SERIES: The Gospel of John
Light for a Dark World
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
Introduction: I appreciated Alan Groh’s excellent song this morning, entitled “I Am.” In the Gospel of John seven great “I am” statements come from the lips of Jesus, each involving an implicit claim to deity. We have already examined “I am the Bread of Life;” today we come to “I am the Light of the World.” If ever there was a time when this world needed light, it is today. Let’s readJohn 8:12-30:
When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
13 The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.”
14 Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. 15 You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. 16 But if I do judge, my decisions are true, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. 17 In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is true. 18 I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
19 Then they asked him, “Where is your father?”
“You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20 He spoke these words while teaching in the temple courts near the place where the offerings were put. Yet no one seized him, because his hour had not yet come.
21 Once more Jesus said to them, “I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.”
22 This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?”
23 But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. 24 I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.”
25 “Who are you?” they asked.
“Just what I have been telling you from the beginning,” Jesus replied. 26 “I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is trustworthy, and what I have heard from him I tell the world.”
27 They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father. 28 So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. 29 The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” 30 Even as he spoke, many believed in him.
Those of you who have known me for some time know that I am not an alarmist. I was one of the few evangelical preachers who didn’t preach a doomsday message on Babylon during Operation Desert Storm; I have never mentioned from the pulpit Larry Burkett’s The Coming Economic Earthquake; nor did I warn you about the dire consequences if Bill Clinton became President.
You see, I am a strong believer and teacher in the sovereignty of God, being convinced that nothing that happens in this world takes Him by surprise or is beyond His control. Nevertheless, I have a hard time escaping the conclusion that we in the United States are entering a new dimension of moral and spiritual darkness in which evil is not just tolerated but promoted as official governmental and social policy.
The theme of our Scripture text today is that Jesus is the Light. Light is one of the great metaphorical themes running through Scripture. At the very beginning, at the outset of creation, God commanded, “Let there be light.” And as the story closes in Revelation with an eternal beginning, we see a glorious city bathed in light where “there will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light.” In between Genesis 1 and Revelation 22 is the account of how sin brought darkness upon this world and how Jesus came to restore the light and even to turn His followers into lights, for He charged His disciples in Matt. 5, “You are the light of the world.” [i]
The key thing about light is that it shows up best in the darkest places. So, before we can fully appreciate the meaning of Jesus’ great affirmation in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world,” we must grasp that …
The world is in darkness.
In the Bible the term “world” generally refers not to the earth or to the globe, but to human society without God. All that mankind is—his culture, his history, his achievements, his intellect, his emotions, his will—has been touched by sin and lies in moral and spiritual darkness. Our passage touches upon several evidences of that darkness, though there are many more.
It regularly violates the moral law of God. (1-11) Sunday before last we examined the story of the woman taken in adultery. The adultery itself is, of course, indicative of moral darkness, but an even clearer indication is the action of the religious leaders who brought the woman to Jesus to lay a trap for Him. If we are correct in suggesting that Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments with His finger on the ground, then the guilt of the woman’s accusers is obvious from the fact that all of them vanished rather than throw a stone at her.
As we look around at the world in which we live, we see similar wholesale violations of the moral law of God. There is open immorality all around us—violence on the streets, political corruption on the local, state, and national level, sexual promiscuity on nearly every primetime TV program and in most movies, novels, and magazines. Of course, the evil we see around us is nothing new; what isnew is the degree to which it is being endorsed as public policy. For twenty years now that has been the case with abortion on demand, a grave evil often promoted as a good. But today the plague is spreading.
Take, for example, legalized gambling. I am sufficiently concerned about the rapid growth of the gambling industry and the fact that many professing Christians participate in it, that I am going to address it in some detail tonight in a new series entitled, “Holes in Our Moral Ozone.” But allow me to comment just briefly this morning. Up until 1989 only two states—Nevada and New Jersey—had casino gambling. Today 11 states have it, and it is pending in a score of others. Thirty-two states have government-run lotteries that in 1991 siphoned off $17 billion, and 47 states participate in some form of gambling.
