Five words from an old pastor to a hurting church. They tell you what God is like, how to read every hard page of your Bible, and how to live with nothing left to hide.
God is light is John's summary of the whole message he heard from Jesus (1 John 1:5). It means God is completely holy, completely true and completely good, with no darkness in Him at all.
It also means the way to know Him is out in the open. Walking in the light is honesty with God and with each other, and the blood of Jesus keeps us clean while we walk.
The rest of this page is why those two sentences matter more than they first appear to.
When Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island, my wife was in the hospital giving birth to our third child. We lost power for three weeks. With two little ones at home, it was rough.
Even a week into the outage, I kept walking into rooms and flicking the light switch. Nothing happened, of course. A week earlier I had not given electricity one thought. Now I missed it every time I walked through a doorway.
When something is constant, we stop noticing it. That is true of light, and it is true of God. Darkness is no place to live. So when the Bible says God is light, it is reaching for the most basic good thing in human life.
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
1 John 1:5 to 7First John is a pastor writing to churches that had just been through a painful split. “They went out from us,” he says in 2:19, “but they did not really belong to us.” You can hear the ideas they left behind in three claims John answers in chapter one, each starting with “If we claim.”
Closeness to God while walking in darkness. John calls that a lie.
Denying there is anything to deal with. John calls that self-deception.
Rewriting the past, which makes God out to be a liar, since His rescue assumes we needed rescuing.
The ordinary word for light. John uses it of God, of Jesus and of how believers walk.
Darkness. In John it is moral: lies, hatred, hiding.
Sharing, a common life, with God and with one another.
John does not say God is mostly light. He says there is no darkness in Him at all, and he doubles the negative in Greek to make sure you hear it. Not a shadow. Not a corner.
In the letter, light carries three ideas. It is holiness, because darkness is sin. It is truth, because darkness is lying. And it is love, because whoever hates a brother or sister is still in darkness (2:9). Two chapters later John says it another way: God is love, a love defined by Jesus laying down His life for us (3:16).
That has a practical edge. When something goes wrong, many of us blame God or assume He arranged it. John's sentence says otherwise. Jesus never promised an easy life. He said “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
James agrees: every good gift comes from “the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17).
At Sound of Heaven we read 1 John 1:5 as a rule for reading the whole Bible. If there is no darkness in God, any dark portrait of God has to be brought to Jesus, who has made the Father known (John 1:18).
The strongest case on the other side deserves a fair hearing. Isaiah 45:7 has God saying He forms light and creates darkness, and older passages credit God with sending a harmful spirit on Saul. Many faithful Christians read those lines flat and conclude that both light and darkness come from God's hand.
We think that is wrong. Isaiah 45 answers a world of rival gods by saying there is one God over everything; it is not a portrait of His character. Scripture is God-breathed and also progressively revealed, written by real people who sometimes acted in God's name in ways Jesus later corrected. If a picture of God does not look like Jesus, it is not the final word on God. God is not the author of evil. More in did God create evil and the character of God.
One friendly sermon illustration needs correcting: that God is light because light hides everywhere, even in the dark. God is present everywhere, but John was not writing physics. His point is moral.
In 1 John, what does it mean that there is no darkness in God?
John's darkness is lying, sin and hatred (1:6, 1:8, 2:9). Saying there is none in God means none of those are in Him, which is why every dark picture of God gets read through Jesus.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Here is the surprise in verse 7. You expect John to say walking in the light gives us fellowship with God. He says we have fellowship with one another. The light is a room full of people who have stopped pretending. And the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin, so walking in the light means walking where the stumbling can be seen, named and washed.
I can keep a secret life and still be close to God. This is the claim in 1:6, and John calls it a lie. Hiding is the very thing light ends.
Walking in the light means I never fail. That is the claim in 1:8 in different clothes, and it drives people to hide even harder.
The first comforts people who do not want to change. The second crushes people already trying and failing. John refuses both within three verses.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
1 John 1:9Confession is agreement: saying about your sin what God already knows. It is not getting saved again every time you slip. A true believer cannot lose their salvation, and John writes to people he calls dear children. Confession is how children stay close to a Father. See what forgiveness is.
