The Light Has Come

Look around you for a second before you even open the Bible. That is how I started this message, standing in a park with the sun going down behind the trees in Southeast Georgia. Within a short time none of us would be able to see each other's faces the way we could right then. The lights on the poles would soon be coming on, and the bugs would soon be finding them and circling like there was nothing else in the world worth flying toward.

There is something in all of us that responds to a moment like that. We like the light. We plan around it, we linger in it, and we get a little uneasy when it begins to go. But there is also something in every one of us that is grateful when the dark finally settles in. Things we would never do at noon in front of everybody get a lot easier to justify once nobody can see us do them. Be honest with yourself about that.

This is not really about a park at dusk. This is about the human heart. We say we want the light, and for the most part we mean it. There is still a part of us that likes the cover of darkness.

Jesus told a man exactly that one night, in a private conversation that started with questions about being born again and ended in the most famous verse in all the Bible.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the living God. What we find here is that God loved the world enough to send the Light, and that same Light that came to save you is right now showing you exactly where you stand.

God's Extravagant Love Revealed

That little word so does not just mean a lot. It means in this way. God loved the world in this manner, to this extent: He gave. Not advice. Not a vague warm feeling toward humanity from a safe distance. He gave His only begotten Son, His one and only, the Son there was no substitute for and no backup plan behind. Jesus is the only pure Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. No one else.

When John says world here, he does not mean a nice word for the church, or for good people, or for people who would eventually love God back. He means to tell us that this love was not limited to the Jews only or to the Roman Empire. He so loved people from every nation, tribe, language, and culture. It does not matter the color of your skin or the language you speak. God so loved the world.

Notice what verse 17 rules out before we ever get to verse 18. God did not send His Son to come in and start handing out sentences. The world was already headed for judgment with or without Him. He came with the opposite errand, not to condemn what stood condemned already, but to save it.

Most of us understand love when it is aimed at somebody we already love. Somebody lovable, somebody who deserves it, somebody who will probably love us back. God aimed His only Son at a world that hated Him, a people who were enemies of God and at war with Him.

That is where I want you to check yourself. Do you believe this about God, that He so loved the world? Or have you just heard the verse enough times that it stopped meaning anything to you? There is a difference between admiring a gift at a distance and actually receiving it. Have you believed in Him personally, specifically, this Son who was given for you? I am not asking whether you agree that God loves people in general. Have you believed?

That is a love big enough to reach the whole world. But do not let the size of it fool you into thinking everybody ends up in the same place. When the text says God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, it does not say that every human being without exception ends up in heaven. Not all are the recipients of this love. The very next verse draws a line right down the middle of the human race.

The Dividing Line: Belief and Unbelief

I know there are all kinds of categories in the minds of men today. I read about them in school, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor. None of that will matter on Judgment Day. I will tell you what matters. Not good people and bad people. Not religious people and irreligious people. Believing in Him and not believing in Him.

Look closely at the tense on that second half of verse 18. It does not say the unbeliever will be judged someday, pending review, pending some final tally of good deeds against bad ones. It says he has been judged already. The verdict is not waiting on your sins to pile up high enough. The verdict is already entered, and the charge on the docket is not a list of crimes weighed on one side of a scale against the other. It is this: he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

Perhaps you have sat with men who were still waiting on sentencing for something they had already confessed to, still hoping the judge might see it their way. That is not this. This is a man already convicted, walking around like the trial is still open when the paperwork has been signed for a long time. That is the position of every person who has not put his trust in Jesus Christ. Not at risk of judgment. Under it, right now.

So do not walk away from this text thinking of judgment as a someday problem. Ask yourself where you actually stand with the Son of God, not in general but by name. How is your relationship with Jesus Christ this very hour? Have you been saved? Have you trusted Him? That is the only question this verse is asking, and it is the only one that matters.

Why would anybody stay on the wrong side of a line that clear when the love on the other side is as big as verse 16? The next three verses answer that, and the answer is not flattering.

Light Exposes What We Are

This is the judgment. Not merely a legal record filed away somewhere off in the future. This is what the judgment looks like played out in front of you today. The Light came into the world, God in the flesh, walking around Judea and Galilee, and men had the chance to walk toward Him. Most did not. John does not say they were confused about which way the light was. He says they loved the darkness. That is a preference, a choice, not an accident. Verse 20 tells you why. Everyone who does evil hates the Light and stays away from it on purpose, because the Light shows things up for what they are.

Matthew Henry, writing on this exact verse, called it "the unspeakable folly of the most of men that they loved darkness rather than light, rather than this light. The Jews loved the dark shadows of their law, and the instructions of their blind guides, rather than the doctrine of Christ. The Gentiles loved their superstitious services of an unknown God, whom they ignorantly worshipped, rather than the reasonable service which the gospel enjoins." Folly, because the darkness never actually fixes anything. It only keeps you from seeing what needs fixing. Suppose you had a hole in the wall of your house or a tear in the carpet, and you could see it plain as day because the lights were on. Instead of fixing it you say, turn that light off, I do not want anything to do with those problems. You flip the switch and try to forget about it. That is the way it is with man. There are eternal problems in your life, and sitting in the dark corrects nothing.

