There is no darkness in God

Because God is only light and there is no darkness in God, nothing to which I must close my eyes comes from him.

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.

1 John 1:5 (NIV).

God wants us to know that he is light and there is no darkness in him. This is, in fact, the very first and key message John said “we” have heard from God and now declare. God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. This is the source of everything that follows in John’s letter.

I have previously written at length about the implications of the first part of the declaration: God is light. This describes both his personal character and his activity in his creation. This is all covered in the link given above.

But the second part of the declaration is just as important: there is no darkness in God.

His first act in the creation was to speak light into it. He then separated the light–which he had created–from the darkness.

There is no evil in God. Disorder and destruction do not originate with him.

Because sin is, at its heart, a turning away from God, a substitution of what is not God for God to serve our own pleasures and interests, there can be no sin in God. Sin is turning away from God to go our own way–turning away from the light and closing our eyes to it to stumble in the dark in the direction we want to go.

But God is consistent, unchanging, always true to himself. He never turns away from himself or closes his eyes.

But finally, and most importantly for our lives, no darkness in our lives can ever either come from him or show his presence in us. The point is not just that we have to close our eyes and turn away from God to sin. It is that, whenever we are faced with something that has even a little darkness in it, we know that it is not from God. If I have to close my eyes–or, in another figure of speech, to hold my nose–to make a in a certain way a decision I am feeling pressed to make, or to do or refrain from doing a certain act, I know the decision I am about to make did not come from God. I need to repent–to turn back to the direction God’s light is leading, the direction in which I can see God working, and open my eyes.