Day 4: Love vs. Holiness

Dear friend,

So far, we have focused on the supreme purpose of life as Jesus declares it in John 17:3:

“And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (NKJV)

Now, let’s think further about the nature of God as it’s uniquely revealed in the Bible. First, God is love; and second, God is light. The first statement – God is love – is found in the first epistle of John, chapter 4, verses 7 and 8:

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (NKJV)

The second statement is also found in the same first epistle of John, chapter 1, verses 5-8:

“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. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practise 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 Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (NKJV)

Those are very searching words – "God is light; in Him is no darkness." So if there’s any darkness in our lives, that comes between God and us. We cannot claim to be walking with God if we’re walking in the dark.

You take those two statements together – God is love, and God is light – immediately you become aware of a kind of basic tension that affects our life. God is love – we long for love. His love draws us, it attracts us, we reach out for it. But then God is also light – absolute pure, radiant, unsullied light. No darkness can have any fellowship with that light; no darkness can have access to that light. And so there’s the tension. The human mind left to itself has no solution for this problem.

But, thank God, the Bible also contains God’s way of resolving this tension – the tension between love and light. There could be no more appropriate season than this Christmas season to speak about the resolution of that tension. Only God could resolve the tension. And He did it. He did it in Christ.

Man could not approach God, so God came down to man. God who is light, who cannot be approached, with whom there is no possibility of any kind of sin or evil approaching Him – God chose in His grace to veil that light in human flesh, in the weakness of a little, newborn babe, and then of a man as He grew up. It was all contained in God’s Christmas gift, the Lord Jesus Christ.

For reflection and prayer

‍God is love. God is light.