For the last few weeks, we've been looking at the first chapter of John. I'd like to go back there again this morning. I'll read the first five verses, and I want to focus this morning on verse 5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." We love blacks and whites, but we live in a world that often flavors things in shades of gray. Sometimes that's the best we can do with our own discernment, is a shade of gray that leans toward white or that leans toward black. I'm not going to go so far as to say that God absolutely wants us to live in a certain home and to drive a certain car, but on moral, ethical, and values-related issues with God, there is no shade of gray. God knows everything, thought, word, deed, motive, and for God, something is right or wrong, not neutral in terms of those issues. I guess this shade of gray deals with the fallenness of our nature that cannot discern moral issues as clearly as God. And the equation by which we started to compare ourselves with God is an impossible thing. We can only contrast ourselves with God because we are so dissimilar to Him. has already established that Jesus, the Word, is God, is eternal, shares all the essential attributes of God. One of those is unchangeableness. He doesn't change. He doesn't wake up and need two cups of coffee. He doesn't have a bad hair day. He doesn't wake up in a bad mood. He is predictably and gloriously the same at all times and under all circumstances. He doesn't succeed today and fail tomorrow. One of the Old Testament writers says, he is in one mind and who can turn him? He has one mind, he has one way of looking at things and we can't change his mind. Sometimes we live as if we believe that our own decisions, values decisions, sometimes we're negotiable with God and we make up our mind, decide what we want and then try to negotiate divine approval. God doesn't negotiate those issues. He's black and white. Probably light and darkness is one of the most common analogies in all fields of teaching that has any sense of moral values or values of any sort whatever to it. It's just so clearly grasped. the idea that there is something very different here that is incredible. In our life, we live with this mixture of success and failure. In our efforts at living by faith and serving God, we live with successes and failures, not so with God. He is predictably successful all the time. The next verses following this verse introduce John the Baptist as the initial herald or witness to the incarnate Christ in his public ministry. In his public ministry, he shows no fear. He doesn't dress conventionally. He doesn't act conventionally. He doesn't teach conventionally. It's interesting that Jews actually practiced a form of baptism in the first century. But it was practiced very uniquely. Jews who were active in Judaism never were baptized. But if a Gentile became a proselyte, went through the study and the training, and embraced Judaism as a proselyte to Judaism, a convert to Judaism, At a point in the transition, culturally, they had to submit to a public immersion. They're washing off their old Gentile identity and coming out clean from the water and putting on their Jewish identity. Don't miss the irony of the point. John is preaching to Jews. And he's saying the only way you're going to get into this kingdom and the only way you're going to enjoy the blessings of this Messiah is for you, not Gentiles, you Jews, to be immersed and to take on a new identity about your faith, about your God, and about Messiah. He's not bothered by public approval or disapproval. He's not afraid of anything. He calls the religious leaders of the day, who had just about despotic power over the culture, you're a generation of vipers, you're a bunch of deadly snakes. Try saying that to the local religious leader or the local governmental leader of our time and see how much popularity grows for you. John doesn't care. In the book of Matthew, chapter 11, We read that John, probably no more than 18 months after he begins his public ministry, is arrested and is now in prison. He's isolated from the worshiping community that he has initially initiated. He sends his disciples with a message to Jesus. Are you he that should come, or should we look for another? Doubt. Not just a casual doubt. Doubt about the very identity of the one he said is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Are you the one? Or should we look for another? This firebrand of courage is suddenly very discouraged and faltering and struggling with his view of the identity of the Christ. Not just a minor issue. I can't overlook the point. For all of his faults and failures and shortcomings, the Lord in the New Testament established a public assembly called church as a public worshiping community for mutual encouragement, support, instruction and training in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. If Scripture establishes church, there is a value before God to the benefit that church can impart that should not be minimized or overlooked. We take such an incredibly casual attitude toward church today that it is frightening. Can we miss the point? John is isolated by circumstances he can't alter from fellowship with the worshiping community and falls into incredible discouragement and loses his view and perspective and the strength of his conviction. If you want your faith to be shaken at the foundations, isolate yourself for a prolonged period of time from church and you shall experience just that. The Hebrew writer in chapter 10 says, ìWe are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.î And he says, ìSo much the more, as you see the day approaching.