In His spotlessly holy life, Jesus showed Himself to be that true light, perfectly displaying true love, Indeed, in order to provide a way back to God for men and women who were otherwise doomed to eternal punishment, He was willing to experience causeless human hatred, being beaten, abused and unjustly condemned to an agonising death on a Roman cross.
The darkness could not overcome this ‘true light’, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who said about Himself: John writes about Jesus: ‘this is the true light, that lights every man, coming into the world’ (John 1:9). Genesis 4 records that Adam’s elder son Cain hated his brother Abel and murdered him, ‘because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous’ (1 John 3:12). As a result, every member of the race is scarred from birth.
The root cause of this is a problem traced back to the beginning of the Bible, when Adam, the father of the human race, rebelled against God and ‘sin came into the world through one man’ (Romans 5:12). When photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot spent five years attempting to capture life in Kowloon Walled City, the largely ungoverned, densely populated enclave within Hong Kong notorious for drugs, sexual depravity and crime, they called the book they published in 1993, City of Darkness. Jesus was stating that people’s love is misdirected – to ‘love darkness’ goes hand-in-hand with embracing ‘evil works’. The Bible answers these questions in a statement most likely made by Jesus Himself: ‘people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil’ (John 3:19).