“The true light…was coming into the world.”

I was about 11 years old.  My family had never really been out west before.  But here we were, crossing Texas.  I thought it would take forever!  Little did I realize that this first-ever month-long vacation held many exciting adventures once Texas was behind us: the Great Salt Lake, Disneyland, San Francisco, a world’s fair, and more.  But one of the early surprises was a cave, a very big cave, called Carlsbad Cavern.  We stood in line for about an hour before finally descending down a roped concrete path into the mouth of what looked like the subject of a Jules Verne novel.  The sunlight became that light in the tunnel behind us, fading with every step.  The pathway was well lit with lights so we could see and move forward.  Slowly we, and the scores of others with us, made it to the Big Room, so named for good reason.  This one part of the cave covers more than eight acres and can accommodate six football fields!  But then the shock came.  The tour guide mentioned that most people had never experienced total darkness, not even on the darkest nights in the darkest closets.  So he told us he was going to turn off the lights.  And he did.  Very faint echoes of distant noises.  Vainly looking for anything.  It was the most absolutely creeped-out feeling of all my eleven years!  Such a vast underground expanse with too many strangers and no eyes to see at all.  Then he asked us, “If you were stuck here, how do you think you’d get out?”  That was when the fear began to set in.  Then suddenly the lights returned, and I detected more than just a few “Whew’s”.

But before the lights returned, the guide turned on his flashlight, then another light from a far distance.  You could see it clearly.  And that fact is what we find in our text from John 1, which identifies Jesus as the true light.  In verse one Jesus is the Word and God.  In the second verse he is with God in the beginning, at creation.  He is the Creator in verse three.  Then in verse four we find that life is resident in him, and this life is “the light of men”.  What are we to make of this?

Think of it this way.  The text tells us that Jesus is the Creator, the one who gives life.  How can evolutionists explain how life arose from dead matter?  In a word, they can’t.  All naturalistic explanations fall far, far short.  The more scientists discover from microbiological research, the more they discover what has been called “irreducible complexity”.  At the risk of sounding ancient, my high school biology teacher told us the single cell is the simplest organism known to man.  Yeah, right.  Scientists now know that the “simple cell” has more infrastructure and greater complexity than all of New York City!  They also say that at the core of life is code, language, information and organization, things that require intelligence.  Where, they ask, did this come from?  How did it get to be this way?  Well, if the Creator is “the Word”, we have right there language, code and organization.  Our intelligent Creator arranges lifeless matter, organizing it in such a way that life not only arises, it also sustains itself.  Science is now proving what the text has said for thousands of years: this life is the light of men, if they only have the eyes to see it.  And what does this light show?  That there is a Creator, that we are not alone, and that as such, we are responsible to him.  Whether or not we embrace this is irrespective of the fact that truth is a good thing.  No one really enjoys being tricked or fooled or deceived.  Light shows what is, and what is real.

But verse nine says that Jesus is the “true light that gives light to every man [when he] was coming into the world”.  Is this true light distinguished from false light?  No.  There are times when the counterpart of true is false.  True and false prophets fit this scenario.  Jesus said he was the “true vine” in John 15:1.  Was he comparing himself to a “false vine”?  No.  Numerous places in the Old Testament describe Israel as a vine.  Distinguishing himself from the nation, Jesus said he was the true vine.  What, then, did he mean?  That he was the genuine, faithful, original vine.  As creator, Israel came from him, the true vine.  Likewise, his coming into the world (conception and birth) gave additional light revealing him as Creator.  His death revealed that he is Redeemer and Savior.  His resurrection and ascension revealed that he is Lord (Phil. 2:9-11).

In essence, then, we have light upon light, increasing revelation from the principle of life to the life of Jesus himself.  And this light illuminates every man, woman and child.  He has not left himself without witness, nor is he unconcerned about billions still living in spiritual darkness, like me in a spiritual Big Room at Carlsbad.  Are you using this true light to direct others from their cavern to light and life?