î What day is he talking about? Heís talking about the day of worship. Whenever the day of worship is, itís the day we need to make sure we donít forsake the assembly or put ourselves in danger of destruction by our archenemy. You know, you see these nature TV shows, a lot of them typically go to all of the wildlife in Africa. When a lion is hungry and he begins stalking a herd of wildebeest, what does he do? Does he single out the strongest leader of the herd and go after the leader? No. He watches and observes to find a weak or a crippled member of the herd. And he will very carefully manipulate to isolate that weak member from the herd and then that weak wildebeest is at his mercy and becomes his dinner. You think Satan, the roaring lion that Peter describes in 1 Peter chapter 5 does differently? He'll watch for the weak in the flock of the church. He'll carefully move to isolate them from public assembly and from worship and interaction and fellowship with the saints. And as they're isolated, they become more and more at his mercy. That, folks, is a powerful admonition that we make attendance at church a consistent habit without fail. Bless his heart, he was one of my dear friends. He was, during his lifetime, one of the most faithful men I knew. He developed Alzheimer's. And as that disease does, it began to materially change his personality and affect his way of thinking. Long after he had been afflicted with Alzheimer's, this particular friend made a comment to me one day. It just doesn't take as much church for me as it does some folks. He never missed public assembly during his healthy years. There are a lot of folks who don't have Alzheimer's as an excuse to say the same thing. It's a setup. for Satan to move in just the way he did with John in prison. And it won't be something minor. It won't be a spiritual hiccup. It will be an attack at the very core of your faith. Is Jesus the Christ, or is he just another wild teacher who claims to be what he isn't? Was I right about all of this, or was I just cruelly deceived? Well, you get the point. Throughout the Lord's public ministry, and at least into the Acts of the Apostles, a significant number of years, the Apostle Peter demonstrates a rather significant vacillating attitude. On one occasion in the book of Acts, someone contrary to the teaching of the Mosaic Law, absolutely, goes up and whacks Paul across the face, slaps him hard, severely across the face, and he really He goes after this guy, and somebody on the sideline says, Don't you know that's the high priest? Never mind, the high priest violated the law. Never mind, he was wrong with what he did. Paul said, Brethren, forgive me, I did not know he was the high priest. God commands respect for the office of leadership and worship. How about your own personal experience? Is your faith absolutely consistent every single day? Do you wake up every morning and say, Good morning, God, I'm so happy we're together and in good fellowship. What do you want me to do today? Or do you wake up sometimes and God's really not the first thing you think about? Phone rings and wakes you up before you're ready to wake up, and if you were to say to the person on the other end what you're thinking, you probably would have to apologize later. You know, there's a danger to living on the west coast, because most primitive Baptists are in the central and eastern states, and they forget about a two to three hour time gap. So quite often in the morning, our phone rings very early. I've conditioned the people that call regularly, don't you dare call before 630, you will have my wife's ire up. And if the phone rings before 630, I'm going to hear about it. You know, that's all right. If it rings after nine o'clock at night, she'll probably hear about it from me, too. If you want to make sense out of me, don't call me after nine o'clock at night, because you'll get a zombie, you know. Is that somewhere in the Bible? Is John chapter one, is that in the Old or New Testament? You know, I'm a morning person, she's a night person, so you have to kind of work those things out, but at very best, at fast. Our personal faith is a cycle of successes and failures, of accomplishments and slips, and you keep hoping to do better and improve the ratio as you go along in life, and that's what we should do. Paul says in Ephesians 5, the gospel is for the perfecting of the saints. Paul wasn't under the impression or the misguided opinion that saints were perfect. The gospel is what God has sent in the worshiping community of the church to perfect saints who are not perfect. Not so God. You see, here we see the vivid contrast between us and God. In the first chapter of Hebrews, after identifying that Jesus Christ is God's message, God's speech, God's alphabet to his people, the writer identifies Christ is better than, which becomes the theme of the entire book of Hebrews. In the first note he sounds, Christ is better than angels. And before he finishes the theme that Christ is better than angels, near the end of the chapter, he quotes from Psalms where God is describing the natural creation. So there's an implication that God is not only better than angels, he's better than natural creation, in which the psalmist says, the earth and all the things in the earth like a worn-out carpet, like a piece of clothing that you wear and you love and it's your favorite outfit, and after a period of time, styles change, it gets threadbare, it gets worn out, you fold it up, put it away, give it to goodwill or put it in the trash. This whole universe, he says, will get old and wear out, and God will roll it up like a worn-out carpet to be hauled off and put in the dark. And then he draws the contrast, but thou art the same. and thy years shall not fail." Isn't it wonderful to believe in a God who today is as vibrantly God as He was in Genesis 1? He hasn't gotten