of his humanity and reveals the glory of his deity, bathing everything in brilliant light. The Gospel of Luke called it dazzling light. Peter says, I saw this. I saw the display with my own eyes of his royalty, his deity. I heard with my own ears this voice from heaven. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. We explored that phrase in our last study. It's a combination of several Old Testament texts that point to not only the deity of Christ, but the fact he's going to come back and rule with a rod of iron, all from Psalm chapter 2. So Peter is saying, I'm telling you the truth about Jesus Christ because of what I saw and what I heard. Now with that, Peter moves to his second defense. So let's pick up our study at verse 19. And we have the prophetic word more fully conformed, confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Now we're not going to unpack all this today. It'll take at least five years. But here's what Peter is saying from sort of a 30,000-foot view. In summary, Peter's saying, I'm not creating a myth, I'm not teaching you fairy tales, I'm telling you the truth about Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom. And it's true not only because of what I saw and what I heard, but because of what I read. The Word of God. And with that, the rest of this chapter is going to be a defense, a definition of God's inspired word. Now, what I want to do today is highlight just from verse 19 four descriptions of the Bible in this brief statement. Either directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, Peter is defending the accuracy, the influence of the trustworthiness of the power of the Word of God. Next Lord's Day, Lord willing, I want to answer some practical questions which come out of what Peter writes near the end of the chapter. Questions like, where'd we get the Bible from? Who decided what books went into the Bible? Who decided what's excluded? Is it really from God? And how did God do that? Again, these are all a part of the ongoing battle, the attack on the Word of God. There is still a battle raging over the Bible to this very day. That's the first description I want to point out. Here it is. The Bible continues to survive every attack and outlive every opponent. Now I want you to get the significance of the present tense. It's easy to miss what Peter says. We have this word. We've got it. He didn't say, oh, we used to have it, but the Roman Empire destroyed it. Wish we had a copy of it. No, we have it. This is the miracle of the preservation of this document. Atheists have tried to dismiss it. Skeptics tried to discredit it. Emperors throughout the course of human history have tried to destroy it. Even to this day, regimes outlaw it by penalty of death in our world today if you own it. By the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Diocletian will put to death anybody owning a copy of any portion of the Bible. In fact, he will send out an edict from Rome that all copies of the Bible are to be burned by fire. How's that working? To this day, the Bible is the most translated, most owned, best-selling book on the planet. So far, seven billion copies have been printed and sold. My executive director at Wisdom International, where our sermons are translated and uploaded, he showed me some interesting developments in the last few weeks. One was that China now outpaces any other country coming to our website, nearly 40 countries a day. Hundreds of questions come in every day. But China outnumbers anybody from the U.S., which is thrilling to us. Typically, we have this screen on a wall in the studio, and it shows little dots of light where someone at that moment is on the website. It's moment-by-moment analytics. A few weeks ago he said, Hey, come here, Stephen, you gotta see this. And he showed me a little dot of light appearing in the country of North Korea. Now it could have been a government official. You know, we hope he got saved if it was. But then two dots. And then three. At the threat of death, someone is being exposed to the Bible that we still have. The most vilified, inspected, discredited, critiqued, slandered book on the planet. And to this day, we still have the Old Testament preserved over thousands of years. We have a completed New Testament that is affirmed and authenticated by thousands of manuscripts, hundreds of them discovered in our lifetime, that have carried through over these last 2,000 years. It survives every attack. Couldn't help but think of Voltaire, the French atheist, who boasted that the Bible would become extinct within the century. He even boasted that his writings would help the Bible become extinct. Then he died on May 30, 1778. His home was put on the market and purchased by the Geneva Bible Society. Boxes of books stacked everywhere as they used his home as a distribution center for the scriptures. God evidently has a sense of humor. The Bible survives every attack, it outlives every opponent. Number two. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed. That adjective prophetic is used only here and in Romans 16. It's a reference to the entirety of the Old Testament. Some commentators say this phrase indicates that the apostle's experience on the Mount of Transfiguration confirmed the Old Testament. A literal reading of Peter's staban here, I think, clears it up. It could read this. And we have more sure, you could translate it, more stable the prophetic word. In other words, regardless of how dramatic Peter's experience, his eyewitness experience was, the word of God is more stable. It's better. It's more reliable. Experiences fade. Memories fade. Voices fade. Peter is effectively saying that the promise of Christ's kingdom isn't to be believed simply on the basis of what I saw and what I heard. Read it. Here it is. By the way, this is the only time that Peter even mentions his experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. The other two disciples who were with him, James and John. James never mentioned it. John only mentioned it one time. John chapter 1, verse 14. And this is so important to understand. This is so encouraging to grip. You might feel today, as a believer, that you're just in a dark place. It's dismal. Maybe events are forbidding, unsettling. Maybe everything's murky. Maybe you think if I could hear a voice, that'd settle it for me. If I could just see them, that'd do it. That'd take care of it. Peter is telling us here that you don't want to build your faith on an experience, even something you might see or hear, there's something more stable, and that is what you can read. Sometimes I think that the unbelieving world grasps the significance of Scripture better than the ordinary Christian. For why would they bother to attack it if it's only fairy tales? Why would they kill someone for owning it? A group of atheists and agnostics called the Freedom From Religion Foundation. They continue to try to get the Bible out of the public view. They lobby universities and hospitals and hotels. They do battle with the Gideons who place Bibles everywhere possible. Years ago, they began a campaign against the Holiday Inn to try to make Bible-free rooms. And Holiday Inn evidently resisted that. Why would freedom from religion give their life's energy to eliminating the Bible? Well, the Bible tells us the law of God is written on every human heart. And it intuitively corresponds in understanding without admitting the truth of God's word. They fear it. They must ignore it. It will interrupt their lives if they don't. But maybe you're still thinking, but yeah, I know, Stephen, I appreciate that. But if I could just hear God, wouldn't that be great? If I heard him, that would be more verifiable than reading something he said. Charles Spurgeon, who pastored in the 1800s, I think answered it well in his comments on this text as he preached. I'm just going to read a paragraph of what he said. If a man receives a written letter from his father or a friend, does he attach less importance to it than he would have done to spoken communication? Most of you in business are content to get a written order for goods. And when you get that written order, you do not require a verbal request. In fact, you prefer it in black and white. Take God at his word. The light of his word will provide enough illumination for the next step, the next moment. You typically don't get it until that moment as you work your way through the dismal swamp of life. Now here's the third description of the Bible. The Bible will not do you any good unless it becomes your trusted guide. Peter writes here again in verse 19: we have this more stable, this more sure, prophetic word to which you will do well to pay attention. The verb for paying attention means to bring it near, to keep it close. Pay attention, Peter says. Did you ever have a teacher in elementary school call out your name and tell you to pay attention? Me neither. No idea what that would be like. Pay attention means your mind is wandering. You're going to miss the directions, you're going to miss the point, you're going to miss the lesson. Peter is really calling out your name here. In fact, you could write your name in the margin of this text next to the words, pay attention. You do well to pay attention, Stephen, Charles, Susan, Barbara, John. If I happen to name you, it was purely intentional, I mean coincidental, that you're awake. You do well to bring it close. Why? He says, because the Bible is like a lamp shining in a dark place. This adjective sent my mind back to my childhood because the word for dark, a dark place, is found nowhere else in the New Testament. It means stagnant. It means murky. It's a picture, and it was used in the past to describe the murky waters of a swamp. This is the biblical description of the world around us, most often characterized as darkness as opposed to the kingdom of light. Darkness, the darkness of sin, the darkness of spiritual ignorance, the darkness and confusion that comes from abandoning the Word of God. I found it interesting that the Freedom from Religion Foundation in recent years got into a bit of a trouble. Several prominent board members even resigned, including Richard Dawkins and others, because they could not agree over transgender issues. I couldn't help but think how ironic it was. They wanted to get rid of the Bible, but the Bible defines God's creative design of male and female. And without it, you wander in confusion. They ended up so disagreeable they split up. But this dark world removes the compass from moral issues. And it's no surprise then that, like our culture, this dark world wanders around in its own confusion. It's lost its bearings. Human history began, according to the Bible, in a beautiful garden where Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day. There's not a lot of description about how that happened, but wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't that settle at all? It didn't. They sinned. And they walked with him in the cool of the day. Because of sin, they were exiled from that garden into something that now resembles a dismal swamp. What hope do we have of ever returning to walking with God in the cool of the day? Well, here's the guide. Even now, it's a lamp. It illumines your path. Keep it close. The Bible not only saved your life, it shapes your lifestyle. It shapes your decision making and your work ethic, your morality, your identity. The world is stumbling today in the darkness of this swamp without any bearings, and they can't answer the most basic existential questions the Bible has already answered for us, like, where did the universe come from? We're spending billions of dollars trying to find the beginning point. And the first