Clough John Lesson 3
The Logos and Creation – John 1:3-5
There are some questions on the feedback
cards. The first question is how can I
tell a skeptic that is an evolutionist that the death mentioned in 1
Corinthians 15:21 is physical death; this person insists it only means
spiritual death. This is the kind of
typical hedge that you get when people don’t want to face the claims of a
literal text; they want to mix oil and water; they want to mix the Biblical
philosophy of creation with the pantheist philosophy of evolution, and the only
way they can do this is to readjust the interpretation of obvious words so that
obvious words are no longer obvious, and the word “death” doesn’t mean
“death.” 1 Corinthians
Another question is some believers claim the necessity of baptism for salvation and cite John 3:5 as an example. We’ll get to that when I get to John 3, we’ll have a complete exposition.
Do you think this particular church could mobilize in every area in event of a local, state, or national collapse. Well, I doubt it, and it would take a lot more believers than just in LBC.
Sunday night, you mentioned that Christ, when in the flesh, was [can’t understand word] on God the Father; it confused a visitor I brought and also myself and I wish you could explain this. Well, when Jesus Christ was incarnate He was both God and man, and in His humanity He would pray to the Father, and obviously in His humanity as a creature He doesn’t come waltzing into God’s presence as anything but a creature, therefore, when you go to these texts and you see Jesus’ apparent inferiority, it’s obviously apparent because at that point He’s incarnate under the doctrine of kenosis, He’s under humiliation, He hasn’t received the glory which He had before incarnation, and which He received after ascension. That being the case, then He is conducting His ministry under the concept of kenosis which also we’ll get into in John. So if you’ll just hang in there you’ll catch it.
Let’s open to the Gospel of John; John 1:1-18, the prologue to the fourth Gospel. It is in this prologue when the logos is defined. John is very fond of using words that have deep meanings as well as surface meanings. And we said last time that the word “logos” was a term that was used in the Greek world for both the external words coming out of someone’s mouth and the thoughts in the head before they were verbalized. And therefore this word came to mean, in large, in philosophic areas, to include language and logic. And that’s the whole point of this; it has tremendous philosophic overtones, the word “logos.” And when John identifies Jesus Christ with the logos he’s making a claim that was absolutely astounding to the Greek world, because he claimed that the one principle that unified, so to speak, the universe, was none other than not a principle at all but a person.
We found also his use of “in the beginning”
en arche, which is a Greek word which
also was loaded with great philosophic meaning, is used deliberately in verse 1
in mimicry of Genesis 1. We found also
that the Logos is personal, it wasn’t
an “it,” it wasn’t a process because he used “the Word was with God,” pros;
not meta, which is a preposition that
could have been used, but pros, one
who approaches God, one who comes to God and one who leaves God, one who is in
a personal relationship with Him. “And
the Word was God,” and we showed
So John 1:1-2 deal with the nature of the Logos, the divine nature of Christ. Now beginning with verse 3 and extending through verse 5 we have the relationship of the Logos to the creation. Verses 1-2 the relationship of the Logos to God; verses 3-5 the relationship of the Logos to the creation. And in verses 3-5 we have an answer to two great questions that men have always asked, and have always struggled with, all different kind of countries in all different kind of eras. One: what is man’s nature that leads him always to seek a God? Why is man just restless until he can find a God; he’s got to find a God. He’s either going to find an idol or he’s going to find the true God but he will find a God. He always deifies some portion of the universe, he can’t help it. And your most ardent atheist, your most ardent agnostic has already deified something; and all men have deified either that which is correct or that which is in correct.
The second question is: is there a single source of truth behind all religion? These are questions that the modern man would raise but they’re answered here by the data of verses 3-5. What is man’s nature that leads him to think of God, and is there a single source of truth behind all religion. In John 1:3, “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. [4] In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. [5] And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness never comprehended it.” Now those of you who know Greek, this is your opportunity to use it; you spend hours learning it and you might as well get some pleasure out of the hours of sweat that you put into learning it. It doesn’t second or third year Greek, really, to benefit from some of the insights as you watch. That’s why I urge you, if you have studied Greek bring your Greek text and use it; don’t just sit there looking at the English, you’ll never train yourself and discipline to use the languages unless you force yourself to use them and by forcing I mean just sit there with the English text closed and the Greek text open and that’s the only thing you’re looking at. Of course, when we have to cite other passages then you have to retreat to the English.
