-This message John heard from Christ Himself. “We’ve heard and seen... We’ve seen... We’ve seen and heard... We’ve heard...” - He’s is making a point. John didn’t just make this stuff up. He didn’t dream it up in a vacuum. He was a witness. Jesus was his personal teacher - for three years, in fact. "I am the Light, the Light of life, the Light of the world" - Jesus said it over and over and over again (Jn 3.19, 8.12, 9.5, 12.35, 12.46). "Come to Me, believe in Me, walk with Me - come out of the darkness and into the Light, walk in the Light, and become sons and daughters of Light..."
-Light and darkness - here we have the first of several motifs John begins to take up in this letter. God is light. He dwells in "unapproachable" light (1Tim 6.16), light so blindingly bright that human eyes cannot gaze at it directly and even the backside of it will light up your face like the sun. n the beginning, the first thing God said was, ‘Let there be light’. He had made the heavens and the earth, but the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the earth. The eternal God spoke into the void and darkness and created the light with a word. And light is the first thing mentioned in all of Scripture which was good. Light is good, and in this sense, darkness is bad. Light and darkness are completely antithetical - they cannot coexist. Darkness is the absence of light. It is the concealment of light, where truth and righteousness are suppressed and where I can (try to) hide and do those things of which I am (or should be) ashamed. Where light goes, it dispels darkness. And as you get closer to God, and approach all the way to Him, you will find that there is not even a single bit of darkness. No hiding. No concealing. Nothing but light. Truth, justice, and the Heavenly way. And so we observe that John is beginning with the character of God, reminding us of Who God is and what He is like. This is the God with Whom we have to do.
-From a certain perspective, darkness - or night - is a necessary concession to the physical constraints of life on our planet. Living things need to sleep - and the darkness of night certainly seems more conducive to that. But a 24-day - let’s say for the sake of conjecture that the earth did not rotate around its axis once every 24 hours but simply went around the sun with one side constantly facing towards it. That side would be total desert. The other side would be a massive ice cap. It is difficut to imagine how life as we know it could exist without a period of darkness. Nevertheless, we are told that one day - when the children of the Light find themselves in the new heavenly Jerusalem, with a new heavens and a new earth - that there will be no longer any night, nor even any need for a sun. God Himself will be present in that realm, and the Light of His glory will illuminate the entire place such that somehow there is no longer any night (Rev 21.23-25, 22.5). What a(n unending) day of brilliant blindingly breathtaking goodness that will be...!
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