Among the Four Gospels, John is unique. Unlike Matthew and Luke, there is no birth narrative. He begins like Mark’s Gospel with John the Baptist announcing the Messiah’s imminent revelation. However, John adds a prologue, a preface to the historical beginning, when John the Baptist testifies, “I am not the Christ,” to priestly inquisitors sent by Jerusalem’s religious rulers. With a few, albeit profound, words, the prologue testifies to the Messiah’s eternal, theological, and scriptural identity prior to his incarnation.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1–5)
As if imitating the fullness of the one called the Word, the Evangelist begins his Gospel with these words that densely compress the truths expounded in the unfolding storyline concerning the One testified to by “a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6). First, the Evangelist identifies the One about whom John testifies as the Word who was in the beginning, who was with God, who was God, and through whom every created thing came into existence. Second, he identifies the Word who spoke everything into existence as the wellspring of Life so that Life is an apt title for him, which he owns for himself by announcing: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). From the Life emerges the Evangelist’s third designation for the Word: “and the Life was the Light,” a designation dominating John’s Gospel. Dense as the Evangelist’s opening statements are, his next is more compact: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). This compressed declaration establishes light as a core thematic imagery punctuating John’s Gospel with its counterpart, darkness. This imagery summons other clusters of counterpart symbols that will feature prominently in John’s gospel: day-night and sight-blindness. More than this, the compact thesis statement anchors the light-darkness theme in creation’s first day (Gen. 1:3). The Light that shined into darkness on the first day presaged the dawning of the new creation with the advent of “the Light of the world” whose revelatory radiance is the unfolding mystery recounted by John. How do so few words—only thirteen in the Greek text—within this single verse capture the plotline of John’s Gospel and connect the initial day of God’s creative activity with the dawn of the new creation? This is worthy of careful unpacking in this article and in its sequel (part two).
Creation’s First Light Is the True Light of the New Creation
John’s initial words, “in the beginning,” followed by his explicit assertion that all creation, material and immaterial, came into existence through the Word (John 1:2), orient the remainder of the paragraph to the opening verses of Genesis 1. John tells us that the Word who was present “in the beginning,” who spoke all things into existence, was also the source of life, thus properly designated “the Life,” but also was present as “the Light” that “shined in darkness” on the first day (Gen. 1:3). Ponder how the compressed statement of John 1:5 comprehends the expanse of the ages! In the beginning, the Creator speaks and foreshadows the emergence of the True Light—from the darkness in the Last Days. Thus, the Apostle Paul explicates this mystery and states the correlation plainly: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).[1]
1. What precedes sets the context: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case, the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:3–5). Also, Paul’s appeal to Gen. 1:3 may be influenced by combining it with Isa. 9:1 (LXX).
On the first day, The Light’s inextinguishable radiance penetrated the darkness of creation until the sun, created on the fourth day as a copy of and stand-in for the True Light, became the heavenly body “to give light on the earth to rule the day … to separate the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:16-18; cf. John 1:9).[2] The Apostles John and Paul compel us to recognize God’s creational design concerning darkness and light. As the plotline of the mystery of God’s progressive redemption unfolds, being concealed even while being revealed, it becomes clear that our Creator infused darkness and light with weighty, irrepressible significance throughout all the world’s cultures.[3]
Beyond the visible realm, our Creator established darkness and light to bear universal significance, with light representing all that is right, holy, and good, while darkness represents all that is positively evil. Darkness is the domain of God’s disfavor, and light is the realm of his favor, where his grace resides.[4] So, the Creator’s actions and words, recorded in Genesis 1:4–5, instruct us by reinforcing these observations: (1) God approves light over darkness: “And God saw that the light was good” (Gen. 1:4); (2) the Creator “separated the light from the darkness” and “called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night;” (3) God’s word declares, “And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.” The Creator reckoned days from evening to morning, the inverse of our reckoning from morning to evening, because darkness shrouded God’s first creative acts until the Word uttered, “Let there be light.” To emphasize God’s turning darkness into light, God saw to it that Moses would repeat these same words five more times in Genesis 1, once for each of the subsequent days of creation (John 1:8, 13, 19, 23, 31).
