Sinclair Ferguson

And that's something we've really been considering, isn't it?

that even the people who walk in darkness cannot escape the fact that their thinking, their reasoning, their loving, their living, their sense that there might be some meaning to life, their light on life is grounded in the Word who created everything, and now in Jesus Christ the Word, the true light who enlightens everyone who has come into the world.

This is a wonderful thing for us to know.

The inescapability of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

The fact that the world owes its existence to our Lord Jesus Christ.

The human race owes everything to Him.

It's amazing when you think about it, that the world has rejected him, as John goes on to say in his prologue, and yet he has continued to sustain that world.

But it's into that world that the Son came, the Logos, the Word, in order to redeem us.

There is, says John, good news for us in the fallen creation order.

And it comes in a sense in the prologue to John's Gospel in two stages.

Stage one is wonderful.

The light continues to shine because the darkness can never extinguish it.

But if stage one is wonderful, stage two is absolutely phenomenal.

The light that gives light has come into the world.

The Word has become flesh.

The eternal God has come to be face to face with us.

And the purpose of it all is that those who come to trust in Him might have the right to become the children of God.

Later on in his gospel, John explains to us that that comes into our lives through new birth, through regeneration, when we receive the Lord Jesus Christ.

But what he teaches us in the first chapter is this, that we who in Adam and Eve were created to be the children of God,

to live in loving fellowship with Him, to grow in the knowledge of Him, and who now have been excluded from that Garden of Eden where man and God walked together in love and in faithfulness, that we can now be restored to that, but only through Jesus Christ.