Scripture: John 1:4-5
Date: April 17, 2011
Speaker: Sean Higgins
The Gospel of John was written that men might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they may have life in His name (John 20:31). The opposite of believing and living in Jesus is not life in someone else’s name. Those who do not believe in Him are dead though they live. There are no variations of life or degrees of life apart from the Logos. Apart from the Logos there is only death.
The gospel does not offer men something better than what they already have, though sometimes we act (evangelize) as if men have a life—like they have a car—but Christianity is a nicer life, a cleaner life, a life that gets better milage, that is better for the environment, that has a longer warranty, and all we need to do is convince them to trade up. The hard part is not getting someone to trade up, it’s getting them to give up the lie that they have any sort of life in the first place. They’ve got nothing, and one of the surest signs of (spiritual) death is protesting that one isn’t dead.
John isn’t writing about one option for life; he’s writing about the only hope for life. The reality is that life—true, spiritual, eternal, abundant—is only in the Logos.
Last week we stepped into the Prologue (1:1-18), John’s introduction to the testimony about Jesus. It’s provoking that John begins by running downhill with realities about Jesus, setting the gospel in its eternal context. Verses 1-5 focus on the Word, the Logos.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 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.
The Logos is God and is God’s self-expression, His revelation of Himself. John used the term “Logos” as one that would connect with Jews (“the word of God”) and Gentiles (the universal “reason” principle), though their understandings were not sufficient. We considered from verses 1-3 the first four realities of the Logos.
There are three additional realities in verses 4-5. The reason I didn’t try to cover them in last week’s message is because, for as simple as the sentences are, the concepts are overwhelming. A pitter-patter pattern connects these two verses together: life…life, light…light, darkness…darkness.
As quickly as we can read through these verses, we may bounce over the questions that beg to be answered. Some of those questions include:
These are just some of the questions that we’ll try to answer while we consider three additional realities of the Logos, with an emphasis that life is in the Logos.
Life is because the Logos was.
In him was life,
That’s an interesting, but sort of unnecessary, assertion, isn’t it? Haven’t we been assuming life all along? The Logos was in the beginning, the Logos was with God, He was God, and all of that assumes that He was, that there was life, existence, and being. John doesn’t leave us at the assumption level, and we really need to think about why.
God did not create life, God created creatures that were capable of living (Genesis 1:20-21; 24; 2:7). Life is God’s to give and His to take, but life is in Him. That was true at creation and it is true now. John attributes vitality, the power giving energy and continuance to life, to the Logos. Life is divine.
as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. (John 5:26)
Is that “life” physical or spiritual? Temporal or eternal? It must be whatever kind of life God has. Whatever kind of life we have is shared from God’s own vitality, even if we carry life in different looking containers. He created to share His own life so that His glory would be seen and shared, and the Logos has a unique role in revealing and giving life to others.
The life communicated by the Logos to men is more than breath.
and the life was the light of men.
All things were created by the Logos, animate and inanimate. Many of His creatures have life: plants, animals, and men. Genesis records the uniqueness of the animals over the plants, even with God’s charge to them to be fruitful and multiply.
His creation of Adam was in a class all by itself. The life He gave men was life that reflected His own life. They breathed and they could behold. They moved and they could magnify. They could reason and relate and rejoice. They could understand and enjoy life because God shared His life and the life was the light of men.
Why not say “the life (of the Logos) was the life of men”? When John says that “the life was the light of men” I think he means that God’s own life in men made life comprehendible like light makes visible. Light makes it so we can see, seeing makes us able to know, and knowing gives us purpose and reason for praise.
Luminosity refers to the measurement of brightness and radiance, it deals with visibility and energy. In the Logos was life, and [His] life was the [clarifying and activating power] of men.
Is this true for all men? For Adam? For only a certain sort of man? We’ll try to move forward without clearing that question off the table.
Light is even more important when you’re in darkness.
The light shines in darkness, and the darkness [did not understand (NAS)] it.
I struggled with where these realities fit in the scheme of the paragraph. Is this still a reality about the Logos, or have we moved from realities about the Logos to realities of the created order, less about who the Word is and more about how the world is?
On one hand, the imagery channels Genesis 1:2, when “darkness was over the face of the deep” and when God created light as His first specific act: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3-5). But it is more than that, more than physical, and beyond that first week.
The light “shines,” it did and it does. The present tense of the verb shines brightly in a paragraph of pasts with ongoing results, and the gloss, “is shining” or even “keeps on shining,” fits.
Not only is it present tense, it’s personal. As the complete Prologue previously helped us to identify the Logos, the Prologue also helps us identify the light. In context, according to the next two paragraphs, the light is a Person.
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 enlightens 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. (John 1:6–10)
The light is the Logos. John learned that from Jesus Himself.
Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. (John 12:46)
In John’s first epistle, he speaks about God being “in” the light—“if we walk in the light, as he is in the light” (1 John 1:7)—which may make it sound as if light were an abstract idea outside of us and outside of God. But 1 John 1:5 states clearly, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
Where did this darkness come from? Is it physical? Again, the creation account merely introduces us to a much larger (if we would say that light in the universe is a “smaller” concept) context. While John may be jumping off of creation’s darkness, the rest of his gospel makes it clear that his concern is spiritual darkness.
I wasn’t asking about darkness up till verse 4, and really not even until verse 5. If it were up to me, I think I would have been happier without it. But remember the eternal context. God has purpose in all this, including the darkness. There is something about the life and light that makes light brighter and life fuller when contrasted with darkness.
Darkness is a metaphor for the effect that sin and evil have: they keep men from seeing reality. Reality is there, just as the furniture is still there though the lights are off, it just isn’t seen. Sin keeps men in the dark.
But, even though light shines, “the darkness [did not comprehend] it” (NAS). The word “overcome” in the ESV is translated “comprehend” in the NAS and KJV/NKJV, and “understood” in the NIV. The Greek word, κατέλαβεν, could mean either: to get something literally, like one “takes” a prize for winning a race (1 Corinthians 9:24) or, to get something figuratively, like “grasp” what something means.
While both are true about the relationship of darkness and the light of the Logos, the stress of “comprehend” fits better in the context. Look again at verse 9, “the world did not know” him. Verse 5 anticipates rejection of the light, revelation and salvation, of the Logos. John wrote later:
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. (John 3:19)
Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the next paragraph (vv.6-8) introduces a witness to the light. Why would the light need testimony? Isn’t light it’s own witness in the dark? Yes. But men, in darkness, don’t understand it. The light is incomprehensible to them without faith.
Without belief men don’t know the Logos, they don’t receive Him. John will explain in verses 12-13 how it is that light becomes comprehensible.
John’s gospel is a Great Commission resource in at least two ways.
Here’s the rub: life is in the Logos, but men don’t understand the Logos, and that means they don’t have His light to understand and they don’t have life!
I don’t want to get all postmodern jargony, but people are miserable because they have no meaning, or because they can’t figure out what is the meaning for their existence. It’s because they’re in the dark, cut off from light and life. Jesus said, “The one who walks in darkness does not know where he is going” (John 12:35). It’s one of the brutal clauses in the fine print in the evolution documents. They don’t tell you that believing in evolution will steal your soul.
No Logos -> no life -> no light. Light is in the Logos. Faith in Jesus is not a stab in the dark, it is a step into light. The life is the light of men, it is their only hope of light. That means that He is the light for all men, though not all men comprehend the reality.
This ought to give us great confidence in our witness. I was telling the Life to Life group I visited last week that I don’t want to tell people about Jesus’ deity, at least not at the start. I feel like I need to build a case, to fit all the right blocks into the space before I can put the final blog in about Jesus and about Him being God.
That’s all wrong. That’s pushing water uphill. We start with the Logos, with life and light. Of course they don’t understand! But we don’t need to prove how light works; we need to let loose the light. John’s gospel is such a powerful Great Commission resource because he testifies to the light.
”In him was life.” Life was. Life is eternal, in God, in the Persons of the Trinity. God created, and especially He created men, to spill over and share eternal, divine life. His Trinitarian, eternal fellowship, communion, and enjoyment is our life.
I wonder if we who have eternal life are living life.
Imagine that you lived life with a bag over your head. You didn’t know you had a bag over your head because that’s how it always was. Imagine that someone took you into a great banquet hall, filled with great art and great food, and your friend began to tell you all about it. It sounds good, but there’s no way for you to understand what he’s saying. Imagine next that your friend took the bag off your head and, for the first time, all the glories of the banquet were exposed.
What would you do? Many of us would get out our journals, or steal a napkin off the table, and start taking notes. We would walk around quietly, observing and trying to learn as much as we possibly could. We didn’t even know that all this existed. We’re seeing glorious things for the first time. We want to know more; we’re in the light.
But that is not life! Life is hugging your friend who took the bag off your head, sitting down at the table, eating and laughing and enjoying each other as well as the Host of the party.
Kids get this. They’re not suspicious, they’re not quiet, they want more food and hugs and jokes. We’re trying to read them our notes, wondering why they seem so quickly bored with us. They’re not the only ones.
We bring our bagged-head friends into the banquet room, tell them about how great it is, but they don’t hear any silverware clanging, no music, no laughing. There’s no life, and the Head of the table isn’t honored.
Logos -> Life -> Light -> in the light -> living -> in the Logos.
From Him and through Him and to Him is life! To live and help others to live in greater life is our life’s work.