tired. He can be the Ancient of Days, according to Daniel, and yet at the same time, this morning when you woke up, He was as fresh as the morning dew in His deity. He's timeless. The light shined in darkness. The darkness comprehended it not. The light shined. Tom Costa will suggest that probably John here, and I think he makes a good point, is anticipating the outcome of the story he's going to tell in his gospel. He's looking at Calvary and he's saying, the light shines, it's a dark world, but the light wins. The light doesn't lose. The Dead Sea Scrolls, probably compiled by the Essenes or another sect of Judaism, somewhat almost a commune, in fact it was very much an isolated commune of Judaism, often writes about the fact that there are forces of light and darkness that are engaged in mortal combat. The Dead Sea Scrolls identify that God has predestined that light. will win in the end. One of the most common religions of the first century in the Roman world and the surrounding civilizations to the Roman Empire was Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism held to the existence of two deities, both eternal and both equal, the God of Light and the God of Darkness. And the only thing that matters in life is whether you contribute to the God of Light or the God of Darkness. That's all it's about. You study the Eastern religions of our time, many of them Dave probably, since your wife is of Oriental extraction, you've maybe done some examination of this idea. They call it yin and yang, right? The perpetual, eternal conflict of good and bad, right and wrong, light and darkness, all of these contrasting and conflicting and contradicting things are in this massive equation that's in turmoil and trying each to outdo the other. fables of our time is that during the some 30 years before Jesus enters his public ministry, he traveled to the Far East and studied under the Eastern, you know, Hindu and Zen Buddhism and so on, or whatever the Eastern religions were of the time, and then came back and with the power of the Eastern religions that he gained during those years, he accomplished his miracles. If you study first-century Jewish writings, they were aware of the Eastern religions, and if Jesus had given a hint of those teachings in his teachings, he would have been completely rejected immediately, and that would have been identified. It's just an absolute ludicrous fable. But this is the way minds think. There has to be this conflict, and there has to be this equation, this balance between good and evil, and there's this perpetual conflict, and the outcome is not really known and for certain. Don't overlook the fact that from the sounding bell at the beginning of John's gospel, he says, this is not the way it is. God is light and him is no darkness. The light shines in darkness and the darkness doesn't comprehend it. Light and darkness, for John, are not equal. Light prevails always and consistently. Darkness comprehended it not. There's a problem with translations of any document from one language to another. In one language, in the parent language of the document, you'll have a particular word that naturally has two specific shades of meaning. And then when you go to the recipient language of the translation, there's a word for this meaning, a different word for this meaning, but no word that picks up the nuance. If you look at various translations of this verse, you'll find a dichotomy. One set of translations, like the King James, will say the darkness comprehended or apprehended, the middle grasp, if not. You'll find others that come down more on the side of the darkness did not physically overpower, and when the victory over light. Commentators are just about as equally divided as the translations, because the Greek word from which this word is translated in the Greek language had both meanings. So, commentators and translators come down on one side or the other. Let me suggest that it's better to go back to the language and embrace both. Even if we have to add a word in our study to understand it, embrace both thoughts. Both thoughts are true. Brigham Barclay makes the point about the particular word, not that it matters to you. Catalambanan. The word can have three meanings. Number one, it can mean that the darkness never understood the light. Amen? Yes. There's a sense in which the man of the world simply cannot understand the demands of Christ in the way of the gospel. Number two, it can mean the darkness never overcame the light. Amen to that? And then finally, it can be used of extinguishing a fire or a flame. Jesus comes, incarnate, he brings the message and the person and the character of God, and men started trying to do everything they could to just wipe him out, and they couldn't. In John 12.35, Jesus says, "...while it is day, lest the darkness come upon you." In 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul says the day comes as a thief in the night, and you should be watchful and ever alert in your faith, lest that day overtake you as a thief. The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. We don't have to be surprised by it if we believe it's coming. That doesn't mean we know when it comes. It means when it comes, we expect it and we're looking forward to it. Now, let's look at it from a scriptural perspective. Keep your finger and go to 1 Corinthians 2. This is absolutely one of my favorite chapters in 1 Corinthians. It's practical, it's doctrinal, it's blended, it's incredibly delightful from beginning to end. I'll read a couple of three verses, but make a note from where I begin reading that you should go to the very end of the chapter and get the whole message. He actually would start in verse 6, and he's talking about the mystery of God, the wisdom