Since a certain percentage of the population is susceptible, for either psychological or physiological reasons, to what the American Psychiatric Association calls “a disorder of impulse control,” more commonly called “gambling fever,” there is no question but that wider availability will lead directly to more ruined lives, in much the same way as increased alcohol availability and consumption leads to direct increases in alcoholism. But even for those who will never become compulsive about it, in the words of George Will,
“Gambling inflames the lust for wealth without work, weakening a perishable American belief—that the moral worth of a person is gauged not by how much money he makes but by how he makes his money. By institutionalizing a few highly publicized bonanzas, government foments, for its benefit, mass irrationality. It also deepens the belief that life’s benefits are allocated randomly.” [ii]
Another issue that troubles me deeply is the increasing role our government is playing in elevating homosexuality to an acceptable alternative lifestyle. I believe all people, even gross sinners, deserve the protection of the law. Violence of any kind against people who have chosen a religion or a philosophy or a lifestyle different from ours has no place in a civilized society. After all, we even have laws that protect convicted violent criminals from cruel and unusual punishment. But what we don’t have to do and should not do is feel obligated to treat all religions, all philosophies, and all lifestyles as equally valid and morally acceptable. People deserve respect because they are created in the image of God; viewpoints or behavior don’t necessarily deserve respect, because some of them are morally wrong.
I don’t believe this audience is ignorant of what the Bible says about homosexual behavior, and therefore I won’t use our time this morning to prove that the Bible calls it a sinful abomination. Period. No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. What I do want to talk about is how this perversion of human sexuality is gaining respectability by leaps and bounds right before our eyes. What the powerful homosexual lobby is seeking today is not just protection under the law from being harassed for what is done in private between consenting adults; if that were all they were asking, I say it should be granted to them, on the same grounds that we do not harass heterosexuals for promiscuous but private behavior between consenting adults. Laws won’t stop the behavior anyway—only spiritual conversion, moral persuasion, or the natural consequences of sin will stop it.
But the homosexual lobby is not demanding tolerance but endorsement—total legitimizing of their lifestyle on two bogus grounds: (1) that homosexuality is genetic, innate, and immutable, and (2) that it involves a vast number of Americans—10% to 15% or more of the population.[iii] Both of these assertions are patently false, and we’ll discuss why in detail next Sunday night in the second part of our series on “Holes in our Moral Ozone.”
The homosexual lobby is trying to brainwash the American public into thinking that anyone who does not accept homosexuality as normal is guilty of homophobia. Closely related is the same lobby’s campaign to convince us that AIDS is a threat to all of us, not just to those who practice high-risk behavior. The fact is if you are living by God’s moral standards, you have about as much chance of getting AIDS as you do of getting hit by lightning.
Don’t misunderstand me. We should feel great compassion for the hemophiliacs and others who got AIDS from blood transfusions before blood banks began to screen the blood supply adequately, as well as for the handful of doctors and nurses who contracted it while treating AIDS patients. And we should feel pity even for those who get AIDS through sinful behavior, as we would for an alcoholic who contracts cirrhosis of the liver, or a smoker who gets lung cancer, or a teenager who ends up a quadriplegic from a car wreck while driving 110 mph.
But frankly, friends, there can be no justification in my estimation for the humongous amount of money our government is currently spending on AIDS research compared to what it is spending on research for diseases that affect many times more people—people who were not knowingly violating God’s moral law. No one can argue with the fact that the AIDS epidemic is almost totally related to behavior. It would stop spreading overnight if people just quit violating God’s moral laws. Now I know that isn’t politically correct, but that’s how I see it.
Further, mark my word, the homosexual lobby is just the tip of the iceberg. Advocates of euthanasia, pedophilia, and even bestiality will be the next groups demanding respectability. And why not? If there is no absolute moral law, then anything goes. Have you stopped to think how absurd is the current uproar about children being left home alone, when it comes from people who demand that mothers be allowed to kill their children any time before birth? If you can kill them for your own peace of mind before birth, what’s so bad about leaving them home alone for a few days while you go on vacation? You see, there is no rational reason for making a distinction at birth. Children don’t become human just as they exit the birth canal.
I think what is going on here is that people who have forsaken their moral conscience in one area (like abortion) are bending over backwards to recover it in another (like child abuse, sexism, etc.). Isn’t that at least partially why the animal rights movement and the radical ecology movement are so popular right now? Consciences weighed down by the blood of millions of unborn children are desperately looking for some salve by championing the rights of spotted owls or hump-back whales or the rain forest. But these concerns are phony and temporary because they are not grounded in any moral law.
