2 CORINTHIANS 4:6

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

TO PONDER

As some of you know, I have an engineering background. I need to be able to see and touch what I am working on. However, when it comes to abstract thinking, I really struggle. So, when it comes to theological subjects, I need to relate the abstract to experiences in my life. When I think of love, I have to relate it to my own experiences of being loved and of expressing love to others. In a similar way, we understand the love of God for us through the things Jesus did as much as through the things he said. All through the Bible, we see God in action, as well as providing direction for our lives. Jesus provided much of His teaching through parables which related directly to the experiences of Jesus’s hearers.

One possible unintended consequence of needing to understand God in terms of things we already know is that we cut God down to size so that we can comprehend him. We tend to limit what we expect God can do to what humans are able to do, or what we see happen in nature. And when it comes to Jesus, it is tempting to limit our thinking of him to being just an itinerant prophet, ex‑carpenter, trudging the roads of Palestine, providing good advice on how to live good moral lives.

Our text reminds us that God’s glory was seen in Jesus. God’s love for us was fully expressed in Jesus; God’s compassion and mercy for us was fully lived out in Jesus; God’s plans for us were fully explained by Jesus and achieved in Jesus. If we are going to follow this Jesus and surrender our lives to Him, we need to be sure we following the real thing. We are helped in this by comprehending the glory of this God revealed through Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, right at the beginning, we have John declaring: “In the beginning was the Word (meaning Jesus), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The God we believe in is the God who created the universe containing billions of billions of stars, and life on earth in all its complexity. Our minds cannot comprehend the enormity of what God has done. And this God is the one who wants to bring blessings into our lives, and he has done this through the revelation (light) brought to us through His son Jesus.

Both Paul and the apostle John had been given visions of Jesus in heavenly glory, and this greatly expanded their understanding of who Jesus was, what he had done, and what He was still doing. They saw that God has a detailed plan for this planet and the people living in, and he is working out his plan through the lives of people. And He is not limited in what He can do.

So, what Paul is saying in this passage is that the God who created time and space and light has the knowledge, power and wisdom to work in our lives for us to understand (be enlightened about) reality from God’s point of view, instead of our earth‑bound view.

PRAYER: Heavenly Father, we come to you for you to enlighten us as to who you are in all your glory. Please help us to grow in seeing the light of understanding you are shining on us. Amen

Today's devotion written by Charles Bertelsmeier, LifeWay Epping