of God in a mystery, hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory. That's verse 7. Now, let me begin reading with verse 8. "...which none of the princes of this world knew, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." They didn't get it! They didn't get it! God come in the form of a man, even the Jews didn't get it. And before you get too critical of them, would you have? Would you have? The darkness doesn't comprehend the light. That's a universal truth, a personal experience of everything. They didn't get it. Now, there is something very important in this passage. Natural man without the Spirit of God cannot get it. One of the major themes in gospel preaching today is that the gospel makes its intellectual and rational appeal to your mind. And if you get it and if you figure it out and respond to it in a certain way, then you are the catalyst that brings about your salvation. You know what Paul says in this context? It can't happen. Eye hasn't seen, ear hasn't heard, it hasn't entered into the heart of the natural man without God the things that God has prepared for them that love him. Well, how in the world can a natural man know those things? And Paul tells you, but God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit. The only way a natural man will respond to the things of God is by the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit. You're not going to learn the gospel by rational instruction like you would learn the theories of science or physics. A man knows these things, he knows it. by revelation. Example, Gospel of Matthew, Jesus turns to the disciples and says, what did all these folks say about me? Who did they say that I am? Well, some say you're Elijah. There's a mystical prophecy in Malachi about Elijah or an Elijah-like prophet that would come in the last days. Maybe it was Elijah raised from the dead. Maybe some Jews had that idea. By this time, John is dead, so maybe it's John come back from the dead. All good answers, but all the wrong answer. Human rational thinking will never rise to the height of divine revelation. It cannot. Isn't that what Paul says here? Eye hasn't seen, ear hasn't heard, it hasn't entered the heart of man what God has prepared for those that love him. Then Jesus turns to the disciples. Whom do you say that I, the Son of Man, am? And Peter speaks up. the Christ, the Son of the Living God. And how does Jesus respond? Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for what? What? Flesh and blood has not revealed this. You didn't learn it in a Bible study lesson. You didn't read it in a book and come to the grasp of it. You didn't hear it on a Sunday sermon. flesh and blood didn't reveal it to you, but my Father which is in heaven." My friends, if you believe that Jesus is God incarnate, if you really and truly believe that, you didn't get that from your rational intellect and your natural mind. God gave it to you. I'm not talking about some mystical, special revelation. I'm talking about something that God gives with life. And if the source of it is not you, the source of it is God. A natural man can grasp the things of nature. It takes the Spirit of God in the natural man, elevating him to be a child of God before he can know the things of God. What's the point? The princes of this world, the leaders, the bright lights in the culture didn't get it. If they had, they wouldn't have crucified the Lord of Glory. So the darkness didn't comprehend the light. Amen. Of course it didn't. OK, let's look at the other side. The darkness didn't overpower the light. Let's not go to Jesus strongest and best moment, let's go to his weakest moment from the human perspective. Many of you saw The Passion of the Christ in the last year or so. During the early morning appearances before Pilate, he's been kept awake and beaten and scourged all night long. He has been subjected to tortures beyond human imagination. Many human beings would literally die from the torture already inflicted. And Pilate says, don't you know that I have the power to do anything I want with you? How does Jesus respond? This is the Roman governor and Jesus is just this little itinerant Jew under house arrest, ready to be killed. And Jesus, two different records. Matthew says, don't you understand that I could just say to my father and he would send twelve legions of twelve hundred angels Hey, if you read what one angel did in the Old Testament, what do you think 1,200 angels all gathered up and going in the same direction could do if God sent them all? And in John's Gospel, Jesus' response is, you don't have the ability to do anything except what's been given to you to do. The darkness did not overcome. Years ago, we can have an interesting discussion about whether Jesus was crucified on Thursday, Friday or Wednesday or whatever. On Sunday morning before daylight, he is out of the grave. That we know for sure. The prevailing view is that he's crucified on Friday. I tend to think probably a bit earlier than that, but I won't arm wrestle anyone over that issue. A few years ago, I heard one of the most dynamic sermons on tape. It was a black creature, and he put this truth together, threaded it like a needle. And he had this refrain throughout the sermon. He'd paint the picture dark, and he started off very quietly saying, It's Friday, but Sunday's coming. And then he'd paint it dark again, and he'd say, It's Friday, but Sunday's coming. By the time he got us to Sunday morning in that sermon, we were all ready to jump up and down and shout. Friday's a dark day, or whenever Crucifixion Day is, it's a dark day. There are literally three hours of supernatural darkness during the time Jesus is on the cross. I don't try to mystify it. Scripture doesn't attribute anything