Christmas Lights
“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 1:4–5, ESV)
If the first great question of philosophy is “Why is there something and not nothing,” then the second is surely, “How did we move from no-life to life?” The atheist’s answer to this is neither convincing nor plausible. One wit summarized it like this, “Atheism: the belief that there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing, and then nothing magically exploded for no reason creating everything, and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits, which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense.”
This is perhaps the atheist’s essential conundrum: At the beginning, was there nothing or something? If nothing existed, then how did everything come into being? Ex nihil, nihil fit (Out of nothing, nothing comes), right? So, if something exists now, then something has always existed. With that being the case, what was the nature of that something? If that something is simply impersonal matter - let’s call it mud - then mud is king, and mud has always existed. Thoughtless mud. Lifeless mud. Forever. Really?
From where, then, did that mud arise? How can a finite, mutable thing exist forever? Atheists cannot deny that this is a serious question, and their worldview has no logical answer.
The Bible begins somewhere else - with Someone. This makes all the difference in the world. Before there was any finite, mutable matter, the Godhead existed. Ultimate reality is alive, thoughtful, loving, and creative.
This is John’s point in these initial verses. Christ is the Life behind all life. Instinctively, all of us know this. Non-life cannot give birth to life. The life of Christ shines in and through the life of every other living thing. It enlightens all mankind. No human being is immune from this revelation, though we try to be. We prefer the darkness we love, to the Light we hate (John 3:18ff).
Yet, in Jesus, the Light shines still, relentlessly invading the darkness, reaching out to benighted souls with boundless mercy. Not that the darkness takes all this lying down, you understand? No, as John implies, there is resistance: “The darkness has not overcome it.” If you are familiar with different English New Testament translations, you will note that translators render this verb differently. The NIV, for example, reads this way: “The darkness has not understood it.” This is an acceptable translation as long as we add the layer of purposeful resistance which the verb contains. It is not so much that the world wants to understand the light, but rather, that it can’t, much like a rebellious teenager staring out the window while his dad berates him; the world has no interest in listening to the Light. It doesn’t want to understand. The lack of learning is deliberate. This is the way all of us are by nature. Only the sovereign mercy of God makes us different.
The Babe in Bethlehem’s manger, therefore, represents a wondrous victory of determined love. We didn’t want Him to come, but He came anyway. We hated Him, but He persists in loving us with a love that far exceeds our penchant for and love of the darkness. What a Savior!