In Sydney, when I lived there, the Christian Union ran a mission to the University one year, and as part of their build-up to it they mounted a huge poster-board just inside the entrance gates. Every two days, the poster was changed, and over a period of a fortnight or so, the notices ran one after another something like this:

1. Albert Einstein has spoken:
In their struggle for the ethical good, men must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God. Their path lies in the striving after rational knowledge.

2. Sigmund Freud has spoken:
Science is no illusion. But it is an illusion to suppose that we can secure anywhere else what science cannot give us.

3. H. G. Wells has spoken:
Mankind is a species demented, and must pull itself together or perish. There is no way forward but steeply up or steeply down.

4. Winston Churchill has spoken:
In this moment in his history there lies before man, if he wishes, a golden age of peace and progress. All is in his hand. He has only to conquer his last and worst enemy, himself.

5. Bertrand Russell has spoken:
The only platform upon which intelligent man can take his stand is upon a philosophy of unyielding despair.

... and so on. The day before the campaign meetings began, the final poster was displayed.

6. Jesus has spoken:
I am the Light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

By contrast, it sounded so simple and direct ... and satisfying. All the other pronouncements, beside it, sounded complicated and ... pompous. Human life is a confusion, a bedlam, so it is not easy to see clearly either where we are going, or where we should be going; it is hardly surprising that pronouncements on its future should be varied and ... apprehensive. But like a king appearing in an Eastern Bazaar before whose presence all voices die away to silence, Jesus stands forth and says with calm and assured authority, "The truth is with me."

The circumstances in which He said this were highly impressive. John tells us that it was on the last day of the Feast, the great day. It was the Feast of Tabernacles, when Jerusalem was thronged with pilgrims. In the court of the Temple, there stood two huge golden lamps on tall, free-standing pillars. As night began to fall these were lighted, pouring a flood of brilliant light over the Temple precincts. They formed a beacon that could be seen, indeed, for miles across the hills. They lighted up the narrow streets of the city too, it was said - streets which on every other night of the year were dark; for there was no street lighting in those times, and the only lights within the homes were feeble oil lamps. With those great lights flashing through the warm autumn night, you can perhaps appreciate how arresting this utterance was: "I am the Light of the world."

It would have sounded even more arresting to the Jews who heard it than it does to us. The word "light" was especially associated in their thought with God. "The Lord is my light," reads Psalm 27. "The Lord shall be your everlasting light," was Isaiah's promise. "When I sit in darkness," wrote the prophet Micah, "the Lord shall be a light to me." The rabbis used to say that Messiah's name, when He came, would be "Light."

In the setting of that religious festival, the claim Jesus made was unmistakable. He was ranking Himself with God. If you believed God to be the Fashioner and Ruler of Heaven and earth, then to say what Jesus said was to claim that you had exclusive possession of ultimate truth. "I am the light," He said, "of the world" - of the whole cosmos.

It means that Jesus casts light - full, clear light - on the nature of God, on the meaning of life, and on the destiny of man.

THE NATURE OF GOD

Take the first.

In John's day, people were as unsure of God as they are in ours. Who knew what He was really like? Was He enemy to mankind, or friend? Life was sometimes pleasant, often cruel. What did it mean? Was the mysterious presence that moved unseen behind the screen of circumstances benevolent, or malevolent?

There is an incident in the Old Testament that captures this dreadful uncertainty. A simple man, Manoah by name, and his wife, were visited by an angel from God and promised a son (who would be Samson). But their ignorance of God's real intentions filled them with dread. The man broke out in dismay: since God had visited them, they would surely die. But his wife was not convinced. "If the Lord had meant to kill us," she reasoned, "surely He would not have shown us this kindness." Do you catch the pathos of it? ... these simple folk, so desperately unsure of God, able only to guess, their guessing fashioned by fear. How many today are any more sure?

A recent survey showed that, whilst 65% of the population believe there is a God, less than 25% think religion is any use in solving the world's problems. On a scale of 1-10 the question "How important is it to have God in your life?" rated 4.2. God is too powerless ... or too problematical ... or too irrelevant to be trusted.

In John's day, people's minds were filled with dark terrors. The night winds were devils moaning in the darkness. Clouds scudding across the face of the moon were the shapes of demons prowling the skies. To be sick was worst of all, for that was evidence that you had fallen into the clutches of evil powers.

We smile, but modern psychiatry has revealed beyond dispute that our deep minds are veritable snake-pits of crawling fears and savage passions; our civilised urbanity is but a thin veneer, and it only needs a mass stimulus such as Hitler provided to bring the wolves howling from their cellars and turn ordinary citizens into Belsen attendants. No truer diagnosis of our human condition was ever penned than the one in Hebrews where men are described as those who "through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage."

None of us can quite plumb the depth of sheer joy with which John dipped his pen in the ink and wrote: "This is the message that we have: God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all."

To know that - to be sure of that - was indescribably exciting. It was to be freed from a crippling burden of fearful uncertainty. The sky was swept clean of filthy shapes. The night was robbed of its horrors. At the heart of reality there lay, not a cold, uncaring, nameless, dread Unknown, but a radiant Being whose name was love.

As the Arab physician in Browning's poem put it:

The very God ... think Abib - dost thou think?
So the ALL-GREAT were ALL-LOVING too!
So through the thunder came a human voice,
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here ...
Beats here for you.

Do you know that? Do you know it so as to be sure? ... that over all there beats for you a great, loving heart, a Father's heart, so that trusting it, all shall be well?

Apart from Christ, how can we be sure?

But, seeing Him, we hear the words, "If God spared not His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, shall He not also give us all things with Him?" "If, while, we were enemies, God reconciled us to Himself by the death of His Son, how much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life? Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

I know of no one else in all the world who can do that for us - cause us to rejoice in God, with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But He does, because He shines the clear light of revelation on the nature of God till there is no part dark. In Him we see that all God's ways are goodness, and that He has made our eternal welfare His whole endeavour.