special to it that says it happened. I'm not trying to make it your primary theology. It's going off to the deep end. You don't have to do that. You shouldn't do that. Whether the wise is sufficient. Keith Wright, you're smiling. But it's a dark day. If we judge by crucifixion day, the darkness is winning, the sun is coming. And when those women go out Sunday morning with good intentions, expecting to find a sealed grave, They find an open grave and empty grave clothes. The light wins the day. It always does. I realized when I was looking at this text this week, I think probably for most of my ministry, when I quoted this passage in a sermon reference, I misquoted it. The light shined in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. Nope. The word shine is the present tense. The light shines in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. Don't overlook it. Don't minimize it. The light is still shining, folks. The darkness of the generation in which he came didn't comprehend. They didn't understand it. They didn't get it. And they didn't win the day. He did. The song of Calvary is the song of resurrection, is the song of victory for the light. That's the message. None of this yin-yang, Zoroastrianism, good and bad are in mortal conflict and the outcome is uncertain. God says the outcome is certain! Light wins. Light wins. Darkness loses every time. How do we live? Do we live like we believe in the predictable and certain victory of light? Or do we live as if we think the outcome is not certain? The creatures that have a desire and a need to be social, rightly channeled, that's good. wrongly channeled, it's dreadful. You're on the job, you're in your circle of family and friends, and you want to fit in. You want to belong. You want to mesh. What about when they start stretching the limit of biblical truth, moral values? It's easy. Don't tell me it isn't. It's easy. So look the other way. and pretend it's not nearly as black and white as God in Scripture says it is. If you don't believe it, look at some people who claim to be Christians who say abortion is no big deal. It is to that little baby whose life is taken. It is to that little baby who Lord knows what could have been. There are a number of major entertainers and world figures who were conceived in dreadful circumstances and their mothers could have aborted them and we wouldn't have the music of Ethel Waters to cheer us and a lot of other people of equal note. Yes, it matters. You see, when we start caving in and calling things that are black and white gray so that it, well, it depends on how you look at it. You see a little more gray and I see a little more white and who knows? It's beyond any of us. We can't figure it out. You know what we're doing? We're showing that our archenemy, the roaring lion, is culling us from the herd. and moving in for the kill. We're saying the outcome of life and darkness is uncertain. And so, since the outcome is uncertain, it doesn't matter that I forsake the favor of God for a season, or rationalize that God doesn't care, He's great like I am, and embrace The tactics, the weapons, and the strategy are his in him. It doesn't matter. The outcome is uncertain. But if I live every day based on a profound conviction That light and darkness are different and that God and light are right and will win. I don't know all the details. I don't know all the blacks and whites of God. That's why He's God and I'm not. There are a lot of things I can know. I can read Psalm 139 and tell you that biblically abortion is wrong. I can go down a lot of other issues and deal with them from a biblical perspective. We've been there, done that. It's not a soapbox. That's the principle I'm looking at here. If I live with the conviction that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all, and that light wins and darkness loses, I'll be more like John was in his ministry. I'll stand up for what God wants and what God teaches, and if it makes me unpopular, so be it. God doesn't look at the public opinion polls to bestow blessings. God doesn't check on what political and social and cultural leaders think before he blesses. Peter and some of the apostles in the early chapters of Acts. This is the same Peter who, under threat of his life, told a young girl, I don't know that man. Now he's standing up on the portico of the temple in Jerusalem preaching Jesus and saying, You leaders by wicked hands crucified and slew the Lord of glory. God made him Lord in Christ. He's the light winds. Later, they secretly arrest him and bring him in for a hearing. If you look at the names of the people involved in Judaism at that point in time, it's the same names that were involved in the arrest and trial of Jesus. And the implication to Peter and James is, you know what we did to your boss? We can do it to you, too. You just keep it up. Pretty easy when somebody says, I'll kill you if you don't stop preaching this, if you don't stop standing for these values, you're a dead man. It'd be easy to give in to the pressure. But what does Peter say? We ought to obey God rather than man. Peter said light and darkness are different, and light's right and darkness is wrong, and light wins and darkness doesn't. I live as a child of the light. That's what it means to live as a child of the light. I believe it was a policeman in Northern California who is also a profound Christian who speaks at Christian conferences. If not, it fits him. I believe it was this man who first made the point. If you were arrested and put on trial for being a Christian, would your life produce enough evidence to convict you? How do you live? Do you live this verse and what it really means in the trenches of life? Shines, shines in darkness, and the darkness never gets it.