In John 1:3 you’ll see something immediately; “All things were made by Him,” and in the Greek this word lacks the article. It looks like this in the original: panta, usually it’s written this way, ta panta; ta is the neuter plural article that goes with this noun, and when it is used it primarily refers to the unit, the whole world. The question we are faced with in verse 3 as we begin, why does John not say, “And the world was made by Him,” after all, Genesis 1 is on his mind, he started verse 1 that way, and in Genesis 1 we have the Hebrew word for heaven and earth, and those two words together mean the entire universe. Well if that’s the case, then how come John doesn’t have the world on his mind; he uses panta, and not ta panta. The reason he uses panta without the article instead of with the article, is because he is looking at the details of the universe. It’s his way of making us think that whatever the detail on our minds, whatever we’re looking at, whether it’s a rock, whether it’s an organic thing, a plant, whether it’s the clouds, whether it’s the right man/right woman, whether it’s some child, whatever that detail is, he says that was made by Him. So the emphasis is on the details, not the overall. He’s going to teach that the entire world was made by Him, but not right here. He’s saying, rather, focus in on the details of the world; every detail that you can imagine was made by Him, “all things were made by Him.”
And then for the word “made” John is going to use a word that he will alternately use in certain key texts and we’ll study these words because they come up time and time again and the first time they come up we’ll study them and then later on when they come up for about the 200th time then we won’t have to go over them again. But the word for “made,” ginomai, and this is going to be alternately used with another word, eimi; both are kind of talking about state except eimi is a simply Greek verb to be, it just states bare existence. Ginomai, on the other hand, says that which comes into existence.
So see the difference turn to John 8:58, to show how skillfully he uses these two words to drive home a point. He reports this conversation that Jesus had when he said that Abraham saw Him, and they said huh? Abraham saw you, why you’re not yet fifty years old, how can you make the claim that Abraham saw you? And then he goes on to make a more outstanding claim, a claim that is so powerful that they took up stones to cast at Him. Skeptics always like to say that nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus ever claim to be God. If He is not claiming to be God, how do you explain the reaction? Why are they picking up stones? I would guess that the people of that day understood Jesus better than His 20th century critics. And so what was it that got them mad enough to pick up the stones to throw at Him; a simple little statement, “Before Abraham was, I am.” But it was the use of the two verbs that got to His audience. “Before Abraham,” ginomai, “before Abraham came to exist, I am,” said Jesus. I pre-exist Abraham. And that was enough for any good monotheistic Jew to get very incensed about anybody making a claim like that. So we have right here in the text, contrary to modern criticism, here we have in the text a direct blatant statement by Jesus in which He claimed to be divine. “Before Abraham came into existence, I am,” He doesn’t even say I was, He says “I am,” claiming to be God Himself.
Now turn back to John 1 and we’ll notice
that this is the word here, “All things came into existence by Him,” the
emphasis is upon however they came to be, whenever they came to be, whether it’s
an incident of history, whether it’s a person, we’re in Daniel, we’re studying
Antiochus Epiphanies, prior to or in the Maccabean period, even that he says
came into existence “by Him,” and by Him is one that commands our attention.
Every word in this verse commands your close attention. This is why John is such a fascinating
author, he never, never uses words loosely.
What is translated “by Him” in the English looks like this, and it’s a
preposition of intermediate agency, “through him.” Now that may seem like a small point except
John is consistent, insisting that all things come through the Son from the
Father. There’s a clear cut distinction
of prepositions in the Bible. In Romans
The Father is always the source logically, just like we use the illustration of time, you have future, present, past. Time comes to us out of the unknown future. We encounter time only in the present; people who live in the past or the future are off their rocker. Normal people live in the present and that’s the only place you can live; you can’t live in the future and you can’t live in the past. You live right here and now, and that’s where you meet life, in the present. And in the past, well we use our experiences out of our past life that we can orient ourselves to the present; so the past is a teacher for the present. So thus we have at least on partial illustration of the Trinity in the very nature of the universe. So the Son is now the one through whom has come all things, all detail. The Son has brought into existence all things of history. Notice that he is not just saying that Jesus is part of history nor is he just saying that Jesus is the center of history; not content with that, he goes on to argue that Jesus is the maker of history. Now this is the high and lofty view he has and he’s going to give us some 35 instances in this gospel that he has carefully selected to show the nature of this God-man. “These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Messiah,” and to prove that he must show that Jesus must answer to the Old Testament picture of who Messiah was to be like.
So “All things came by Him,” or “through Him.” Now the next phrase of verse 3 is the opposite and this is one literary technique of John, and that is that he will say an affirmative, and then he’ll immediately follow it with a parallel negative, just to make sure we’ve got the truth he gives it to us both ways. And so he says, “All things came into existence through Him,” and just so we get the point, “without Him was not anything,” or “did not anything come into existence.” And those two statements coupled together are an undeniable claim that Jesus Christ is the creator. The Son is the Creator, as well as the Father and Spirit.
