One light, and the Light it points to

God Is Light

When John wants to summarize the message he heard from Jesus and now passes on, he reaches for one of the shortest and most searching sentences in all of Scripture. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Nothing is qualified. There is no shadow admitted, no trace of dimness allowed. It is a claim about the very being of God, and John states it as the foundation of everything else he will say about fellowship and forgiveness and truth. This page dwells on that sentence and on what John builds upon it. The declaration is not offered as abstract theology. John writes it to a community troubled by people who claimed intimacy with God while walking in ways that contradicted his character. Against such claims he sets the pure light of God as the measure of all fellowship. If God is light without any darkness, then closeness to him cannot coexist with a life at home in the dark. The verse is a comfort and a warning in the same breath.

“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”1 John 1:5

The light in Scripture

The opening of John's first letter moves quickly to this theme. Having spoken of the word of life that he and the others had seen and heard and handled, John says that the message they received and now announce is this, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. The double statement is emphatic. He affirms the positive, that God is light, and then closes every loophole with the negative, that no darkness exists in him whatsoever. The Greek piles up the denial so that the reader cannot imagine even a shadow. From this John draws immediate consequences for how people live and speak. He addresses those who say they have fellowship with God while walking in darkness, and he says plainly that such people lie and do not practice the truth. The test is not the claim but the walk. Fellowship with a God who is light must show itself in a life that moves in the light. John is not describing moral perfection as the price of nearness. He is describing a fundamental direction, whether a person walks toward the light or away from it. Then comes the promise that keeps the passage from crushing the honest reader. John says that if we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. Remarkably, walking in the light does not turn out to mean sinlessness. It turns out to mean living in the openness where sin can be seen and confessed and cleansed. Light is the place where honesty becomes possible. John presses this further. He warns that anyone who claims to have no sin is deceiving himself and the truth is not in him. But he immediately offers the counter promise, that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive them and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The purity of God, which might have seemed only a barrier, becomes the very reason confession is safe. Because God is light, nothing is hidden from him, and because he is faithful, nothing confessed to him is held against the one who comes.

What it comes to mean

What John states plainly is a claim about the nature of God, expressed under the image of light. Light in this letter carries at least two strands that the context makes clear. It speaks of holiness, the moral purity of a God untouched by any evil, and it speaks of truth, the self revealing openness of a God who hides nothing and in whom nothing false can dwell. The denial that there is any darkness in him rules out both moral compromise and deception. God is wholly good and wholly true, without mixture. What can be responsibly drawn out is the way this purity reshapes the meaning of fellowship. One might expect that a perfectly holy God would be approachable only by the perfectly holy, and that walking in the light would mean achieving flawlessness. John says the opposite. Walking in the light means living where the light shines, where things are exposed rather than concealed. It is the difference between two people who hide their faults from each other and two who bring them into the open. The second pair, John says, actually have fellowship, precisely because nothing festers in the dark between them. This is the honest and often surprising heart of the passage. The proof that a person walks in the light is not the absence of sin but the presence of confession. The one who claims no sin has stepped back into darkness, into the lie. The one who confesses has stepped into the light, where cleansing waits. So the holiness of God does not finally drive the sinner away. Received rightly, it draws the sinner into the one place where sin can be dealt with honestly and washed away. Honesty also requires marking the boundary of what the text says. John is not teaching that sin does not matter, nor that any behavior is acceptable so long as one is sincere. He is severe with those who claim fellowship while walking in darkness. The comfort of confession never becomes permission for the dark. What John holds together is a high and unyielding view of God's purity and an equally high confidence in the cleansing that flows from the blood of Jesus. Neither cancels the other. The light exposes, and the same light, in Christ, cleanses.