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Japanese In the Bible, light stands first for God himself. John puts it plainly: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Everything else grows from that. His word is a lamp, his face shines on his people, Jesus calls himself the light of the world, and those who follow him are told to shine.
Scripture shows us this from its first page to its last. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3), on the first day, before there was any sun to give it. The sun and moon come on the fourth day. And in the last vision of the Bible, the city of God needs neither: “they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light” (Revelation 22:5). The Bible begins and ends with a light the sun did not make. Every other meaning of light in Scripture lives between those two verses.
Why was there light before the sun in Genesis?
The text itself sets them apart. On the first day God speaks light into being and divides it from the darkness, and calls the light Day (Genesis 1:3–5). On the fourth day he makes “two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night” (Genesis 1:16). Christians read the days of Genesis in more than one way, but the order is plain on the page: light comes from God’s word before it comes from any lamp in the sky.
The early Church noticed the order too. Basil of Caesarea, preaching on the six days of creation, explained it this way: on the first day “the actual nature of light was produced,” and on the fourth “the sun’s body is constructed to be a vehicle for that original light.” A lamp, he said, is not the fire it carries. The sun carries a light that God made first.
The prophets carry that order to the end of time. “The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory” (Isaiah 60:19). John saw it fulfilled: “the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (Revelation 21:23).
Why does the Bible say God is light?
Because God is wholly pure, and all true light comes from him. John gives this as the heart of the message he had heard from Christ (1 John 1:5), and he adds that in God there is no darkness at all. Nothing in God is crooked or dark. Paul says the same from the other side: God dwells “in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Timothy 6:16). His light is too bright for us to walk into on our own.
And yet he shines toward us. The blessing the priests of Israel spoke over the people asks, “The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee” (Numbers 6:25). When Moses came down from Sinai, “the skin of his face shone” from talking with God (Exodus 34:29). When Jesus was transfigured on the mountain, “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matthew 17:2). The psalmist puts it in a single line: “For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9). We do not find our way to God by our own light. We see by his.
That is why a frightened believer can sing, “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1), and why James calls God “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). The sun moves and the shadows move with it. God does not change.
What is the word for light in Hebrew and Greek?
The Hebrew word is ‘or, the light of Genesis 1:3 and of “The LORD is my light” in Psalm 27:1. It covers daylight, the dawn and the lights of heaven, and once, in Job 37:3, the King James translators rendered it “lightning”. The Greek word in the New Testament is phōs, the light of John’s Gospel and of “God is light”.
The King James Version uses “light” 272 times. With lights, lighted, lighten, lightened, lighteneth, lighteth, enlighten, enlightened and enlightening, the total is 320. Not all of them are about brightness. “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30) means not heavy. The sailors in Jonah’s storm threw the cargo overboard “to lighten it of them” (Jonah 1:5). And “lighted” can mean got down, as when Rebekah saw Isaac and “lighted off the camel” (Genesis 24:64). So the count is a guide, not a measure of the symbol.
What does a lamp mean in the Bible?
A lamp is God’s light carried into ordinary life, a light we can hold. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105). A lamp held low lights the next step, not the whole road, and that is how Scripture guides us. “The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple” (Psalm 119:130). Proverbs says the same of God’s commands: “the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light” (Proverbs 6:23).
Proverbs also says that something in us is a lamp in God’s hand: “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly” (Proverbs 20:27). In the tabernacle a lamp burned before the LORD from evening to morning, fed with “pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always” (Exodus 27:20). Jesus called John the Baptist “a burning and a shining light” (John 5:35), and the word he used there is the Greek word for a lamp, lychnos. It is the same word behind “the Lamb is the light thereof” in Revelation 21:23. In the city of God the Lamb himself is the lamp.
Why is Jesus called the light of the world?
Because he said it of himself: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). John’s Gospel opens with the same claim: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). Isaiah had promised that “the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2), and Simeon, holding the child in his arms in the Temple, called him “A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
The churches confess it together. The Nicene Creed, named for the Council of Nicaea of 325 and most likely issued in its full form by the Council of Constantinople in 381, says of the Son, in the English of the Catholic bishops of the United States and of the Episcopal Church, that he is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”. The Orthodox Church in America’s translation reads “Light of light; true God of true God.” Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and the major Protestant churches all accept this creed. Jesus’ words in John 8 have their own page, why Jesus is called the light of the world.
What do light and darkness mean together in Scripture?
They mean the struggle between God and everything that resists him, and Scripture never treats it as an even match. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). The Greek verb behind “comprehended” means to lay hold of or seize, so the line says more than that the darkness failed to understand. It could not overcome the light, as the English Standard Version translates it. Jesus says plainly why some people stay in the dark: “light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil,” while “he that doeth truth cometh to the light” (John 3:19, 21). John draws the same line for believers: “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
Darkness is never too deep for God. “Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee” (Psalm 139:12). The prophet Micah, surrounded by enemies, could say, “when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me” (Micah 7:8). The other side of the picture has its own page, the spiritual meaning of darkness in the Bible.
How are Christians called to be light?
We are called to shine with a light that is not our own. Jesus told his disciples, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid,” and then, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:14, 16). The light leads people to the Father, not to us. Paul writes, “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8). Those words are unpacked in Matthew 5:14–16, “Ye are the light of the world”.
The light grows with a life lived near God. “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Proverbs 4:18). It is the light of dawn. It starts grey at the edge of the sky and keeps growing until it is full day.
Paul gathers the whole story into one sentence, from the first day of creation to the face of Christ and into our own hearts: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
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