“All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that has been made,” notice in the Greek the tense shift, from the aorist to the perfect, “that has been made.” Now there’s a problem here as to why this tense shift, it’s the first time we’ve had it, basically as far as right in one verse. “All things came into existence, and without Him nothing came into existence,” and then he adds, “that is, anything that has yet come to pass,” the perfect. Why is the shift? The shift is to show us that he is not only thinking just of that far distant point of the direct act of creation but more than just that original point of creation John has on his mind every scene of history. He would sit down and listen to Daniel, as we went through this morning, and say okay, there was Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, there was Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire; there were the kings of the Persian Empire that followed Cyrus, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, there were the Greeks, with Alexander, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, there were the Romans with Caesar Augustus and all the rest of them; and all those men, all those men John says, have come unto history according to plan and He who brings them to task is the Son. What a magnificent large view of Christ.
Needless to say, John didn’t have a bumper,
“If you love Jesus” on his car. Jesus was not to be put on bumper stickers;
the funny part about that is, “Honk if you love Jesus,” I’d like to see what
would happen if you went around town honking after them. I have a friend who has a brother at
The last phrase, “that was made,” if you have a modern translation, some of you may find it attached to verse 4 and the reason is that in some of the texts it is punctuated as such, however most Johannine commentators reject the attachment; in other words, the translation would read, “That which has been made in him was life.” Keep in mind in the original Greek there was no punctuation mark. The Greek text just goes right along like this, there’s no break; you’re reading an editorialized Greek text when you read it, but that’s the way it originally read and you just had to know the language well enough that you could go right on down the line. Do you know why they did that? Expenses, saved space so they just jammed everything together and you had to know language well enough to break the words. And this is why it’s ambiguous at this point. But really it isn’t too ambiguous because if we attach the phrase with verse 3 we get a complete parallel statement, everything balances out; rip it off of verse 3 and plug it into verse 4 you not only get something imbalanced but you get kind of a nonsense statement. This is totally peculiar, “anything that has come to pass in Him,” that’s just not a Johannine way of speaking, so for that reason we keep it in verse 3 and go on to verse 4.
John 1:4, “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men,” he says. Now right here we have to notice something. It says en, translated “in,” “in Him,” notice he says life doesn’t come through Jesus, life wasn’t created by Jesus, life is “in Jesus.” And he makes a very careful distinction that you understand that the word life, zoe, that he’s speaking of, that life is not just something along with the rest of creation but it’s something special, something lofty, something that you won’t find in the creation but you must go to the Creator. It is not as the Oriental religionist would have it sitting in your closet contemplating your navel, finding the key force or something. This is not something inward, it is something outside of ourselves; “in Him” and nowhere else. It is not in us, it is not in the creation, but “in Him,” that’s where it is he says.
And so “in Him was life.” And when we come to the word “life,” and light, we are now faced with two word studies in this Gospel; word studies which we will draw upon again and again and again. One of the most famous scenes of Jesus ministry is when he proclaims Himself as the light of the world. I hope that by the time we get there I’ll have a picture of the model, I’ll be able to show you when I come back from Israel a model that has been made in the city of Jerusalem of Herod’s temple, a scale model, it’s magnificent, and by photographing this thing we can recreate the scene that happened in John 8, when Jesus got up in the middle of the court we have Talmudic sources that tell us exactly what the ceremony was like and with a little addition and helps from extra-Biblical forces we can create the full scene, so you can appreciate what it was that Jesus did when He got up in the middle of the mob that night and said “I am the light of the world.” He said it in the middle of a celebration that was just fantastic. So as we go through John we’ll get these neat scenes that will go back to these words, and here we find the word “life.”
So we have to stop and do a study on the word “life,” no sense going any further if you can’t understand it. And don’t think you do understand it until you stop and say, John uses the word zoe, if John is talking about life, knowing how John writes, how he thinks, there must be tremendous content to this word. So we have to stop and say okay, what’s “life.” And when we ask the question, what life is, we can’t find the answer very readily because as you can see in the court cases that are now being argued in the courts of our land over abortion, nobody can agree on what life is; if they could it’d settle the abortion issue. If you have a Roman Catholic theologian he says life begins at conception; and you have a Unitarian that says no, life begins after physical birth when he becomes part of the community, of when you have somebody else that argues like me that life begins at the first breath, obviously a court can’t decide whether some doctor who has performed abortion has murdered or not; you can’t have murder if you don’t have life. So you can see that we are in a dilemma and we have to go back to Scripture to see.