Those light fixtures in the park would soon be drawing every moth and every beetle in the park, because that is what they are made to do. But you know as well as I do that if we took a flashlight over to the tree line, whatever is living back there, a deer or a raccoon or an armadillo, would take off running in the opposite direction. Light draws some things and scatters others, and the difference is not the light. The light is the same either way. The difference is what is living in the dark.

I am not talking about raccoons and armadillos now. I am talking about you and me.

The reason we keep it dark is exactly the reason verse 20 gives. Not because we do not know it is there, but because we do not want it exposed. Running from the Light does not make it go away. It only proves the diagnosis was right.

Name that place, at least to yourself. Is there an area of your life you have deliberately kept your spouse out of, or your closest friends, or this church, because the light would cost you something? A pattern online. A way you talk about people when they are not in the room. A grudge you have nursed so long you stopped calling it a grudge. That is your tree line.

I know people who will come to the park or the beach at the drop of a hat until they find out there is preaching going on, and then they suddenly have an excuse. There are folks who will walk the long way around rather than pass by where the Word of God is being preached. That happens every week. You can fool people. The God of heaven sees it. Men loved the darkness rather than the Light because their deeds were evil.

Long ago the wise preacher of Proverbs put it plainly.

Hold on to that thought. We will come back to it.

If our text stopped at verse 20, that would be the whole story, and it would be a hopeless one. Light exposes, darkness hides, and that is the end. Humanity is in bad shape, like a dog going back to its vomit for a meal. That is not nutritious, and eventually it kills him. But John does not stop there. Verse 21 opens a door.

The Call to Come to the Light

Notice the verb tense again. Practices the truth. Not achieved it. Not perfected it. A settled, ongoing direction, a man who has turned and keeps turning toward exposure instead of away from it. He loves the Light. And notice what happens when he comes: his deeds are shown to have been done by God.

Not done by his own strength, polished up and presented for approval. He is not better than you. None of us are. It is by the grace of God. Done by God, which means when he finally steps into the light, what gets revealed is not a spotless record he is proud of. It is grace, working in him all along, now visible.

So ask yourself which way you are walking. The man who practices the truth still has sin to confess and still finds things in himself he would rather not look at. What has changed is the direction. He has quit running from the light and he keeps coming back to it, and he comes back because he has learned that what the light shows him is already covered. That is the difference between a man managing the dark and a man walking in the day.

A Word to the Religious Without Christ

When the text says men loved the darkness rather than the Light, John was not talking only about people on the streets. He was not talking only about the dope addicts and the gang leaders and the people who never darken the door of a church. He is talking about all men everywhere who love the darkness rather than the Light. That reaches into the pews.

Remember the passage from Proverbs? Peter picked it up and had something to say about it.

Peter was dealing with apostates here. In modern day Christianity there are many like this, men and women who have sought personal improvement and moral reformation in their quest for a spiritual and religious experience. No repentance. No new birth. No trusting in Jesus Christ. A superficial joining of a church, maybe. A baptism somewhere. Religious language, certainly. But no real new birth and no salvation. Like a dog returning to its vomit or a pig back to the mud, they love the darkness rather than the Light, and Peter says their last state is worse than the first. Those who understand the truth with a head knowledge and still turn away will face a greater judgment than those who never heard it at all.

The Light Took the Exposure Himself

Hear the comfort too, because it is in these same six verses, and it is here for you whether you have ever set foot in a church or not.

The Son who is the Light did not stay at a safe distance and shine judgment down on us from heaven. A few verses earlier, in the same conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus said this:

That is the cross. Look to Jesus and live.

The Light did not merely expose our darkness. He went to a hill outside Jerusalem and took the exposure Himself, the shame, the judgment, everything our hiding deserved, and He bore it in His own body so that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life. He who believes in Him is not judged. He does not say judged less. Not judged at all.

If you belong to Him and you still feel that pull toward the tree line, toward keeping something dark, hear this. Your standing with God was never built on how well lit your life looks. We still struggle with sin, that is a fact. Your standing was built on a Son who was judged in the full light of God's holiness in your place. You can walk in the light now, not because you have nothing left to be ashamed of, but because He already carried the shame for you.

If you have never believed in Jesus Christ, hear the warning in this text plainly. You are not waiting on some future judgment to be handed down. Verse 18 says it has already been entered. Every reason you have given yourself for staying in the dark, every excuse, every promise that you will deal with it later, is one more piece of evidence for the verdict already on the books. The folly Matthew Henry named is real and it costs everything. Look and live. Look to Jesus. Repent and believe in Jesus and be saved.