In the beginning God spoke. Remember, He SAID “Let there be light” and there was light. Each time He spoke something, the thing said created whatever was said. It was the raw power of God. We saw that power, that WORD, with our own eyes. We heard it with our own ears. We touched it with our own hands. We were captivated by it. The one we followed was the word spoken by God. He was the Eternal Life that was with the Father. He became flesh and stood right in front of us - and this word is what we proclaimed. There was nothing special about us, but whoever believed our message was joined together with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Writing these things down fulfills us.

You make simplicity so complicated, but the message we got from Him was clear: God is light, there are no dark places in Him. Consider the fact that anyone who comes to the light is in the light; those who don't, remain in darkness. Plain and simple. If I have been joined with Christ, then wherever I walk I am in the light. The reason you think it's not that simple is because you judge with your eyes. Somehow, you equate the word of man with the word of God. But the stuff that comes out of men is nothing more than vain boasting, while the word that came out of God is powerful and accomplishes what He was sent to do.

Now, if I find myself surrounded by those who claim to be in the light but really aren't, I'll live in a continual state of confusion as I adopt their outlook on the new life. Such was the case with those I wrote the letter to - and it is pretty much the same with most of you. Blind men are demanding that you follow them. They structure their words to deceive you into thinking they have something they don't. And they are encouraged that you have been intimidated into following after their empty facades.

Listen. A blind man might possibly claim to see, but a man who could see would not be fooled even if the words were convincing. Now, if we, the ones sent by Jesus, told you we were joined together with God, but we still walked in the darkness, we would be liars. How could there have been any truth to our claim and why would you fall for it? For if God and us were joined together, the darkness in us would also have been in HIM. But if God had done something to take the darkness out of us and bring us into the light THEN we really were sharers of His life - and we really had this union of the Father and the Son to offer. The WORD OF MAN means nothing; but the reality of being in the WORD OF GOD means that the evil deeds of darkness were removed from us who were in the light. This is what was done by Jesus, the son of God - the WORD MADE FLESH - by shedding his blood.

What if we had claimed to have no evil deeds of darkness? We would have been fooling ourselves; and the truth would not have been in us. We, instead, had come to see that our whole existence had been in the darkness and that there had been absolutely NO LIGHT in us. It is this ability to call things as they are that revealed who we were - just as the blind man who was given sight was able to confess “Once I was blind, but now I can see. “

GOD is the faithful and righteous one, NOT US. We had been blind until He gave us sight. And we, who couldn't help but to verbalize our former blindness, were the ones who had been forgiven from all sin. We were the ones who were being kept untouched by that which is not of God. If we were denying these deeds of darkness (which is all that those in darkness CAN do) we would have been making the God we represented out to be a liar. For this was the reality of our condition before He took us out of it. If we hadn't been in agreement with this assessment, His word would not have been in us.