verse of the Bible tells us. When did the universe begin? Is anybody out there? What's the meaning of life? Why do I exist? What's the purpose of life? Does God exist? How can I know him if he exists? What's going to happen to me after I die? Is there life after death? All of it. Answered. Our path illumined. Peter says, you do well to pay attention to this lamp. Hold it close. It means, as one author wrote, cultivate more than a casual relationship with God's Word. Don't just read it. Relish it. Don't simply peruse it. Ponder it. Don't just browse through it. Believe every word of it. Number four. And Peter's description of God's word, here it is, the lamp of the Bible is a preview of the sunrise of Christ's coming kingdom. Within the context of this letter, Peter now writes at the end of verse 19 this promise: You do well, you will do well, to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. This expression for the day dawning is an expression that appears only here in the New Testament. It sort of pictures the first gleams of a new day piercing the darkness, scattering the darkness. Now, in the context of Peter's defense of Christ's return to earth, this expression becomes this rather profound promise that the darkness of this world will soon be banished. As the dawn of Christ's kingdom appears. Jesus, as you probably know, in Revelation 22, is called the bright and what? Morning star. The star is rising in our hearts. This is both a personal encouragement for here and now of the Lord's presence in our hearts and our minds and our lives. But it's also a prophetic preview of that day when his kingdom of light literally comes. Malachi describes it, the prophet in chapter 4, he speaks of the returning Messiah, and he says, the sun, and that's S you in. The sun, the blazing sun of righteousness will arise with healing in his wings. He's going to heal the nations. Zechariah, the priest in Luke 1, delivered a prophecy of the Messiah. He said, the sunrise shall visit us. I love that he describes Jesus as the sunrise. So does Peter. The sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace. Wow. It's dark all around us, but we have the lamp of God's word, and it promises the rising of the sun, which is the brilliant display of Christ's kingdom of light. So think of it this way. The Bible is a night light. It's a night light. You never want to grow out of it. It's a night light that illumines the darkness of the swamp that surrounds us. But soon, this night light will no longer be needed, Peter says, because the sunrise will soon appear. In this little verse, Peter has described the preservation of the word. It outlives every attack. He's described the priority of the word. What you read takes precedence over what you feel, see, or hear. What's taking place around you. He has described the practicality of the word. It gives light to your feet. It helps you daily. Keep it close. And then Peter describes the ultimate promise of the word. The sunrise is coming. In the meantime, this night light will guide you until the morning star appears. Keep it close. Keep it close. It is the very word of God to you. Billy Sunday was an evangelist, and I'm going to close with this. His personal testimony was found written on a piece of paper in his Bible. Billy Sunday was an evangelist. He sort of set the stage some of the methods that Billy Graham would later use, the Tent Crusades and the Sawdust Trail. When Billy Sunday passed away, they found this piece of paper in his Bible. And it read, Twenty-nine years ago, referring to his salvation, I entered at the portico of Genesis. I walked along the corridor of the Old Testament art gallery where portraits of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Jacob, and Daniel hung on the wall. I passed into the music room of the Psalms, where the Spirit swept the keyboard of nature corresponding to the harp of David. I entered the chamber of Ecclesiastes where the voice of the preacher warned me. Then along the lily of the valley where sweet spices perfumed my life. I entered the business office of Proverbs to gain insight, and then on into the observatory of the prophets, whose telescopes of various sizes pointed to far-off events, but all concentrating on the bright and morning star. I then entered the eyewitness room where Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John gave their evidence. Then into the correspondence room where I read the letters of Paul, Peter, James, and John. And then finally, I stepped into the throne room of Revelation, and I saw the King of Kings upon his throne of brilliant glory with the healing of nations in his hand. And I cried out, I'll hail the power of Jesus' name. Let angels prostrate fall, bring forth the royal diadem, and crown him as Lord of all. We know unbelievers are here, Father, and we would pray that they would see the glorious truth of the gospel of Christ. For those of us who know you, as we gather, it challenges us. It convicts us. It urges us onward. It reminds us that we're passing through the dismal swamp. We're pilgrims here. This is not our home. To take heart. We thank you for the words of your son that you have come to give us peace in our hearts. In the world we will have tribulation, but take heart. You said, Lord, I have overcome the world. We thank you for your word that is settled. And it continually is affirmed with every discovery that every archaeologist's spade points to the integrity and reliability. Thank you that we have it. Father, do we relish it? Do we hide it in our heart? Do we skim it? Or study it. So in our own lives, help us, Father, to be disciplined and to understand the urgency of the lamplight we need. Take it off the shelf. And stain the pages with notes, with tears, thoughts. This is our treasure given from you. Help us to keep it without close. We pray it in Jesus' name.