At the beginning of this series we talked about the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him, to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of prosperity, luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God, as Jesus says in John 17:3. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try. The constant restlessness of our society in always grasping for something new and novel, something to relieve the meaninglessness of life in this fallen world, grows out of this. We’re restless, because we were created for something better. God gives us good things in this life, but there’s always a sense of incompleteness about them. I’ve often recommended John Baillie’s book, A Diary of Private Prayer. One of his prayers, which I’ve adapted somewhat, expresses this idea: “We thank you, O Lord, that you have so put eternity in our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us completely. We thank you that every present joy is mixed with sadness and unrest, to remind us that we are not yet home. And above all, we thank you for the sure hope and promise of an endless life which you have given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen” (see A Diary of Private Prayer, p. 91).
Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. God gives us good things, but He won’t permit us to find fulfillment in them alone. In doing that, He’s not being miserly. He’s not depriving us. He’s protecting us from idolatry. He’s calling us to Himself, the source of all good things. And when we’re walking with Him, gratefully enjoying the things He gives us, these things don’t have the sense of bitterness and emptiness that they do apart from Him. C.S. Lewis has a good description of how this works: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a [swim] or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home” (C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, p. 18). Our Father refreshes us on the journey; but we must remember that we are still on a journey. These pleasant inns which our Father gives to refresh us are only a foretaste of what’s ahead. He is the source of all good, and our hearts will only find rest in fellowship with Him. “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
In the last sermon, we looked at the goodness of God, that this God who created us to know Him is a God who delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. Many Christians have been stern and rigid because they think that’s what God is like. They think of God as a humorless, harsh, demanding taskmaster who makes excessive demands and is never pleased with anything we do. A.W. Tozer, in an attempt to correct this perception, wrote this: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15).
The passage we’re looking at today is about fellowship with God. John begins by testifying to his personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of life: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” He’s not writing to them about his own theories. He’s an eyewitness. He’s speaking of things he knows for certain. And his purpose in writing is this: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
John wants them to know God. That’s why he’s writing. But he’s concerned with a different problem than the one we confronted in the last sermon. One of Satan’s strategies is to deceive us about who God is, and if he doesn’t succeed in one direction he’ll try something else. He persuaded Eve that God wasn’t good, that He was depriving them of something really beneficial by forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). But if we resist this temptation, he’ll try the opposite error. He’ll try to persuade us that God’s goodness means He doesn’t really care that much about our sins. I’ve often heard this sort of thing, that because God is good, He won’t punish us for our sins. I’ve talked to many people who see God as a benevolent, grandfatherly figure who is up in heaven wringing His hands, wishing we’d behave better, but who will forgive us in the end anyway, no matter what.
John wants to correct this misconception, so he tells us, in verse 5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” This contrast between light and darkness is common in Scripture. It’s often used to describe the conflict between truth and error. For example, Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” Or, in John’s gospel, Jesus says: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Light, when it’s used in this way, symbolizes truth, and darkness symbolizes error.
But light and darkness are also used in a moral sense. For example, in Isaiah 5: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (v. 20). Here, the contrast is between good and evil. Paul uses this same image in Ephesians 5: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth). Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (vv. 8-14). In this passage, light symbolizes holiness and righteousness, but also the truth that makes things visible, that exposes the works of darkness. Both of these images are important in the way John uses light and darkness in his letter.
Here’s one more example, from John’s gospel: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19-21). Light symbolizes truth and holiness, and darkness symbolizes sin and error. Evil hates to be exposed for what it is, so it is opposed to both holiness and truth. That’s the point of what Jesus said to His brothers: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil (John 7:7).” He speaks the truth about sin and unrighteousness. He exposes wickedness to the light of the truth, contrasting it with the holiness of God.
So, with all that in mind, what does John mean when he says “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”? The primary stress here is on His holiness. The following verses deal with the problem of sin in relation to a holy God. So, the most important idea in this verse is God’s absolute holiness and purity (although the emphasis on truth is also here, especially in verses 7-2:2). He wants to be sure his readers understand, so he states it both positively and negatively, in the strongest possible terms: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. Eugene Peterson does a good job of bringing this across in The Message: “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.”
God’s holiness points primarily to two things. The most basic idea is His separateness, “His uniqueness, His distinction as the Wholly Other, the One who cannot be confused with the gods devised by men..., the One who stands apart from and above the creation” (ISBE Revised, vol. 2, p. 755). God stands apart from, and infinitely exalted above, His creation. But holiness also points to His moral perfection, “His absolute freedom from blemish of any kind” (Ibid.). One of the best pictures of God’s holiness is in Isaiah 6: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty’” (Isaiah 6:1-5). God’s holiness isn’t something we discuss over coffee and then go on with our business. When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter, when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8).
In 1977, while I was at Operation Mobilization’s September conference preparing to go to India, I bought a hymnal. I didn’t grow up in the church, so I really didn’t know many hymn tunes at this point, and the hymnal I bought only had words. But I read through it as part of my devotions. Because I knew so few tunes, I often ended up using the same tunes for many different hymns. I learned a lot about God, and about worship, from reading through that hymnal. Some of my best memories from my time in India are the times I was able to get away from the team and away from other people to sing to the Lord. (It’s not always easy to get away from people in India. Sometimes I’d climb a tree in the early morning, before the rest of the team was up, or I’d walk out into the fog on a foggy morning.) This is one of the hymns I discovered in that hymnal. It’s not only about God’s holiness, but everything the author says about God in worship is pervaded with an understanding that he is worshiping One who is absolutely holy and pure.
