“In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not overpower it.” John 1:4 – 5
If Jesus’s life is the light of men, then without the indwelling life of Christ, mankind lives isolated in darkness. This is the story of fallen humanity, but tragically so many Christians still live in darkness because they’ve not learned to participate in the light that is the life of Christ. John 1:5 does not say that “the light” shines INTO the darkness. Rather, it says that the light shines IN the darkness. Jesus doesn’t dispel our spiritual, thus emotional, mental darkness by shining into it. Instead, the second person of the Godhead stepped into our darkness by becoming human. In the incarnation, God clothed Himself in the darkness of our fallen, frail humanity, but the darkness did not overpower His light. The life of Jesus is the light of men and women, and when Christ joins Himself to us, His strength is made perfect in our weaknesses. Jesus is the truth, and because of your union with Him, He is the truth about you. Your darkness no longer identifies you because the light of His life shines in the darkness. Our frail humanity gives context to His adequacy, and when light shines in darkness, all surrounding darkness is dispelled.
“And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him, there is no darkness at all..” 1 John 1:5. I’m so grateful that God didn’t waive some kind of magic one and declare us “saved,” but that would not have fulfilled His dream for us. His dream for us is that we would be grafted into the Sonship of Jesus and, as coheirs with Him, experiencing and enjoying all He has and all that He is. For this to happen, He couldn’t save us from a safe distance. He plunged into our muck and slime and saves us from the inside out.