Now the word “life” starts out in Genesis 1:20; let’s go back to Genesis 1:20 and notice some things about the way the Bible looks at life; not the way 20th century man looks at life, the way the Bible looks at life. Now the time you mention life to anybody that’s had a little training in science he’s immediately going to think of what he learned in biology, that life is that point breached in the evolutionary process when you have reproducing cells; that is life. No, says the Bible; that is not the way, precisely not the way the word life is used in Scripture. The modern biological definition is find for operational purposes but it’s certainly not reflecting biblical insights as to what life is.
The proof of it is if you’ll look in Genesis 1:10-11, we have the coming into existence of plants; plants are reproducing, organic life, you would think. But isn’t it strange that the Hebrew text does not use the word “life” here. Chayim is not used; why isn’t it used? Because plants aren’t considered life, that’s not why it’s not used. The first time the word “life” is used is in verse 20, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” There, with animals, that’s the first time we have life. And if you did a word study and went through your concordance and carefully looked at all the word usages of life, from Genesis all the way to Revelation, you would find certain characteristics cluster around this word; when Biblical writers use the word they are referring to things that move, much like we divide the zoological world from the botanical world, things that move, things that have blood, and things that have breathe. It seems that these three characteristics are in the minds of the biblical writers as they use the word “life.”
In particular, things breathe, and in the Old Testament you’re thinking in terms of concrete things, don’t read Plato and Aristotle into it. In the Old Testament people think concretely and simply and breathe, the word ruach is the Hebrew word for breath or wind; it’s also the word for spirit; the same thing in Greek, pneuma used for wind, used for spirit. What does that mean? It means if you asked somebody in the ancient world, hey, how do you know that so and so has spirit. You say okay, are they breathing or not; if they’re breathing they have spirit; if they aren’t breathing they don’t have spirit, it’s that simple. So they linked spirit with the physical breathing, all through the text they did this. They did not think in terms of some platonic glob that kind of inched around. They thought in terms of concrete breath. Fine, animals then have breathe, and therefore animals have souls; the word nephesh for soul is the result of breath; breath and body together make soul.
But we come one step further; we have seen
that plants do not have life; we see that animals do have a sort of life, but
then we come to men and men have something animals don’t which is said to be
the image of God. And the image of God
that men have is God-consciousness. Men
are conscious of God; dogs aren’t. A dog
may appreciate you and he may bark and wag his tail but he’s not worshiping
God. When you ring a bell and the dog
responds to the signal the dog is thinking but he’s not saying to himself, I
wonder whether it’s true or false, right or wrong; that’s the point. Man alone had the sense of an authority in
which they can step outside and judge whether it’s true or false. Animals can be taught to respond to sensory
signals but only men can get out of the stream of thinking and look down on the
process and say hey, I wonder if this is true, or I wonder if this is false, or
I wonder if this is right, or I wonder if this is wrong. Only men can do that because men come
equipped with something animals don’t come equipped with: conscience. And with all due apologies to
But the along during the years and the centuries of revelation, God entered into covenant with His people. And these covenants had very strange clauses; clauses which at first nobody ever noticed. And then later on people began to say hey, God’s really promising something kind of strange in these covenants; you know He said “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” That’s very nice for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are walking in the land, but what happens after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob die, God’s still known as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And you’re tempted to think that that’s just a historic title; you’re tempted to say oh well, that’s just like He’s the God of the Pilgrims, He’s the God of somebody else. You’re tempted to think of that just as a historic title. Wrong! What that’s saying is in Moses’ day, four centuries after Abraham died God was still the God of Abraham, which meant that Abraham was somewhere worshiping God: I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So it was always implicit on the Old Testament covenants, it was always implicit that life went on somehow; they didn’t know how but it went on somehow.
This argument, by the way, is the argument Jesus uses in Matthew 22:32 where He says that this proves that resurrection is implicit in the Old Testament, not explicitly stated but implicit in the very core of the covenants. If God promised something to Abraham then Abraham had to be around to get the promise or God was a liar. And Abraham didn’t get the promise, good night, when his wife died he had to buy a plot of land for her, he didn’t even own the land. Well if Abraham was promised the land and Abraham never got the land, either God’s a liar or Abraham is going to have to come back from the dead to inherit the land. It’s a very simple argument and Jesus used it to prove to the Sadducees, which was a group in his day that rejected the doctrine of resurrection.