Most of us have things tucked under the couch cushions of our souls, things we have never said out loud. Hear this first: the light John describes is not a searchlight looking for someone to shame. It is a God who already knows and has already moved toward you in Jesus.
Tell God. Then tell one safe person. If you do not have that person, our team would be honored to pray with you through our prayer page, and you will be met with grace.
Walking in the light is not a life without sin. It is a life without hiding, lived together, with the blood of Jesus doing the cleaning.
John did not invent the idea. He is gathering a thread that starts on page one.
God's first spoken word in the Bible is light over darkness and chaos.
David sings “The LORD is my light and my salvation,” and God's word is a lamp for our feet.
People walking in darkness see a great light. Matthew 4 says it came true when Jesus began preaching in Galilee.
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light of Genesis walks into the world as a person.
Paul ties it together: the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” now shines in our hearts, displaying His glory “in the face of Christ.”
So John can say God is light and also record Jesus saying “I am the light of the world” with no competition between them. Jesus is fully God, the Father's light with a human face. For His claim, see Jesus is the light of the world; for God's nature more broadly, the attributes of God and God is spirit.
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”
Ephesians 5:8Paul does not say you will be light one day. He says you are. John wrote the same to his churches: “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:8). They were living through the end of one age, in the years before the temple fell in AD 70. The light was not a future hope. It had come.
The phrase was already in the air. The community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls called themselves sons of light, and their War Scroll imagines the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness in a long war. John and Paul keep the vocabulary and change everything about it. New Testament children of light do not win by fighting people. They win by loving them and refusing to hide. The Kingdom is here, and this is what it looks like on a Tuesday.
Light and lying cannot share a room (1:6). Stop managing your image.
Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light (2:10). Grudges are darkness, however righteous they feel.
Expose the fruitless deeds of darkness (Ephesians 5:11), starting with your own.
Jesus calls you light so people see your good deeds and glorify the Father. See salt and light.
This is what being a new creation means in practice: a different kind of life, lived out loud.
If you want to know what “God is light” looks like, look at Jesus. Eating with people others avoided. Telling the truth to the powerful and speaking gently to the ashamed. Giving Himself away on the cross. Light does not hoard itself. It shines on everyone in the room.
There is nothing in God you need to be afraid of. Every corner of who He is looks like Jesus. And there is nothing in you that His light cannot reach, clean and heal.
For related reading, see holiness, why God can seem hidden, what we need to be saved from, what it means to be born again and what the Kingdom of God is. And if you are near Deer Park, come walk in the light with us: plan your visit.
God is light, holy, true and loving with no darkness in Him at all, fully shown in Jesus, and we walk in that light together by living honestly, confessing freely and loving one another now.
Send it to us. A real person at Sound of Heaven will read it and pray with you, with no judgment at all.
It means God is completely holy, true and good, with no darkness in Him at all. John wrote it in 1 John 1:5 as the heart of the message he heard from Jesus. In his letter darkness means sin, lying and hatred, so none of those exist in God. It also shows how we relate to Him: we walk in the light by living honestly, and the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.
The exact words are in 1 John 1:5: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. The idea runs through the whole Bible, though. God speaks light into being in Genesis 1:3, David calls the Lord his light and his salvation in Psalm 27:1, Isaiah 9:2 promises a great light, John 1:4 to 9 calls Jesus the true light coming into the world, and James 1:17 calls God the Father of the heavenly lights.
It means living in the open before God and other believers instead of hiding. In 1 John 1:7 it produces fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin. It does not mean never failing, since the next verse says anyone claiming to be without sin is deceived. It means being honest about failures, confessing them and keeping no secret life.
They describe the same light from two angles. God is light, from 1 John 1:5, is a statement about God's nature: holy, true and loving, with no darkness. I am the light of the world, from John 8:12, is Jesus claiming to be that light in person, come into the world so people can see the Father. Because Jesus is fully God, there is no tension between the two. Jesus is what God's light looks like with a human face.
Paul uses the phrase in Ephesians 5:8: you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord, so live as children of light. It is a present identity, not a future goal. Children of light tell the truth, love their brothers and sisters, bring hidden things into the open and do good that points people to the Father. It is ordinary life in the Kingdom of God now.