Light is the opposite of Darkness. Light illumines, it shows us shape and colour. It enables us to see the way ahead. Plant life needs light for life; human beings need light to see.
Light penetrates darkness; it exposes what is there for what it actually is. Good or bad. It reveals. Darkness hides; covers up; conceals and keeps us from knowing.
The Sun sits at the centre of our Solar System. It radiates its light. Around that light giving source all the planets in our solar system revolve.
From our perspective, the light giving sun is a small ball in the sky. It is but one of many of the phenomena about us which make up our world. We pass our days ignoring it; taking it for granted, never really appreciating just how much we owe to it.
Yet we are totally dependent on it.
Jesus Christ called himself the light of the world.
For so many people his name is just a fact of life out there amidst the totality of what exists in our universe. His existence is assumed, or ignored; worse still, denied. Just a figure in the history books who made a claim about being God. Just another religious lunatic.
And yet he sits at the centre of our existence, radiating spiritual light in the midst of the darkness of man’s utter self centredness.
Jesus said that men hate his light; they refuse his light; and they do so because their deeds are evil, and they refuse to have them exposed.
He that believeth on him is not condemned. But he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
And our deeds can only be of God and “wrought” in God, if we do as God says. And doing as God says means denying what our selfish instincts and thoughts tell us in order to obey what God commands us in the teaching of Jesus Christ.
this is the second in the series of The Names of Christ in the Gospel of John
Christianity 