Now fortunately for us there’s a clear statement of resurrection in the Old
Testament. If you turn to Daniel 12:2,
in Daniel’s day God pulled off the wraps and made the doctrine of resurrection
very clear indeed. No longer was it just
implied by the covenants, but it was stated clearly. I want you to notice the progress of
revelation. First we have what life
looks like at creation; then we have what life looks at after the covenants are
made. And Daniel 12:2, “And man of those
who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and
some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Now Daniel 12:2 is vital because that is your one proof text of the
resurrection in the Old Testament. That
is a proof text, that proves that the doctrine of the resurrection is not a
Christian invention. It was known in the
latter days of Judaism. The resurrection
was looked forward to again because of the covenants. If God promised we have to be around to gain
the promise, so there has to be a resurrection.
But Daniel 12:2 is important for another reason, notice the phrase in there, the first time it ever occurs in the Bible, it’s the phrase that you’ll see again and again and again in the Gospel of John, and as you read verse 2 again see if you can spot what the phrase is; a phrase which if you’re familiar with John you’ve seen it a dozen times: everlasting life! That’s the first time it occurs in the Bible. “Life everlasting,” and where of all places does the term “life everlasting” occur? In the one place of the resurrection, so what does that tell you about the image now. We’ve graduated; before said at creation life is every day mortal life that we know in which we are serving God and obeying God; life with volition, life with moral responsibility.
But now there’s a big breakthrough in
Daniel 12, we see something else, we have this eternal life. And the eternal life is life that goes on,
and it doesn’t mean eternal existence. If
I were you and I were taking notes in this I would put a big fat line between
eternal existence and eternal life, the two are not the same. Look again at Daniel 12:2, there are two
groups here; one that receives everlasting judgment; the other, everlasting
life. Are they both eternally existing?
Yes. Obviously then mere
existence is not to be equated with life.
The word “life” for John means more than just bare naked existence. You can be in hell and exist forever, that’s
not life. The word “life” means, just
like the way you want it to mean when you say boy, that’s life, or that’s
really living. When you use that phrase,
that’s really living, that’s what the Gospel writers are saying and that’s what
they mean by life. Remember what Jesus
says? I am come that they might have
life and have it abundantly; that’s the imagery behind life. And so this eternal life introduces and
builds on the first one. Creation said
life was the ability to respond, not like animals but like high lofty creatures
made in God’s image. And we can respond
to God’s claims; that’s life from Genesis.
But then if we go on to the covenants we find the eternal life that goes
on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on on the other
side of the grave. This life includes
the first one in that it is basically eternal service, eternal worship, eternal
whatever it is that you do before God in this life goes on forever and ever and
ever, eternally. So life comes to a
second stage in Scripture; not it’s called eternal life, life that goes on and
on. And Jesus in Matthew
But now we have a third step and that’s taken from John 11, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Here it becomes very clear that it’s no longer just eternal life either, in the old-fashioned Daniel sense of the Word. See, God teaches us, by steps, very, very gradually. It takes us a long time to learn, and so now we have the third stage in the progress of the understanding of the word eternal life. I’m going through this again because in Christian circles it’s fashionable to say oh he believed in Jesus, he got eternal life, not knowing the foggiest thing about what you just said. [can’t understand word] say what do you mean by that statement? Well, I don’t know… and that’s what you get. But the Bible intends you understand what you’re saying. And if we’re going to say if you believe in Jesus you have eternal life, you’d better have an idea what you’re talking about.
So we know at least from the first two
stages what life eternal if; it’s responsible existence and it’s responsible existence
that goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. But now Jesus introduces a real mind blowing
point in John
But then, John 11:25, “Jesus said unto her,” and here’s where He takes this woman’s understanding of the Old Testament and takes it one step further, He said Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life; and he that believes in Me, though he dies, he lives. [26] And whosoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” See, she believed in verse 24, and she believed the Old Testament, that was her Bible; she’d read it many times, she believed that. And Jesus said I’m going to tell you something that’s not in Daniel, and I want to know Martha, if you believe this. And what is this? This is that [can’t understand section]. Eternal life that is available now, the spiritual eternal life that’s in Christ.
Now that’s the claim He’s making; see what a big claim it is? None of those are available in the creation. Don’t contemplate your navel, that’s not where you get it; it comes from outside of creation, in Him, not in the creation, not in the “all things,” but in Him is life, and it’s the imperfect. [can’t understand words] life always there; there never was a time when this life wasn’t in Him; which begins to answer one of those questions we asked at the first which was: is there any such thing as a core truth behind all the [can’t understand word] truth, and John says whenever there has been true life it has always been [can’t understand words]. Wherever it’s [can’t understand words], under whatever conditions, if men have ever gotten this life they have gotten it because they had a relationship with the Second Person of the Godhead and nowhere else, because the life isn’t anywhere else.
