You Called Me Out of the Dark

Track five is the most rigorously monergist song on the album, and the arrangement enacts what it teaches - it opens in near-silence and dark, and rises to a full band, the music itself a resurrection. I was lying in the dark, cold, and four days dead.

The verses do one thing, and they do it without flinching. They catalog what a spiritually dead man cannot do. No voice on earth could reach me. I could not turn toward the light, I could not lift my head. I did not know that I was lost - a dead man does not miss the sun, he never knew the light. This is Ephesians 2 with no softening. The dead do not cooperate. They do not meet grace halfway. A corpse contributes nothing to its own raising. And so every saving verb in the song belongs to God, and the one thing the dead man does is hear - because the life came riding on the word.

The bridge names what kind of word that is. The same voice that said, let there be light, came down to the grave where I was laid. The effectual call is not a sermon trying to talk a dead will into something. It is the creative word of Genesis 1, the word that brings the life it commands. He does not call the dead to climb. He calls them and they rise. That is how I was saved, and it is the only way anyone is. You called me out of the dark, and a dead man heard.