If human life is not sacred, how can anything else be? But in a totally relativistic world it is impossible to say that one creature has greater worth than another, or even that a human being has greater worth than a tadpole or a tree. We shouldn’t be surprised when Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, put it this way: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” [iv] All of this reminds me of a verse in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” If ever that has been done, it is being done today.
I believe there is an indication in our text today as to why the moral law of God is so routinely and publicly violated, and it is found in verse 15: “You judge by human standards.” So our second reason why the world is in darkness is that …
It judges everything by human standards only. (15) The context here is a challenge by the Pharisees to Jesus’ claim to be the Light of the World. They retort in verse 13, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.” Jesus’ response is, in effect, that His testimony is valid because His knowledge is divine, as opposed to theirs, which is merely human. And furthermore, His witness does not stand alone—His Father confirms everything He says.
But let’s think about that statement, “You judge by human standards.” Isn’t that the real problem in our society, our schools, and our government today? If the culturally elite of our day has a “Bible,” it is probably The Humanist Manifesto, originally penned in 1933, but updated and reaffirmed in the 1970’s. Listen to the preface of the modern version:
“As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith…. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.”
Regarding ethics and morality, consider the following quote from the same source:
“We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction.”
Regarding the specific area of sexuality, the Manifesto goes on:
“We believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognized…. The many varieties of sexual exploration should not in themselves be considered ‘evil.’… Short of harming others or compelling them to do likewise, individuals should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their life-styles as they desire.”
Then comes perhaps the key element:
“The separation of church and state and the separation of ideology and state are imperatives. The state should encourage maximum freedom for different moral, political, religious, and social values in society.”
Of course, what the Manifesto doesn’t acknowledge is that once you separate the church, theism, and moral absolutes completely from the state, what you have left is humanism as the state religion. The Manifesto, not surprisingly, is signed by hundreds of scholars, philosophers, authors, poets, doctors, ministers, psychotherapists, economists, scientists, and other leaders of our culture. But what is more surprising to me is that a recent nationwide Barna poll shows that 53% of those claiming to be Bible-believing, conservative Christians said there is no such thing as absolute truth. In other words, a majority of those who follow the One who says, “I am the truth,” profess not to believe in truth at all.[v] They might as well sign the Manifesto.
We should not be surprised by the darkness around us when the world judges everything by human standards only. The third point in our text is that the world is in darkness because …
It is ignorant of both Jesus and His Father. (19) “Then they asked him, ‘Where is your father?’ ‘You do not know me or my Father,’ Jesus replied. ‘If you knew me, you would know my Father also.'” There is an appalling spiritual ignorance in the world today, no less than in Jesus’ day. And strangely, that spiritual ignorance may be at its worst among the clergy, which was true in Jesus’ day also. It is unbelievable how many ministers signed the Humanist Manifesto. And I am appalled by the number of clergy who advocate abortion rights, ordain homosexuals, and openly approve of Dr. Kevorkian’s ministry of death.
In last Monday’s St. Louis Post Dispatch there was a major article entitled, “Church, Theater Joining Forces to Dramatize Messages of Faith.” The article was about several churches in St. Louis that provide safe havens for avant-garde theater. The plays at St. Marcus United Church of Christ, for example, have included “a performance artist in the nude giving a funny/sad monologue on growing up homosexual, called ‘My Queer Body,’ and a talented cast of actors and actresses singing about reproductive rights.”
The pastor finds the theater’s messages consistent with the church’s mission. The church is a logical place “where these issues can be presented,” he said. And he points out that Jesus Christ Himself, taught about tolerance for other lifestyles and points of view. He further said, “We must always go to the outsider, because Jesus was going to the outsider: the woman caught in adultery, the tax collector. Jesus said there is one law … which is to love.”
Now I don’t know what Bible version he is referring to, but mine says that when Jesus spoke to the woman caught in adultery, He said to her, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Even allowing for the fact that the Post Dispatch almost never gets a story straight, there still seems to be plenty of evidence here of blasphemy. This pastor is not a minister of Jesus Christ; he is a servant of Satan, just as were the Pharisees and teachers of the law who were challenging Jesus in John 8. Listen to what Jesus said about them beginning in verse 44:
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!”
