Amen. You’ll turn with me in your Bibles, please, to the Gospel of John, chapter 1, beginning at the fourth verse:
‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray: Father, we thank you for your light, your light which illuminates our lives and helps us to see all things. Let your light shine in our hearts; let your light shine into our minds and shine before our eyes that we might know you and love you and worship you as the God of all creation. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Who is Jesus Christ? Some might say that he is many different things to many different people. And while that might sound true, he is really only one: the God-man, the Savior, the Lord. But how we understand who he is can be multifaceted and varied, with each person relating to him personally in different ways according to different aspects revealed in Scripture.
And although we must all relate to him as the Lord, the Sovereign over the whole universe and the elect, we get to relate to him as our Lord and Savior. Some of us still relate to him better as our friend, our brother, or as our helper and teacher. Having those kinds of relationships with him are okay and good because no person relates to all other people in the same way.
However, all of the many different ways that we do relate to him and rightly think of him come from the many ways that Scripture describes him, particularly Jesus’ names and titles. Scripture attributes many different names and titles to him, such as the Son of God, God the Son, the Good Shepherd, the Word, the Logos, and the Light of the World.
It’s interesting to note that while all of those names and titles are biblically valid and relevant, many, if not most, of them are sourced from the Gospel of John. Now, every king in the ancient world accumulated titles and honorifics like squirrels accumulate nuts in overabundant and uncountable measures. These human titles that they gain describe their different relationships of authority: king, prince, duke, or lord. Or they serve to remind us of a person’s past glories and their achievements or the glories of their ancestors, like defender of the faith, defender of the realm, victor over XYZ, or conqueror of ABC, or the rescuer of so-and-so.
But the titles that are ascribed to Jesus are far more than that. The titles that Scripture gives to Jesus are each descriptive and definitive in regard to who he is, and each one tells us something different about his character. Every title tells us something that is important about Jesus, describing a different facet and offering a different way for us to relate with him. Each one tells us something that has always been and is always true about him. They are not mere honors or reminders of past glory, but instead, they are descriptors of the present, eternal, and immutable reality of who he is, and they’re each inseparable from him and from one another.
The first title for Jesus that we encounter in John’s Gospel is that of the Logos, the Word, and the second is Theos, the God. When we meditate upon Jesus as the Logos, who is also Theos, we are understanding and relating to him as the Sovereign Creator God, possessing the generative will to create and the decretal power and authority to order his creation. Because he made it, he therefore gets to define what it is and what its purpose is: every it that ever was, that is, and shall ever be.
The next name or title that John ascribes to Jesus is Light, which in the Greek is “phos” or “photos,” naming him as the true light. Making him the phos who is the Logos and the Theos. This title for Jesus as Light does two things for our understanding. First, it appealed to the religious sensibilities of first-century pagans because every other religion has worshiped the sun as a god, like Apollo or Horus, while it also, at the same time, appealed to the religious sensibilities of the Jews, who correlated the idea of divine understanding and wisdom with light, as in mental and spiritual illumination.
Psalm 119:105: ‘Your word, Scripture, is a lamp unto my feet and a light to my path.’ Second, it also condemned both religious perspectives for having the necessary knowledge and awareness of the only true God: the evidence of their eyes and the world around them, and yet failing to respond appropriately to him. As the pagans chose to worship a creature, the sun instead of the Creator, the Jews chose to follow the letter of God’s law without understanding or obeying the illuminated spirit and purposeful meaning behind it—the divine wisdom.
But what is light exactly, and how does it relate or reply to the Logos, Jesus? The question of ‘what is light’ is not something the average person ever stops to think about because we take it for granted. We just accept that light is without caring about what it is.
And although this is not generally fit within our ordinary frame of reference or mode of thought, we need to understand that whatever else it may be, light is first and foremost a thing. Scripture tells us that light was the first thing that was created: ‘And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.’
Where the light which was created is merely, as we understand, a reflection or echo of the true Light, God the Son. Our present modern understanding tells us, according to two of Webster’s 16 definitions of light as a noun, that light is electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength that travels in vacuum with a speed of 299,792,458 m/s, or about 186,000 miles per second. Or it’s more limited to such radiation that is visible to the human eye.
