"The light of the world..."

Reading John 1:4-9
"The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world." (v9)

My life is a juxtaposition of darkness and light, each element unexplainable in its own way. How can I account for the presence of either? The presence of goodness is as problematic as the presence of evil. What makes it even more confusing is the presence of both in one person's life. The world I know, the people I know, is a whirl of both strains that makes for warfare, conflict, and confrontation both between people and within the individual. At the end of history, my personal history or the history of the world, which will win out, the darkness or the light?

John answers the question like this: "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." This is the reading of the NIV but John made his statement in a deliberately ambiguous way (something John was fond of doing). His statement can mean both (and he probably intended both) that the darkness has not understood the light and that the darkness has not overcome the light. The light of Jesus is not a logic that can be comprehended by evil. In a world of tremendous evil there is no explaining the goodness of God. God's goodness presses in to the evil and gets into close proximity with it, it loves the unlovely, it sacrifices itself for the salvation of the enemy, it could call down lightning but refuses to, it could crush in an instant but waits patiently for repentance. The light can not be understood by the darkness, its presuppositions are totally foreign to evil.

John also says that the light cannot be overcome by the darkness. In Jesus it will be shown that goodness is more powerful than evil. Goodness is connected to life (another of John's favorite themes) but evil is connected to death and destruction. The light of Jesus will overcome the darkness in us. Our strategy in the war against evil is to have more of Jesus, more of the light of the world.