2. Here, “True Light” does not stand over against the “false light” of false religions. The contrast is between “the veritable or real Light” and all other forms of divinely given light as copies or replicas of the original. Jesus’s portrayal of John’s witness concerning him as “a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light” (John 5:35) makes it clear that this is the meaning of “True Light.” John’s light correlates to “the True Light” as the moon’s reflective glow compares with the sun’s burning radiance. This is a dominating pattern concerning the Fourth Gospel’s use of “true” as in modifying worshipers (John 4:23), bread (John 6:32), food and drink (John 6:55), the vine (John 15:1), and even God (John 7:28; 17:3). The latter two may entail double entendre with two senses present, true versus false and original versus copy.
3. This statement summarizes the Apostle Paul’s more extensive affirmation—“ In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:7-11).
4. The Light renames the Word as God’s revelatory illumination and redeeming salvation. The darkness represents not only sin, evil, and the devil but also the Messiah’s human adversaries (cf. John 1:4, 5, 8, 9; 3:19, 20, 21; 8:12; 9:5; 11:9, 10; 12:35, 36, 46). By personification, the darkness represents people who stand opposed to the incarnate Word, the Light (cf. John 3:19; 8:12; 12:35, 46; cf. 1 John 1:5, 6; 2:8, 9, 11).
God’s covenant with Israel sustained this reckoning of days, each day beginning at sunset. So, the Gospels tell how the religious rulers in Jerusalem, after plotting and scheming to obligate the Romans to carry out the death of their Messiah by crucifixion, exhibited fastidiousness concerning the Mosaic Law’s regulations about dead bodies hung on wooden poles and the need to remove them before the beginning of a new day, at sunset.[5] They were exceptionally exacting about not desecrating the Sabbath Day. So, John reports that the Jewish officials who knew the Roman practice of crucifixion asked Pilate to expedite the deaths of the three men on their crosses by breaking their legs so that their bodies could be removed for burial before the beginning of the Sabbath (John 19:31). It was then that the soldiers discovered that Jesus was already dead, so they did not break his legs, fulfilling a divine prophecy without realizing it (John 19:32–33, 36). One of Jesus’s disciples, Joseph of Arimathea, assisted by Nicodemus, received the crucified Messiah’s body and buried it in a virgin tomb nearby in a garden as the Sabbath was beginning (John 19:42; Luke 23:54).
So, as we reflect on these observations, this truth should be readily evident. If we are thinking God’s thoughts after him, which is to think biblically as Christ teaches us, darkness and light were divinely imbued with universal moral significance from the beginning. Each day’s cycle, with darkness yielding to light, rehearses and dramatizes for us the first day of creation—but also the Last Day, the day of resurrection. With the dawn of each new day, we are to respond to God’s gracious call to emerge from the darkness into the light. This significance of the daily cycle, divinely imbued, accounts for the Apostle Paul’s appeal to us.
Do this by understanding the time because the hour is already here for you to be awakened from sleep. For now, salvation is nearer to us than when we began to believe. The night is almost spent, and the day has drawn near. Therefore, let us put aside the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk as in the day, not in drinking bouts and drunkenness, not in sexual sin and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not make provision for the flesh for its cravings (Rom. 13:11-14; my translation).
5. See Deut. 21:22–23 for this regulation. “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.”
Thus, the darkness of the unfolding creation account represents the domain of God’s disfavor, the realm of death into which Adam’s disobedience would plunge humanity. Likewise, the Creator’s command, “Let there be light,” penetrating the darkness with brilliance, signifies God’s covenantal grace with his beckoning call, first calling for Adam’s obedience (Gen. 2:15-17), then for disobedient Adam and his progeny, providing redemption through the good news as it is in the Seed of the Woman (Gen. 3:14-21) that all who repent may dwell within the realm of God’s pleasure, where life holds dominion over death, where light banishes darkness.