Physics tells us that light is comprised of photons, quantum particles of energy that travel at the speed of light but yet possess no mass when at rest and are electromagnetically uncharged. So you see, light is stuff! But then John, taking that, correlates the Word to both life and the light, the Logos with the phos, by telling us, ‘In him the Logos was life (zoe), and the life was the light (phos) of men.’
Now, please recall that there are two principal Greek words used in Scripture for life: bios and zoe. Where bios relates to physical biological life, zoe relates to spiritual life. And since we previously considered John’s use of terms in his letters, we can immediately connect the understanding of the Logos as the Creator and Giver of natural life to the Logos also being the Light, the Giver of spiritual life and the wisdom of understanding.
So just as the sun emanates light, so too the Logos emanates the light of life. What is this relationship between life and light? Since light was the first thing created by God, we’re assured of its importance. And since life was created before life began, as explained in Genesis, we must conclude from the text of Scripture that light is a God-decreed requirement for life to exist. The necessity of light for the existence of life is an idea that is also supported and endorsed by all the physical sciences and the entirety of human knowledge.
Light generates or becomes heat through its interactions between photons and other forms of matter. Light inputs the energy that’s necessary to perpetuate the Earth’s weather cycle. It causes standing water to evaporate into vapor and then eventually condense and fall back to the Earth. There is some form of precipitation—rain or snow—where then the cycle continues to repeat itself. Light energy is received and used by plants to fuel the process of photosynthesis, generating the sugars which are the basic chemical compounds of all food energy.
Light also facilitates vegetative respiration, helping them to absorb and transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then release their byproduct of oxygen. Then plants become food for animals, while they also provide shelter or housing for them. Herbivores, plant-eaters, become food for carnivores, which in turn then become food for plants as fertilizer.
Furthermore, whenever scientists or the fantasy peddlers of Hollywood talk about different potential and sensational extinction events such as global warming, nuclear war, or a massive meteor impact, the expected extinction results from each event and the results from it is the natural consequence of either too much or too little light.
Then again, every human person knows we are so very dependent upon light—natural light especially—because we get reminded of it every year every time the seasons change and the days get longer or shorter. Our moods, our attitudes, and energy levels are caused to fluctuate with the amount of available light, don’t they?
Therefore, through both John’s connection and these common natural and reasoned understandings, we can affirm that just as light gives and supports life, Jesus the Logos can be and is the giver and sustainer of all life within God’s good creation.
The next thing John shares is something that is of a profound and important spiritual truth for us, as well as being a physical truth: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ Back in Genesis 1 when it was written, God separated the light from the darkness. Once again, we see John echoing in Moses, but this time he intensifies things.
Whereas before Moses just plainly described a natural division between darkness and light, and with him there was no obvious moral quality to it, with John, there is: ‘The light shines, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ The language used here is implicitly combative, transforming it into a moral concern.
The principal translation choices of the underlying Greek carry the sense of seizing by force, overpowering, taking control of, or making something someone’s own, while the lesser translation choices relate to understanding or comprehension. Thus, John describes a spiritual battle where the good light is valiantly pushing back against the effects of an evil darkness, which seeks to overwhelm and subjugate it and all things, trying to bring everything under the power and authority of darkness.
When John wrote that ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness,’ this is what he meant: light goes into darkness. Light drives back the darkness. Darkness cannot come into or remain within the presence of light.
And while Moses described a pre-corrupted time during creation, John’s description takes into consideration the spiritual conflict that the incarnated Logos is engaged in, framing the spiritual violence and oppression of Satan, which he is constantly defending against.
So thanks to John, the act of division during creation has been long understood by the church as an act that is both actual and metaphorical, being spiritually understood as a division between good and evil, where good is identified with light and evil identified with darkness. Allegorically, it describes the occasion of God’s work of sovereign election, his establishment of the elect and the reprobate before the foundation of the world.
The truth of this division of light and dark is something that we all know and can recognize from the observations of our own eyes. We can see and implicitly understand that darkness cannot exist apart from the light because the light does not need the darkness. Darkness only exists; we only know darkness through its relationship to the light.
