NO DARKNESS IN GOD

This is the message we have heard from Him and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness we lie and do not live by the truth. (1 John 1: 6-7)

John did not mess around with theological concepts and abstract ideas. He came right to the point.He assured his readers that the one of whom he wrote was indeed the one who came from the Father, who lived on earth as a real human being and who was the living Word, representing the Father in all He said and did.

John and his fellow disciples were eyewitness of the truth that Jesus was a man and yet more than a man. They had seen, heard and touched Him and their lives had been changed forever because He came, not only because He lived and died as a perfect Son, but also because He had a message from God for them.

What was that message? Jesus reaffirmed the message of the prophets who spoke for God against the backdrop of His people’s persistent disobedience over centuries of calling them back to Himself. Their constant refrain was …God is holy! He has no part of anything that is tainted with corruption or imperfection.

Even the effects of Adam’s sin over which they had no control, like the shedding of blood during childbirth, was an affront to Him because any form of bloodshed was the outcome of sin. Every hint of corruption or imperfection had to be atoned for by the shedding of blood. Death was the penalty He demanded for imperfection, the death of a perfect and innocent animal as a foreshadowing of the death of God’s perfect Lamb.

John declared that God is light. Like love, light is the essence of who He is. If God were only love, there would be no guarantee that He would act in perfect justice towards those who transgress His laws. To be love without the balance of light would leave us with a wishy-washy God who would gloss over every infringement of His perfection in the name of “love”.

That’s the way some people want Him to be, and even believe Him to be so that they can continue in their evil ways with the assurance that God will do nothing about it. But where does that leave others who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators of evil?

We do have the assurance, however, from the mouth of God Himself that His nature is in perfect balance. He is both love and light. He loved the world of sinners, but He could not pass over their sin without demanding just payment for what they had done. When the time came, He sent His Son into the world to live out a life of perfect obedience to Him, and then to die as a sacrificial lamb to atone for the sins of the world.

Where does that leave us?

He calls for a response from us to what He has done, not only to deal, once for all, with our state of alienation from Him when we respond to His invitation to believe in His Son, but also to enable us to live in daily fellowship with Him. That means that we remain in oneness with Him by walking in the light of who He is and what He requires of us as His sons and daughters. There is no value in believing that Jesus is the Son of God, and that God raised Him from the dead if we do not follow through with a life of transparency with Him and in fellowship with Him and with our fellow human beings.

Unfortunately, so devious is the human heart that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are okay even when we have sinned. Like Adam, we blame others and make excuses for our sin. We may even acknowledge our sin but . . . taking responsibility for it is another story.

That’s where God wants us to be with Him – not just acknowledging we have done wrong when we are caught out but coming clean with God. The Holy Spirit never, let me repeat – never – beats us over the head with our sin. Accusation is the devil’s work. Our conscience, if trained by God’s word, will point out where we have gone wrong. The Holy Spirit points us back to who we are – holy and beloved sons and daughters of God whom Jesus has made righteous by His blood.

We do ourselves a terrible injustice of we insist that our deviation from God’s way are “mistakes” or “indiscretions”. God calls it sin. If we are unwilling to acknowledge that we sinned because we chose to, not because “the devil made me do it” or “because of what my father or mother did to me” or for any other reason, we remain in the darkness of self-deception and self-denial, and forfeit the delight of fellowship with the Father. 

Painful as it is to have to acknowledge that we are deliberately walking in the darkness, and come back to the way of truth, it’s the only way to keep our faces towards Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life and who is the only one who will take us to the Father.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.