My God, how wonderful thou art,
Thy majesty how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
How wonderful, how beautiful
The sight of thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
No earthly father loves like thee;
No mother, e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as thou hast done
With me, thy sinful child.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
(Frederick William Faber, 1814-63)
In worshiping the holy God, Faber is filled with adoration, awe, holy fear, hope, tears of repentance, and love. He’s aware of worshiping the One before whom angels cry out continuously “holy, holy, holy.” God is holy. In Him there is no darkness at all. “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.” In 1978 I read a book by a Christian psychologist who was disturbed by the idea of God’s holiness. It seemed clear to him that an emphasis on God’s holiness would lead to psychological disturbances, and that the New Testament only teaches about a God of love. But the book was foolish and shallow, and the author clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. There’s more of God in the third stanza of Faber’s poem–“How wonderful, how beautiful The sight of thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, And aweful purity!” than there was in 100 or so pages of that other man’s book. He didn’t know God very well, because he presumed to dictate what God should be like. We need to know God as He is, and as He has revealed Himself. And knowing Him, we will find that He is worthy of worship, that our greatest privilege is to fall on our faces before Him in adoration, wonder and praise.
But this still leaves us with a problem, the same problem that both Isaiah and Peter recognized. How do we, as sinful people in a fallen world, live in fellowship with a holy God? This is the problem John addresses in verses 7 through the beginning of chapter 2. He answers the question in three different ways, responding to three different problems, but his basic answer is this: we confess our sins to God, bringing them into the light of His truth, and He both forgives us and purifies us, so that we don’t continue in captivity to sin.
In verses 7-8, he deals with the problem of those who claim to have fellowship with God, but who continue living in habitual sin: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” In John’s time, there were some teachers who associated evil with the material world and good with the spirit. This was an early form of a teaching known as Gnosticism. Some of them became extreme ascetics, punishing their bodies in an attempt to be free from the evil of the flesh, but others decided it didn’t really matter what they did in their bodies, since God is pure spirit anyway and matter is inherently evil. They believed sinning with their bodies wouldn’t harm their relationship with God. John is countering this teaching by asserting that we can’t have fellowship with God, who is light, and be living in darkness at the same time. The answer, in verse 8, is to walk in the light as He is in the light. This means bringing our sins before Him in confession, and also turning away from our sins and seeking to become more like Him (remember that John is using light here to signify both moral purity and truth). He’s saying that we need to confess our sins and turn away from them.
The next problem, in verses 8-9, is the claim to be perfect and without sin. Here’s how it reads in the New English Bible: “If we claim to be sinless, we are self-deceived and strangers to the truth.” Perfectionism gives us a false vision of ourselves; it leads us to self-deception and unreality. It puts us out of step with the truth. If we think we’re perfect, our self-perception is distorted. The solution is to confess our sins to God; and when we do that He forgives and cleanses us. The final problem, in verse 10, is similar. Verse 8 deals with those who claim to be perfect right now, while verse 10 talks about those who claim not to be guilty of sin at all: “If we claim that we’ve never sinned,” as it reads in The Message. All three problems put us in the darkness of sin and falsehood, out of fellowship with the God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. If we try to continue living in sin, and claim to have fellowship with Him at the same time, we’re denying His nature. We’re trying to pretend that He’s someone other than who He is. If we claim to be without sin, either that we’re not guilty at all or that we’ve been made perfect already, we’re rejecting God’s verdict against us, which then keeps us from bringing our sins into the light of His truth for cleansing.
The first two verses of chapter two give a summary of what John has been saying: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” God’s desire is that we live increasingly in freedom from sin. He’s freed us from the kingdom of darkness and made us part of the kingdom of His only Son. We’re new creatures. We’re no longer in bondage to sin. That’s the argument Paul develops at some length in Romans 6. We’re to be growing in holiness.
But we still find that all we do falls short of God’s glory, that everything we do is tainted with pride and self-seeking. And, as much as we might wish it were otherwise, Christians still fall into sin. So provision has been made for this as well. Jesus is our advocate. He speaks to the Father in our defense. He intercedes for us. He is our lawyer, representing us. He is the One who paid the debt for our sins and provided for our forgiveness. God is holy. In Him is no darkness at all. He won’t overlook sin and rebellion. But He’s provided a way, which doesn’t violate His holiness or undermine His justice. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When we’re accused by Satan, when he comes to us and reminds us of all the horrible things we’ve done, we don’t need to worry. Jesus speaks in our defense. Everything our accuser says may be true, but it doesn’t matter. The price has been paid in full. We can have fellowship with the God of light, in whom there is no darkness at all.
Our holy God is a loving and merciful Father. After Isaiah cried out in despair, this is what happened: “Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, ‘See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven” (Isaiah 6:6-7, NLT). This God, “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see,” (1 Timothy 6:15-16) has loved us with a holy love and has given us free access into His presence. Let’s not be afraid to face the truth about ourselves and to bring our sins into the light of His presence, where we receive forgiveness and cleansing. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.... If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
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