Now the last part of John 1:4 he goes on and He equates the word life, zoe, with phos, the word for light. “And the life was the light of men,” he says, “the light of men.” Now we know how John uses the word light, if you’ll turn to some passages in the Gospel I’ll show you how this word is used. John 8:12 is one occurrence, “Jesus spoke unto them, saying, I am the light of the world,” that’s the famous thing that happened in Herod’s temple, and right in the middle of the celebration, great choir, great processions were going down both sides of this great court, carrying these limbs and candles; it was at night when this happened. There was a mob, and hundreds and hundreds of people packed into the temple, and all of a sudden in the middle of the parade, in the middle of this tremendous procession, out steps this Jewish carpenter; He gets up in the middle of the court and proclaims Himself to be the light of the world. That’s the scene, roughly, without all the embellishments. That’s where Jesus chose to make this bombshell of a claim. And it was a double bombshell because the ceremony of the lights were representing Jehovah God, Yahweh. And when Jesus got out in the middle of that court and He said “I am the light of the world,” it was just an act of sheer blasphemy to those people; it must have been interpreted that way, of all things, He could have said this in someone’s living room, some nice place, but no, Jesus can’t stay obscure, He has to always say these things in public. And not only just in public, but right smack dab in the middle of a highly topological service right in the temple. That’s where He chose to let this one out: “I am the light of the world.”
Now there’s another place, John 9:5, He
comes across a blind man, congenital blind; by the way, this passage is a
classic text in the New Testament; sometimes parents think that because they
have a congenital defect in their children it’s because of some sin the parents
have committed. If you think this way or
if you have friends, loved ones, that think this way, your classic answer is
found in John 9:1-4. Now in verse 5 He
says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Another use of it. John
So what is “the light of the world?” Light…light, that’s the word that was used in Genesis, exactly the text John has in mind when he starts out, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” and back in Genesis, “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth … and there was darkness upon the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. [3] And God said, Let there be light,” light was introduced at the first acts of creation. Does John somehow, has something linked in his mind with creation? Let’s look at this and let’s trace light in the world.
In Genesis 1:2 we have what we’ll call pure bare existence…pure, bare, existence. Notice the words used, “And the earth was without form, and void;” tohu vaw bohu, “and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” And what did we learn about Daniel and the imagery of the waters? The waters always picture that which has no form, chaotic, unstable, and if it was true for the waters, the text wants to make us doubly clear it was also true of the earth because the earth too was without form and void; the earth was in a state of chaos at this point. And it says “Darkness was upon the face of the deep,” there was no life. So you have total chaos; existence, yes; but not life, bare naked existence and that’s all.
Then God in Genesis 1 builds, it’s like
you’re building a house, you buy the lot and you have the lumber guy drop all
his lumber there, the brick comes, if you’re using concrete blocks they come,
you get all the raw materials spread out all over this lot; maybe the slab
isn’t poured and you’ve just got the wood for the forms, even the slab isn’t
poured yet, and that’s the picture of Genesis 1:2, the raw materials are
sitting there. And the first step in creation,
in bringing these raw materials together is “Let there be light,” we must have
light. And so light becomes the first
step in bringing a building from pure bare existence. So we go from chaos or what we’ll care bare
existence, by the end of Genesis 1:31 we have mortal history. By that we mean history that is subject to
death, if we sin. Death isn’t there yet
but it’s possible. Death is possible,
and if we have death introduced into creation by disobedience to God, what
happens? The light goes out, and when
the light goes out what does it mean? We
revert to the bare existence again; the house collapses, it comes apart, like
we had in downtown
Then along came the third step which Genesis never has; you might say this is the three steps of creation, except we have to be careful how we include the third step. And that is that man wasn’t created to live forever in the Garden of Eden; Adam and Eve were not to spend the rest of their life in mortal bodies in the Garden of Eden. It was left, the job was left to them and if you give somebody a job to do and it’s not endless, obviously the job has to be finished someday. So we can only speculate what if…what if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, what would have happened then? Did you ever think of that? What if Adam and Eve hadn’t sin. Now we can piece together Scripture to figure out pretty much “what if” they hadn’t sinned, “what if” would have happened. What would have happened would have been that they would have been transfigured and given resurrection bodies because the ultimate destiny of men were not to just stay in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden was a testing ground, that man was to come under tests for a finite duration of time to see whether or not he would in history obey his God. And if he rejected, then back to bare existence, but if he accepted then on to the next, and that is immortal history. He has a choice; those are the three, mortal history, from there going back to bare existence and hell or ahead on to immortal existence.
