And this is the message which we have heard from him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
John opens his letter with something he did not see but heard. It is a message from Christ Himself about God's own nature. What does it mean that God is light, and why does John put this message first?
The opening verses describe what the apostles saw in Christ. Verse 5 turns to something they heard and passed on. One writer weighs the wording, and asks who "him" is:
Along with the manifestation of perfect grace comes the inseparable message of holiness. This is due to God, and necessary for the saints. They had heard it from Christ Himself. The message is not "about Him" but "from Him" — not a manifestation of love, but a message against sin. It is also the first place where the apostle mixes God with Christ, because He is God. The message comes from "Him": this might mean God, but he had just been speaking of Christ. Such a transition perplexes the commentators; but it is a beauty, not a blemish.
The same writer marks what this message is not:
It is not the law but a message. Grace does not put us under law. But it does tell us God's own judgment on everything contrary to His nature.
John does not define the word. Another writer reads it from the nature of light itself:
Light is transparent, perfectly transparent. It is the symbol of intrinsic purity, of God's moral character. To say "God is light" is to say He is holy; not only relatively, but absolutely so. Light does not change, and God cannot be corrupted or tarnished. No moral poison can enter His moral nature. No evil, no sin can ever originate or be in Him... "God is light" tells us that His moral discernment is absolutely perfect. It is a moral impossibility for God to look on sin with pleasure.
The second half of the verse rules out any shade in Him. Light and love must be held together:
We all know how common it is for people to talk about God as love. Some push it to an extreme: not just that God is love, but that love is God. Much less do we hear the message that He is light... But if it is a truth that God is love, He is a great deal more than love. "Light" is a burning word. It expresses the intrinsic and absolute purity of His nature. "Love" expresses that same nature in sovereign action towards others, and in Himself as well. He never sacrifices His light to His love. If anyone thought of Him that way, it would bring the greatest loss on His children.
Another writer ties the two statements to the cross: light is His character, "which made the death of His Son a necessity," while love is His nature, "which led Him to give His Son."
Light does not only shine. It shows what is really there:
Light makes things visible. In the dark nothing is seen as it is. In a dark room there is no difference between a chair and a table. The difference exists, but it is not seen. So it is in the spiritual darkness of our nature. Good and evil, the things of God and the things of the world, are all blended and confused. The evil is there, but apart from God's grace it is not judged. Bring the light of God's truth into the soul, and everything is spiritually discerned, for God is light.
Under the law God hid Himself. One writer sets the two eras side by side:
God had said to Israel that He would dwell in thick darkness. At Sinai He told them to keep away: if even an animal touched the mountain, they were to stone it. There was much good there, but He stayed hidden behind His covering of darkness. God acted towards Israel, but did not show Himself. Now the veil is torn from top to bottom, and all is light. The truth we are in has this very nature: God now stands openly revealed. Whoever comes in through the torn veil stands in the light of God's holiness. That light is perfect purity in itself, and it shows up everything that is not.
Placed where it is, the verse becomes a measuring line for what people say about themselves:
The apostles received the manifestation of life through what they saw in Christ. They received the message of light through what they heard from Him. It stands here as the standard by which the claims of men may be measured... It tests the claims of all who say they have this fellowship.
- Heard — The apostles saw the life. This truth they heard from Christ, and they pass it on as a message, not a law.
- Light — Light is pure through and through. Nothing can stain God, nothing can fool Him, and He takes no pleasure in sin.
- Unmixed — "No darkness at all" means no shading and no trade-off; He never gives up His light for the sake of His love.
- Exposing — Light makes manifest. What sin really is stays blurred until God's light enters the room of the soul.
- Open — The God who once dwelt in thick darkness now stands revealed. The torn veil sets us in that light, not shut out from it.
If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not practise the truth.
John has just announced that God is light. Now he turns that announcement into a test. Verse 6 is the first of three claims he weighs. It asks one question: do a person's words about God match the way they live?
This verse begins a run of claims that John tests one by one.
There are in verses 6-10 three "if we says," all of them important in the extreme. The first is this verse. Can we name a clearer or more open break from the very nature of Christianity? It is saying, but not doing. This was bad enough in Israel. But how sad it is now, when the light and the love have shone out so fully to us, whom God has given life by the word of truth!
Who is the "we" in this verse? The answer is wider than it first looks.
How many people, as I have heard many myself, assume as a matter of fact that "we" must always mean the family of God! It often is, and generally so. But it is not always true… God also deals with people according to what they profess. John speaks here of departures from the truth that had already begun in his day and that spread through the professing Christian world in ours… Someone who is not a Christian might pass himself off as one for a long time. He need not be a deceiver; he might deceive himself and think he was a Christian.
The claim fails because of who God is.
If you say you have that kind of fellowship, and walk in darkness, it is all false. Darkness cannot have fellowship with light… God does not change the holiness of His nature. So claiming to have fellowship with that nature, while we walk in darkness, is all false.
One distinction here keeps struggling believers from misreading the verse.
The question here is where we walk, not how. God brings us to Himself, and He is light. From then on we walk there, poor as the walk may be… But if we pretend to walk in the light while we are still in the dark, our life is nothing but a lie.
So a Christian's failure — even serious failure — is not what this verse describes.
He may slip through carelessness. He may give in to self-will, or let the desires of the flesh or of the mind carry him away. All of that is sinful and out of keeping with the light. But serious as this is, God's love in Christ forgave him when he was an enemy and saved him when he was lost. That same love provides restoring grace… and never calls such sad failure "walking in darkness." … Those who walk in darkness have neither life nor light; they need God to awaken them and give them life. The Christian who falls needs only to repent and have the interrupted fellowship restored.
