Week 3 - The Divine Light
In this series, we’re exploring the cycle of life described in 1 John 1:1-7 and learning how we can apply this essential cycle in our daily Christian walk. In our first two posts, we laid a solid scriptural foundation for the first two items of the cycle: the eternal life and the fellowship that accompanies it. The initial steps in the cycle of life are admittedly mysterious and can seem abstract and unrelatable, even after we understand what the Bible teaches. But if we don’t have a proper scriptural basis for these essential elements, the subsequent and more experiential parts of the life cycle’s process can be mercurial and inconsistent. God's Word remains the unshakeable basis for both our Christian faith and experience. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the next step in the cycle of life: the divine light. We’ll discover what the Bible reveals about light, its importance in the cycle of life, and how it functions in our experience.
The eternal life issues in fellowship, and fellowship brings us into the divine light. The cycle of life in 1 John illustrates a fundamental Scriptural principle: the relationship between light and life. In the Bible, life and light go together. If we want to consistently and effectively employ the cycle of life in our Christian walk, we need to understand this relationship. And we can find it as early as the first page of the Bible. In the record of creation from Genesis 1, God speaks, light appears, and life comes forth. (Gen. 1:3-5,12, 14-18, 20-25) More light, more life, a principle that persists to this day; very little life exists in absolute darkness. This physical relationship serves to inform a spiritual reality. In creation, the light is physical; in our experience of the cycle of life, the light is divine, God Himself. But the results are the same. When God, the light, shines into our hearts, life is generated. 2 Corinthians 4:6 says, “Because the God who said, Out of darkness light shall shine, is the One who shined in our hearts...” The record of the origin of life in the universe mirrors our experience of regeneration: God spoke, light shined in our hearts, and we received a new life when we believed in Jesus Christ.
The biblical relationship between life and light emphasizes the importance of our experience of light in the cycle of life. Without an ongoing and deepening experience of light, our Christian walk may have a genuine beginning, but lack practical continuation. Life initiates the cycle; light, with our cooperation, perpetuates it. The Christian life is not inert nor stagnant; the very nature of its beginning calls us to corresponding and definitive action. As the apostle Paul exhorts us in Ephesians 5:8: “you were once darkness but are now light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” As believers in Christ, we advance in our Christian walk and grow spiritually as we repeatedly experience the fellowship of life and the shining of the divine light in our hearts. Spiritual growth is directly correlated to our cooperation with the divine light. This makes understanding the function of light in our experience paramount. So what is this light, and what does the experience of light look like?
As always, we need the proper Scriptural basis. First John 1:5 says, “And this is the message which we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” As we saw in our last post, when the Bible uses phrases like “God is light,” the intended meaning is not metaphorical but predicative. God is not like light; He is light. John 1:4 says, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” And in both John 8:12 and 9:5, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” In our first post, we saw that the eternal life is a person, Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:2) It should then come as no surprise that light is also a person. Both Scripturally and in our experience, life and light are the wonderful person of Jesus Christ. This realization is indispensable for our understanding of the experience of light in the cycle of life. Our experience of light isn’t something separate from Christ Jesus. When Christ comes, light comes. When we sense shining or illumination in our hearts, that’s Jesus Christ.
Seeing that Christ Jesus is the divine light may be accompanied by a striking realization. That you have, in fact, experienced His shining many times before. Maybe it happened when you were reading the Bible; after all, Psalms 119:130 tells us, “the opening of Your words gives light.” Perhaps it occurred during a time of quiet and intimate prayer in the morning. Or maybe we were shouting and praising as we sang in worship to the Lord. Regardless of how, if our heart is turned to the Lord and our regenerated spirit is exercised to contact Him, light can shine into our hearts. When He does, it’s almost imperceptible, yet the experience is undeniably real. The Lord’s shining and His speaking are indiscernibly joined. As He shines, we sense His speaking. The more we reason and argue, seemingly with ourselves, the more we are paradoxically convinced that Jesus Christ is shining within us. Countless Christians can testify to the awesome, gentle persistence of Jesus Christ shining in their hearts. When at last we yield and go along with His tender insistence, we sense a joy and a sweetness unlike any other. Previously, we may have thought that the purpose of God’s shining was to make us clear about where to go, what to do, or what to say. But the cycle of life reveals that our experience of light has a much more critical function. As we fellowship with God, read His Word, sing, and pray, we are spontaneously brought into His presence. While we are in His presence, He shines in our hearts, illuminating us within and enlightening us to our true condition. When God shines in us, He exposes the things that don’t match Him. These could be thoughts or feelings about others, or something we’ve done or said. When we sense God’s shining, we shouldn’t try to hide, argue with His assessment, or justify our thoughts or actions. When God shines on the things in our hearts that don’t correspond to His holiness, righteousness, and glory, we simply need to agree with Him. When we agree with Him and cooperate with Him by surrendering to His demands, we allow Christ to make His home in our hearts. (Eph. 3:17) The more Christ makes His home in our hearts, the more of the divine, zoe life we gain, and the more we grow spiritually.
As we’ve seen, the divine light is the living person of Jesus Christ shining within us. When we pray, read God’s word, and praise and worship Him, we’re brought into fellowship with Him and into His presence. As we remain in God’s presence, the divine light shines in our hearts, exposing everything contrary to Him. The more we cooperate with God’s shining, the more His life grows in us and transforms us from within. This is the ongoing cycle of life in 1 John: life issues in fellowship, fellowship brings us into the light, and light increases the measure of life within us. May we learn to treasure and cooperate with the Lord’s shining and allow Him to make His home in our hearts day by day.