And what is immortal existence and immortal life and immortal history? It means that when man has come into the third stage that he has a resurrection body that no longer can be cursed, that no longer can fall apart. It’s as though the materials, the bricks and the lumber and the concrete that make up the house suddenly become fused into a beautiful home that cannot be destroyed by any storm on earth. It’s irrevocably constructed; it’s indestructible. That is immortal existence. And Adam and Eve fell so they never went to this third step. So therefore, God in His plan of salvation said all right, Adam and Eve, you deserve to go back here to Genesis 1:2, you deserve to go back to bare existence and chaos, but I’m going to design a plan of salvation for you which will give you life and life, and so I am going to give you the possibility of gaining immortal history and I’m going to do it not in violation of anything I told you in Genesis 1.
What did I say in Genesis 1? Man was to subdue the earth and My plan of salvation is designed so ingeniously that man will subdue the earth and gain immortal history anyway, even though Adam and Eve fell. And man is going to subdue the earth by the virgin born man, Jesus Christ. He will subdue the earth, He will be perfectly obedient, He will bring into existence positive righteousness, absolute righteousness, and when I see that, and when I see that Christ has passed His test, as God-man He is infinite and His testing is credit for every member of the human race. And so Christ will then lead the humanity into immortal history as the Son of man and the Son of God. So therefore we have Jesus fulfilling the destiny that Adam and Eve missed. Jesus fulfills not just for Himself, because Adam and Eve could only have done it for themselves, but Jesus does it for Himself and for everyone else, including you. Jesus has gained the basis of immortal history, which is living a perfect life in obedience to God and having lived a perfect life in obedience to God in mortal history He qualifies Himself to live forever in the presence of God.
Now if you’ll turn to Revelation 21:1, to the last of history, where we see the new heavens and the new earth, we’re still looking for light remember. It’ll all come out. Remember John is the author, the same person we’re studying in the Gospel. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away,” the old, the first creation, the mortal history, in which it was possible to get cursed, that has passed away, “and there was no more sea.” There’s no more material lying around, junk pile. [2] And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,” and he goes on to describe Jerusalem and then as he observes this city that comes out of heaven, he begins to notice something about the city. He says there’s something strange about this, as I sit here and I look at this vision, something catches my attention and he mentions it in Revelation 21:22. So used was John to having a temple, this strange thing, as he peers into the New Jerusalem, he looks and he looks and he looks and he can’t find any temple, “And I saw no temple therein,” and then he has the answer, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple if it.”
Then he goes on and here’s the passage that gives us insight into light. Revelation. 21:23, “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God did light it; and the Lamb is the light thereof.” Now when John says “the Lamb is the light thereof,” he is talking about the fact that in immortal history spiritual light will give physical light. In mortal history, in the universe in which we live, we need physical sources of light, we need chemical reactions that have a photo effect; we need those, that’s part of creation to give us light. But John says no, that’s just an adumbration of what’s coming because when we are qualified to live in immortal history and the Lamb Himself is reigning in His kingdom, it is His own moral purity that generates physical light.
Now you see what… this boggles a materialist concept of history. You cannot go into 20th century cosmogony and hope to understand the Bible in these categories. The Bible insists there are great powers beyond the physical universe, and that John foresees that day in which there will be physical life generated entirely from spiritual sources; the sun will not be necessary.
Now what, then, does light mean? On the way back to the Gospel stop at 1 John 1:7, “”If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another,” it’s unmistakable, light is used in John for God’s righteousness and His justice, it’s his way of saying justification by faith, except he doesn’t use it, Paul uses it, and when he says, “we walk in the light,” we have the light, it means that we are qualified to live in mortal history, we’re qualified to live holy in God’s presence, God, so to speak, can turn the rheostat up and turn the light on in the room now because we are built to take it; we ourselves have acquired the light. Where have we gotten it? Not by ourselves any more than in Genesis 1:2 that mess of rock and the sea that was chaotic, it didn’t generate light by itself, God had to speak against it and say, “Let there be light” there. The light had be given to physical creation from outside of creation. And so therefore we don’t have light either unless God says let there be some light there. And when God says let there be some light there you have justification. We’re not talking about an experience, we’re talking about the generation of absolute and God said in history, “let there be light,” and Jesus Christ lived a perfect life and that was the light. “I am the light of the world,” and so those words have double meaning. “Let there be light,” yes; let there be one man at least in the human race that fulfills perfectly what man was created to do, and that is perfectly obey Me, pass the test, and go on to immortal history; then light into the world was man’s function, and Christ has performed it, and therefore because He’s God as well as man He’s big enough to share it.