The Light of the world.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

But He shines a light also on the meaning of life.

Let me bear personal testimony to that.
No man can be long in Christian ministry but he feels oppressed by the burden of life, by its painful and heart-rending tragedies.
The first funeral I ever took was a child's, my own doctor's son Paol, seven years old, who had died of leukæmia. We had formed a prayer group for him during his illness. I remember a Saturday morning when, despite the pressure of sermon preparation, I had felt compelled to pray for Paul. The compulsion lay on me for perhaps three quarters of an hour, and then lifted suddenly, as though my prayer had been answered; there was no further need to pray. An hour or so later his father rang me from the London Hospital to tell me Paul had died ... at the very hour I had felt released from the need to pray. God had answered our prayer and given the lad healing and life.
The funeral service was held, in the Welsh way (for they were a Welsh family), not in the church but in the doctor's home. I stood in a corner of their lounge to speak, and I can still see that mother's face, her eyes gazing steadily into mine. She never took her eyes away; and on her face was written naked hunger - for some word from me, so clear, so sure, so true, that she could rest in it, could believe it - absolutely - and be at peace. Not before or since have I seen such a need for truth writ so plain on a human face.
If I had not had Christ's Word to give her, I would have fled. Life's ultimate question filled that room, and waited for my word in answer. You never forget an hour like that; it lives with you for years. Merely to quote answers, even Bible answers, will not do. You have to know. For a minister, the need to know becomes desperate.
Christ has made me to know. The light He shines upon life is a light in which I see.

That light shines from His cross. In that cross I see that life - all life - is grounded down on two immutable realities, righteousness and love: the absolute righteousness and the absolute love of the God Christ Jesus there revealed. Righteousness is the foundation of His throne, and love, redeeming love, is the crown and the breastplate of Him who sits on that throne. And because that is so, because God is Holy Love, life before His face has the blended character of judgment and of mercy. These are intertwined: His judgments and His mercies are the warp and woof of life's fabric. The harsh and the tender, the severe and the kindly, the tragic and the glorious together testify to the rule of such a God as Jesus revealed.

I cannot disentangle these elements of judgment and mercy in any given circumstance, but all circumstances are contained within them. This I see and know. Both the righteousness of God and the love of God are wholly good, altogether to be desired; and because I know that God, in an infinite mystery into which the passion of our Lord is the only window, Himself bears the pain of those judgments to which he must deliver us, bears it on His suffering heart of unconquerable love, I know, in the face of all life's fearful calamity that He is utterly to be trusted.

This I believe and know. And it is in the light that Christ alone has shed on life that I see it to be so. It was promised Ezekiel, "You will be consoled for the evil that I have brought upon the city, and you shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it," saith the Lord God. His judgments are righteous, and all His righteous judgments are borne of a love more vast and more enduring than the starry heavens. His ways are true, though they are higher than my ways.

And His thoughts are true, though they are higher than my thoughts. I trust them. And if in the last day, I am myself accursed, even so, no slur will lie upon either His justice or His mercy. He will have done, in mercy, what is right. Christ has shone a great light into the darkness of life's meaning, even into those narrow streets where no other light ever comes, as did the lights in Jerusalem.

THE DESTINY OF MANKIND

Finally, He has shone a great light upon the destiny of mankind.

Jesus of Nazareth is He who came forth from the very bosom of the Father and "was made man, so as never to be unmade more." The future of mankind is therefore Christ's future.

Our Lord's humanity is a real and permanent thing. Even when you know the story - how He grew to manhood and served His people with healing power and life-changing truth, and was put to death but rose again and ascended into Heaven whence we await His return in glory - even when you know all that, you can still misunderstand it. It can sound as though all He did really was to assume a disguise, like the clothes and make-up an actor wears to play a part, which afterwards he discards to resume his normal daily life.

That is not the sort of thing Jesus did. He did not come "slumming," so to speak, for a brief interval, and then on His return to Heaven throw off our humanity like a smelly old costume thankfully discarded. When He assumed our humanity in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, He did so for good and all. He "was made man, so as never to be unmade more." It was as a man that He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven; it is as a man still that He sits at the Father's right hand; and it is as a man that He will come again. Once He took the step of incarnation in Bethlehem, He was launched upon a course from which He could never, into all eternity, turn back.

Do you understand what it means?

It means that humanity's future, since He has joined it, is assured. In Christ God has joined it to Himself. Since Christ's humanity is indissolubly joined to ours, humanity's future is Christ's future. There is no future for mankind except in Him; but in Him the future is secure, it is glorious, it is gathered into God Himself, and is therefore, by gift of grace, as eternal and splendid as He.

We could spend a long time spelling this out, as the New Testament does spell it out in the themes of resurrection and redemption and eternal life with which all its pages are arustle.

If I may borrow a picture from the letter to the Hebrews, humanity is a vessel tossed about on stormy seas, but Christ, Himself in the vessel with us, has plunged into the sea and fixed a line in the haven of eternal rest beyond the headlands that mark the boundaries of our heaving sea, and the ship He will surely haul in.

CONCLUSION - FOLLOW!

But the last thing I must do is to remind you of what Jesus said next. He said, "I am the light of the world."

He also said, "He who follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life."

In the light that shines from Christ, God, life and the future are illuminated with all the lustre our eyes can stand ... but only for these who follow. The following Him is the essential thing.

And the following Him is not a thing you can play at. It requires our entire abandonment to Him - to be taught, guided, ruled and borne by Him.

Be willing for that, and you will not walk in darkness, you shall have the light of life.