God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. At first glance, you might wonder why
John considered that simple statement so vital. What’s so earthshaking about the light of God?
Go back to Genesis 1 and you’ll see.There, we find the greatest mass of darkness and confusion ever recorded in Scripture. We read about a time when “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness
was upon the face of the deep” (verse 2). If there had ever been a place too dark and barren for God to bless, this surely would have been it. If God were ever going to throw
His hands up and say, “I just can’t change this miserable place,” He would have done it in Genesis.But He didn’t.
Instead, He said, “Let there be light: and there was light” (verse 3). Or, as the Hebrew text reads, “God said, Light be! And light was.”
People often assume the light referred to in that verse was the sun. But the rest of the chapter reveals God didn’t create the sun until the fourth day. So what kind of light
did God speak into existence on the first day? What kind of light carried the power to transform that dark, formless void?
It was the light of God’s glory, the luminous force of His creative power which is the source of all matter. It was the light that comes from God Himself. Until God
released that glory light through His Word, it was on the inside of Him. But once He said, “Light be!” it shot forth from Him at a speed of 186,000 miles a second and began
to bring into material manifestation the blueprint of the earth God had within Him.
Let this truth sink in for a moment: Every aspect of creation, every natural material substance that comprises this universe came from the glory light of God. In recent
years, science has caught up with the Bible and declared light energy is the ultimate force and source of all material things. And according to John 1:9, that force is “the true
Light, which lighteth every man.”
That’s right! When God said, “Let us make man in our image” and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 1:26, 2:7), He spoke into mankind the same creative, illuminating glory that brought the earth into manifestation. He energized the spirit of man with the glory light that came from within Him. Then He crowned mankind with that same glory (Psalm 8:5) by blessing them and saying to them: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).
The Hebrew phrase translated replenish the earth in that verse actually means fill it up. What did God expect mankind to fill the earth with?
With God’s glory. With His light.
God’s blessing empowered Adam and Eve to take the glory light throughout the whole earth. It equipped them to bring everything on the planet under the influence of God’s glory and turn the whole place into a Garden
of Eden. But they never fulfilled that commission. They messed things up and fell into sin. As a result, the earth is still waiting for the manifestation of THE BLESSING. It is
still begging to be filled with the glory light
that is within and upon the sons and daughters of God.
That’s the reason God sends His born again children (people like you and me) into
every dark corner of the world. Not so we
can suffer in the darkness for Jesus, but so
we can light up the darkness with His glory.
He sends us there to bring THE BLESSING
and change the most barren places on this
planet into little Gardens of Eden.
That’s what THE BLESSING does. It
releases the glory light of God that exploded
within us when we were born again and puts
that light to work in our circumstances and
surroundings. It changes them from the curse that came on this world through sin, back to the original plan of God. It empowers us to be fruitful, multiply and fill up the earth with divine glory everywhere we go.
That was, and always will be, the perfect
will of God for His people. God isn’t about to change that.
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