There are no shades of gray; the different shades themselves are unique colors. There is only black and white, light and dark, because if it’s not light or white, then it must be dark. We describe light positively as being something that is bright and shining, but we describe darkness in a negative sense as being dim, shadowy, twilight, or dawning. All of these terms used for something darkened actually describe a lack of light—the absence of or a reduced quality or quantity of light.
Therefore, we understand that darkness needs the light, but the light does not need the darkness. So when Scripture tells us that the darkness has not overcome the light, we can believe it and know it to be true because we see the evidence that even in the midst of the deepest darkness, the tiniest light will shine all the more brightly.
John now describes the phos, who is the Logos and the Theos, as the true light, which gives light to everyone and was coming into the world, describing it as something transcendent becoming imminent in order to transform the Creator’s relationship with his creation. Before the Incarnation, God existed entirely outside of his creation.
Although he did act upon and interact with his creation, performing miracles and wonders, appearing to the patriarchs and Moses, or sending dreams to the prophets, he was never a part of creation nor has he ever been contained within it. But now, by taking the human nature upon himself, being born of the Virgin Mary, the infinite chose to limit himself to the finite for a time.
Lastly, many times in New Testament Scripture, the Greek words which are translated as ‘all’ do not always mean all, as in everything or everyone; but here, ‘everyone’ comes from ‘panta anthropod,’ which does mean all mankind or humanity. John is here affirming the universal access humanity has to the natural revelation of God—the ability for us to know that God causes himself to be knowable by everyone, even though he is not known by everyone.
Since all people can know the necessity, existence, and presence of the Lord’s Divinity, this leaves everybody who denies him without any excuse.
So what does this understanding of the Logos or Word as related to the phos or light teach us about who Jesus, God the Son, is? What does it mean for us?
This does not tell us that God the Son was created—not even as the first creation, like the fourth-century heretic Arius taught, or as Jehovah’s Witnesses continue to erroneously believe. This does teach us that Jesus—that God is the source of, and the most basic necessity of life.
Just as the sun gives us the light which warms our planet to the ideal temperature for life, just as that light and that warmth is necessary to maintain and preserve the world’s climate and seasons, allowing plants to grow and produce their fruit at the appropriate time, just as light is converted by plants into sugars fueling animal life and helps produce every form of accessible energy that enables our world and society to function, so God is the one who has decreed that the earth’s temperature would be just so and has ordered his creation in such a way that it is so.
So God is the one who has decreed that there would be certain times and seasons because such a cycle helps life to grow, to transform, and to flourish, because in his wisdom it naturally also incorporates the important necessity of rest or Sabbath.
Therefore, God is the one who directly fuels and empowers us, because our Creator formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. It is God’s breath, his Spirit, that makes us truly alive in body and in soul. And without Light, there is no life. Everything would be dark and lifeless.
Without life, there would be no point or purpose to creation. There would be no meaning in the entire universe. No matter would matter. The whole of creation, and so without God, without the Logos, without the phos, we would not be, because there’d be no reason for us to be. No purpose at all.
But with God, with the Logos, with the phos, we are because God has a reason, because God has a purpose for each and every one of us. And if God is who we believe Scripture says he is, then we must believe this. We must believe this because God does not create junk. Everything is by divine intention, according to divine reasoning for divine purposes.
And it must be so because the alternative is chaos, irrationality, and purposelessness. If something is, then it must be for some reason, because if there’s no reason, then it doesn’t matter whether something or anything is or is not.
Why does this understanding matter for us? It matters because it helps us to trust, to believe, and to remain confident that there is a reason, that there is a purpose to everything, and that this purpose is truly good. Romans 8:28 tells us, ‘And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.’
By believing this, by holding on to this hope, that is what enables us to put one foot in front of the other when it feels like the world is bearing down on us. We must believe that something good somehow will come out of everything, even the things which seem or are bad. Without believing this, without that hope, all that remains is the question: why bother?
Why bother and a long, slow slide into apathy and despair? But apathy and despair, those belong to the realm of darkness, while we’ve now been brought into the light of life. We stand in the light, tall and strong. We’re empowered by God with the confidence and strength to withstand all the malicious effects of the devil.
We are standing in the light, and because the light of God—the phos, who is the Logos and Theos—is not and shall not be overcome, we are not and shall not be overcome. So Hallelujah and praise God Almighty! Amen.