John says more than that such a person speaks falsely. He points to something the person fails to do.
Verse 6 supposes the case of someone who only claims it: "If we say," and so on. It states the broad principle, whoever the speaker may be. The need of it is only too clear where unreality in the things of God prevails — saying and not doing; singing hymns that express fresh, bright, heartfelt enjoyment of the love of God and of Christ, while there is not a trace of it in the life. The word that meets this is very sharp. To walk in darkness is to walk as if God had never revealed Himself in Christ… "Doing the truth" is a weighty word (see John 3:21).
Where a person walks answers what they claim about themselves.
Take anyone who professes this link of fellowship with God — and many are in that state — but walks in darkness at the same time. The very sphere of their walk gives the lie to what they claim. They only claim godliness; they are not believers at all. They have no fellowship, nothing in common with the God they profess to know. They have no real knowledge of God's holy nature. They do not walk in honest communion with the blessed light of God. They have no heart appreciation of the blessed Person of Christ, who Himself is "the light."
- Light first. God's nature sets the standard. Darkness cannot share anything with light, because God never softens His holiness to fit a person's claim.
- Say, then walk. The issue is not doctrine held but life lived — saying and not doing. The place where a person walks either backs their words or exposes them.
- "We" is wide. The words cover anyone who claims the name. God deals with people by what they profess, and a person can fool others — or even himself — for years.
- Where, not how. This verse measures where a person walks, not how well. When a believer slips, grace restores him, and God's love never calls that walking in darkness.
- Do the truth. Truth is something you practise, not only claim. A claim with no trace of it in the life is a lie the whole life keeps telling.
But if we walk in the light as *he* is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin.
John tests every claim to share life with God by asking where a person walks. This verse ties that walk to fellowship with other believers and to cleansing blood — but does walking "in the light" mean how well we live, or where God has put us?
Commentators repeatedly draw a line between walking in the light and walking according to the light. The distinction is about location rather than performance.
"If we walk in the light," etc. (1 John 1), refers to our standing, not to our practical ways. It is not how but where you walk; that is, not in the world nor in Jewish shadows, but "in the light."
That does not make the phrase abstract. Being in the light means living with nothing hidden, and dealing at once with whatever the light exposes.
But what is this walk in the light? It does not mean to live a perfect and sinless life. Walking in the light is not the question of how we walk but where we walk, and the place where the believer walks is the light. It means to walk daily in His presence. Our will and conscience are in the light and presence of God, judging everything that does not answer to that light. We bring whatever is not right at once into His presence. There the light exposes it, and we confess it, judge it and put it away.
The light here is God Himself fully made known, and it is where God has placed us.
And note, this is not only about the first moment of conversion, when that light reached us as poor wretched sinners. It is just as much about what comes afterwards, in all our course as Christians here in this world. We are brought into the light — that is, into this full revealing of God. That is our Christian place before God. It is not a question of walking according to the light; of course we ought. But we are brought into the light. God sets us in a distinct position before Him, and these words express it: "in the light." We are before the eyes of God, and our walk should be before the eyes of God, lit by the full revelation of what He is.
The middle clause is not organised togetherness. It follows from a shared life that surfaces even between strangers.
Verse 7 gives three parts of our Christian condition, looked at as men walking down here. First, we walk in the light as God is in the light, everything judged according to Him with whom we have fellowship. Next comes what the world knows nothing of: "we have fellowship with one another." That is, I have the same divine nature as every Christian, and the same Holy Spirit lives in me. So there must be fellowship. I meet a perfect stranger travelling, and there may be more communion with him than with someone I have known all my life, just because the divine life is there.
Being fully exposed to God might seem the last place to feel secure. Writers here turn that round: the light is exactly where the blood's value is measured.
This light of God into which I am brought shows me, not my sins, but the value of that blood which cleanses from every kind of sin. This is not a constant action going on in the believer, as many would make it out, but what the blood of Jesus does — it "cleanses," and this not partially, but "from every sin."
At the cross we learned what the blood covered in our past. In the light we learn more.
When you come to the cross as a guilty sinner, you learn the value of the blood of Christ, as applied to all that you have done; here in the light you learn the value of the blood as blotting out all that you are capable of doing. It is the same blood, but seen in a deeper, fuller way.
The light does not leave us pretending, and it does not leave us weighed down.
Walking in the light shows us what we are, and we cannot say that we have no sin. But we have no sense of sin resting on us before a holy God. We know that sin is in us, yet we have the assurance of being cleansed from it by His precious blood.
Some read the present tense as cleansing that has to be repeated. One writer answers with everyday examples.
The word is "cleanses" — the present tense. From this some have deduced that the blood is to be continually applied. But the present tense is also used to describe the nature or character of anything; just as we say, "Cork floats." "Fire burns." "Soap washes." Such are their respective natures. So it is the nature of the blood of Christ to cleanse from all sin. That blessed property is inherent in it.
The practical result is that the believer's guilt is a closed question.
Scripture knows nothing of a re-application of the blood of Christ to the believer. Once cleansed, he is cleansed for ever… the blood, once shed and presented before God, is ever there in all its value for our souls, so that the question of guilt can never more be raised against us.
- Place — the verse says where the believer walks, not how well he performs.
- Presence — that place is God fully made known. Our will and conscience stand in the open before Him, and what the light shows up we confess and put away.
- People — one life and one Spirit make fellowship with every believer who walks there, sometimes with a stranger more than with an old friend.
- Proof — in the light what stands out is not our sins but the worth of the blood, cleansing "from every sin," not partially.
- Permanence — "cleanses" states the blood's nature, as fire burns. Cleansed once is cleansed for ever, and guilt is never raised again.