The Writing of The Darkness and the Glory (Part 1)

The Cup and the Glory was written in October–December 1996 but was not published until ten years later with me receiving my first copy on March 2, 2006. In May of 1997, I began teaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina and taught primarily at the College located on the same campus. It was during this time in May-June 1997 that I wrestled for weeks with the “two questions” found in the wager: why did Satan change his tactics from Matthew 16:22-23 (“Don’t go to the cross”) and Luke 22:3 (“Come to the cross”), and why was there darkness over the land when Jesus died? I am not exactly sure the number of weeks that I struggled with this because I did not note when I first began thinking it through. At the time I had no idea how important these questions would become.

Trying to solve this apparent contradiction consumed me almost every waking moment, the thoughts never completely leaving my mind. I would wake up; the questions were before me. I would watch TV with my family; the questions were before me. While waiting in the doctor’s office, they would still be with me. I was able to exercise now from the rheumatoid arthritis and had actually been able (much to my amazement and those around me) to start running again. One day I was so consumed with these two questions that I went on a run and sort of lost track of where I was because of the intense concentration. It took me a few minutes to figure out where I was and how to get back home.

I cannot remember the exact date, but in June 1997, on some Sunday morning at the church we attended, I don’t know the proper term to describe this, but “It finally dawned on me” is far too mild. I was sitting beside Betsy in church a few minutes before the service started. When I knew the answer, I inadvertently gasped out loud a couple of times, sort of like someone hyperventilating. Betsy looked at me to see if I was having a heart attack. I assured her I was fine, but she did not have any idea with what I had been wrestling through for these past few weeks.

In July 1997 I taught a summer school class on Samuel/Kings/Chronicles at the College at Southeastern, where I would officially become a faculty member a few weeks later in the fall. That class at SEBTS was by far the hardest class I ever taught in summer school because of the sheer volume of material within these books; we tried to cover 167 Bible chapters in three weeks. In that class was a slender, ex-military looking, single man, Kevin McAteer, who went on to graduate from both the College and The Master’s Seminary (years before I went as a faculty member). Over the years Kevin became a husband and father, and later a pastor, a trusted friend, and an extremely talented editor (I had no idea he was so superbly gifted for this until after The Cup and the Glory was already printed, or I would have used him as an editor for that book as well).

On the last weekend in July 1997, I drove my family to the final week of the work in Charlotte that I had done for a year with Mike and Brenda Sprott. (You can read more about this in “The Writing of The Cup and the Glory” in the study guide for that book). While on that trip Betsy and I took the kids to Tweetsie Railroad, an amusement park in the mountains of North Carolina, for a one-day vacation. Betsy read to me some as I drove to and from the trip out of the Old Testament books we were studying in class. It was actually a bad time to take the trip since we were in the middle of a very heavy load in the summer school class, but we had to say goodbye to our friends in Charlotte, and we thought that since we were fairly close to Tweetsie Railroad, that we would like for the kids to enjoy this.So in the midst of an exhaustive summer school class, with a three-hour trip to Charlotte and then another 2-3 hour drive to the amusement park, weeks away from beginning a faculty position at a new school, training a new Sheltie puppy named Cowboy, the doctor’s dissertation at Dallas Theological Seminary was not yet complete . . .

. . . since I had nothing better to do, I wrote the first four chapters of The Darkness and the Glory during this time. Of course, the four chapters would be tweaked and edited over the years, but I wrote basically the core (or “sketchpad”) for chapters 1-4 during this time. (The sketchpad consists of the framework of the book. In other words I know what I am going to write, the order of it, etc. It is sort of like a rough draft). It was another one of those periods where I could not sleep. I don’t exactly know how to describe it. I had every reason to be exhausted and yet I was fully awake—both mentally and physically. It reminded me of when I had written The Cup and the Glory the year before, so I did not fight this unexpected burst of writing. Looking back on this now over the years, I think God picked the absolute most impractical time for me—the absurdly worse time—to write these chapters so that when it eventually became a book and then later was published, I would know who got the glory. It made absolutely no sense on a human level to write it during this time, but that is when the book began.

From August-December 1997 I finished writing the sketchpad for the remainder of The Darkness and the Glory. During this time I also finished writing the dissertation and completed the Th.D. program at Dallas Theological Seminary in late November 1997, during my first semester at SEBTS. The last part of the sketchpad is writing and editing the chapters in an attempt to communicate accurately and hopefully in a readable fashion what I had learned in my Glory of God studies. But basically from 1997-2005, other than a few uses of small portions of the material at different times in the classroom or the pulpit, virtually nothing happened with the book as The Darkness and the Glory sat on a shelf in my home office for eight years.

Glory Books Ministry