Now turn back to John 1:4, “In Him was life; and life was the light of men,” light of men, the light that men need because they’re in darkness, because they’ve fallen, the light, the righteousness, the perfect righteousness that every member of the human race needs, that is found in Him; it’s not found in the creation, it can’t be in the creation any more than back in Genesis 1 that light that came…and by the way, this solves another problem. People often ask in Genesis 1 why is it that on the first day God makes light, but only on the fourth day does He make the stars to carry the light? And that is to warn us that what we see as light, what our senses see as light, is something other than just what the physical body is that’s producing it, for God made the light first, then He made the light bearers, and the Hebrew word is ore, it’s the word for light, and then when you get to the fourth day it’s mawore, the light bearer. And the Genesis text is very careful; Moses hasn’t slipped and made a big mistake because he didn’t have the insight of Isaac Asimov; Moses knew what he was writing because God told him and He said write it that way, I want you to distinguish light from the light bearer, because in eternity I’m going to make that…that’s going to be very important that the human race see this. So the light is in Christ and the life was the light of men.
Now John 1:5, the finishing of this section, “And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness comprehended [overcame] it not.” This is again, if you notice in the Greek another tense shift has occurred. Up to this point it’s always things that have been, have been, were, this was done; now for the first time in this Gospel we have a present tense. “The light is now shining in darkness …” is now shining in darkness. Why the shift? Because John, aged man that he is, probably teaching in Ephesus and close to 90 years of age, he says you know, the life that is in Christ in the Word, the light that started way back there in Genesis in its first stage, the life that Daniel reported on was going to go on, the light and the life, it’s the same, its interchangeable, that has come on and you know he says, even 90 years old that I am and I’ve seen the persecutions of Nero, I’ve seen my brethren slaughtered in the streets by the Romans, I’ve seen the great persecution, but this old man can say the light keeps on shining and the darkness hasn’t overcome it. That’s John’s assurance that this light is never going to stop. The light is part of phase three, immortal history, and nothing can destroy it. The creation can’t reverse God’s decree; God has decreed that the light come to pass, Jesus has come to live his life and to generate perfect righteousness, and all the power of hell cannot subtract one milligram from the light; the light continues.
The word “comprehend,” katalambano, it means primarily to gain possession of, to get control over, he says the darkness hasn’t got control over the light. Think back to Genesis 1, John would say, to the chaotic waters, could the earth without form and void say we grab the light and we pull it in? No, because the ore was made before the mawore, the light was made on the first day and the bodies that bear the light were made on the fourth day. If the sun were to stop its reactions, whatever the reaction is, whether it’s a hydrogen reaction or whether it’s an electrical reaction that’s producing the heat and light, whatever the reaction is, if so to speak the sun said I will revert to bare existence and I’ll turn off, Genesis says but the sun only carries the light, the light was given to the sun, and the sun may decide to shut down but it can’t stop the light.
So John says just as it is in the physical world, so in the spiritual; Christ cannot be stopped. There is optimism, that no matter how bad the going gets, the light will go on.
Now we come back and finally answer those two questions. I said verses 3-5 answer two questions that modern man asks all the time. One question was: is there a single source of truth behind all religion. What would John have said? John would have said that wherever you go in the earth, whomever you talk to, and you discuss the issues of religion, wherever there is a partial truth in any religious system, that partial truth is there only because of Jesus Christ, and it is about Christ. So that as you go to this religion, X Y or Z, those religions will have little pieces of the truth here and there, and John will argue that those little pieces of truth here and there are pieces of truth that come from the Logos, because if men have ever attained the light they’ve only gotten it by association with Him. And this becomes the source of Christian apologetics, apologetics seeks out to find where the pieces of truth are in the non-Christian religious system and then seeks to build from there.
The second question: what is man’s nature, [can’t understand word] it leads him to seek a God because man is the one creature who is aware that his mortal destiny isn’t all there is. The animals and the plants and the rocks are satisfied with mortal history. Man is the only creature that hunts and hunts and seeks and seeks until he can find whatever that is that he’s been made for, that somehow just normal living doesn’t fill the void, there’s something made in our hearts and the reason is that we’re made for immortal history, we’re made to walk in the light, and our souls just cry out for the light. It’s abnormal, just like a small child, he gets very uneasy going to bed in a dark room, he’s scared, and so the picture the Bible gives of the human race is that we’re uncomfortable, even though we’ve grown used to the darkness we’re still uncomfortable with it, it’s not natural, we want to turn the light on, just like a blind man would just love to see, just for two minutes, if he could only look out and see. So that’s what is deep in our souls, we want to look out and see and the Bible says that’s why man always wants a God, he’s looking for the light, always looking for the light; he was made to live in the light.