There is an incredible ignorance about Jesus, His teachings, His attitudes, and His personal lifestyle both in the world and, tragically, in the church. That is the greatest task, I believe, to which God has called us as a body of believers—to shine as lights in this incredible darkness. Our mission is “to know God and to make Him known.” Along with Bible Study Fellowship, Community Bible Study, Precept Upon Precept, Navigators, Salt and Light, and a hundred other organizations whose goal is the same, our task is to erase the abominable spiritual illiteracy of our time.
However, because we are living in a post-Christian culture, we must approach things differently today than we did 30 years ago. Where the task used to be convincing people that Jesus is more than just a great teacher, and Christianity is more than just a great religion, today we must often first show that Jesus and Christianity are even relevant topics of discussion. [vi]
Now I have spent an unusual amount of time today talking about the problem and relatively little about the solution. But I have done so to highlight the great statement of Jesus in verse 12: “I am the light of the world.” You see, the key thing about light, as we noted earlier, is that its radiance can best be seen in the darkest places. It’s difficult to notice even a bank of fluorescent lights in a room where the sun is shining through the windows, but strike a single match in absolute darkness, and every eye will be drawn to it. If I am not spending the bulk of my time on the “light” this morning, it is because every message I have preached in this series on the Gospel of John has been doing just that.
Jesus is the light. 9:5 (Ex. 13:21,22; Num. 9:17-23)
What does it mean when Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” I believe it means that He is the One—the only One—able to dispel moral darkness, intellectual darkness, and spiritual darkness that is all around us.
Let’s allow history to prove this point. I ask you to compare any society in which biblical Christianity has had a major impact with any society in which it has not. Included in the latter would be those that are religious but non-Christian, whether Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, animistic, or whatever. Then there are those that are irreligious, like Communistic and socialistic governments that controlled one third of the world’s population for much of the 20th century. Then there are societies which have mixed Christianity with paganism, such as you find in much of Latin America.
In every case you will find in these non-Christian or pseudo-Christian societies a lower view of women, a lower rate of literacy, a lower view of marriage, a lower view of work, a lower view of the individual, a lower standard of living, and on and on we could go.
Friends, we are living on borrowed time, still enjoying benefits as a nation that are in large part due to our theistic heritage and an ethic borrowed from biblical Christianity; but the foundations have been swept away. How long will the superstructure stand? Not long I fear, for it is already crumbling drastically. I am not suggesting for a moment that we were ever a truly Christian nation, or that most of our founding fathers were evangelical, but it is absolutely clear that our constitution, our judiciary, our medical profession, our churches, and our educational system were all originally based upon a biblical framework. That has now eroded so much as to be almost unrecognizable.
So, what do we do about it? There is a great tendency on the part of many Christians today to become so alarmed by all the evil around us that they want to circle the wagons, build up the holy fortresses, and prepare for a long siege. I don’t think that is how God wants us to react. Listen to what Jesus says in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” That says to me that Jesus’ followers will both escape the impact of darkness on their own lives and become lights to others. But we must follow Him!
Whoever follows Jesus will pass from darkness into light. (12) Well, where is He going? When He was on earth, did He retreat, or did He take the battle to the enemy? Both. Sometimes He took His disciples aside to a quiet place to teach them, but only long enough to recharge their batteries for the battle. He told them, “I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” Often we have misunderstood that statement as defensive—that Satan and his forces are trying to break down the gates of Hell in order to attack the Church, but will be unable to destroy her. I don’t think that’s at all what Jesus meant. He was viewing the Church as storming the very gates of Hell, and those gates will be unable to withstand the onslaught. In other words, many caught in the grips of Satan will be virtually snatched out of the fire—a phrase used in Jude 23.
Well, how do we storm the gates of Hell? The same way Jesus did—by being Lights in a dark world. Listen again to Matthew 5, beginning in verse 14:
“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”
That doesn’t sound like a fortress mentality to me. Francis of Assisi once said, “Preach the Gospel all the time; if necessary, use words.” For the clergy words are essential, but there are many ways to be a light without preaching sermons. For some of you the answer is to get involved in national politics at the grass roots level, and you are doing that. For others it means laying yourself on the line in local school board meetings, and others are doing that. For still others it may mean working in a crisis pregnancy center or protesting at an abortion clinic.
And then there are little things that all of us can do. We can quit giving money to organizations that are bent on undermining the very faith we hold dear. Chuck Colson said he stopped giving to his alma mater, Brown University, when he finally came to the realization that while he was contending for a Christian worldview in books, speeches, columns, and radio commentaries, he was also financially supporting a school committed to an opposing belief system.
Secondly, we can spend our money in activist ways. I would encourage you to buy Celestial Seasonings herb teas and other products the next time you’re at the grocery store. You ask, “Do you own stock in that company?” No, but this company has been targeted for a nationwide boycott by the homosexual lobby because they have refused to donate $100,000 to that lobby’s effort to overthrow Colorado’s new law prohibiting the establishment of homosexuals as a separate class deserving of special treatment under the civil rights code. I think we should fight that kind of blackmail by buying their products. Thirdly, we can speak loudly against sex and violence in the media by refusing to watch programs or rent videos that exploit such evils. If 60 million born again Christians categorically refused to patronize such things, don’t you think that would have an effect? And all of us can write to our congressmen and government leaders.
But whatever we do, we must do it with integrity, honesty, and great discernment. The media will use anything they can get their hands on to discredit us, so we must be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Frankly, I feel that the religious right has too often spent its ammunition on issues that don’t matter and on methods that don’t produce. Colson writes,
“On virtually every issue where we’ve launched a frontal assault on the culture, we’ve lost. For, as we discussed earlier, we are dealing with a culture that has lost its fundamental Christian presuppositions…. Besides, frontal assaults only mobilize the opposition…. As a general strategy, we will be more effective when we penetrate behind the lines, influencing the culture from within—which, by the way, does not mean we lose our character. Salt is still salt.” [vii]
Issues like the Panama Canal, the Strategic Defense Initiative, prayer in the schools, and capital punishment are not, in my estimation, issues that will make or break our moral backbone as a nation. Our time and effort would be better spent focusing on gambling, gay rights, sex and violence in the media, the kind of sex education our children receive in school, and the protection of the very young and very old from the twin evils of abortion and euthanasia.
Finally, if Jesus is the light, and whoever follows Him will pass from darkness into light, it only stands to reason that …
Whoever does not will die in his sins. (21-24) Three times in John 8 Jesus threatens that. Look at verse 21:
“‘I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.’ This made the Jews ask, ‘Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, “Where I go, you cannot come”?’ But he continued, ‘You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins.’ ‘Who are you?’ they asked. ‘Just what I have been claiming all along,’ Jesus replied.”
What He has been claiming all along is that He is the Son of God, equal to the Father, creator and sustainer of the universe, the Bread of Life, the only Way, the Truth, and the Life, and now the Light of the World.
There is a famous painting by Homan Hunt that all of you have seen. It is called “The Light of the World,” and it shows Jesus standing at a door, to which there is no handle on the outside, for the door of the soul must be opened from within. Have you opened your heart and allowed Jesus to light up your darkness and to help you, in turn, be a light in a dark world?
DATE: February 21, 1993
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Darkness
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Homosexuality
[i] Charles Colson, The Body, 352.
[ii] George Will, column in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Feb. 7, 1993.
[iii] Ten days ago Newsweek, not exactly the voice of the religious right, indicated that no credible studies have placed the percentage of homosexuals above 2.6% of the population, and many less.
[iv] Colson, 176.
[v] Ibid., 184.
[vi] George Hunter, dean of Asbury Seminary’s School of World Mission and Evangelism, maintains that we have four things in common with the early church and thus should take a lesson from them: (1) Because they faced a population with no knowledge of the Gospel, early Christians had to inform people of Christ’s claims and His offers. They had to educate them before they could witness to them. (2) Because the early Christians faced a hostile populace and persecution from the state, they had to influence people to have a positive attitude toward the Christian movement. (3) Because they confronted an empire with several entrenched religions, early Christians had to convince people of the truth of Christianity, or at least of its plausibility. (4) Since entry into the faith involves an act of the will, Christians had to invite people to make a clear choice and adopt this faith, join a community of believers, and follow Jesus as Lord. (Colson, 338).
[vii] Colson, 355.