John 1:9-10

⁹The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world [or This was the true light that gives light to every man who comes into the world]. ¹⁰He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him.

V9-10 – The true Light enlightened the world, but the world did not recognize Him. Jesus, as the true Light, gives light to the world. “True” here means eternal or heavenly as opposed to temporal or earthly. Back to the Arians again, they say that Genesis 1 points to God’s begetting of Jesus as the Light when He said, “Let there be Light.” The sun and moon came on day 4, so the light of the world – here said to be Jesus Christ – was the light created by God as the first day of creation unfolded. And Jesus is the light that gives light to the sun and other luminous creations. How do we refute that claim?

C.S. Lewis again offers an analogy: “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge – the last thing we know before things become too swift for us… I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Some (i.e., Augustine) have argued that “the light that gives light to every man” is actually only given to the elect. Calvin disagrees saying, “Men have this peculiar excellence which raises them above other animals, that they are endued with reason and intelligence, and that they carry the distinction between right and wrong engraved on their conscience. There is no man, therefore, whom some perception of the eternal light does not reach.” John Piper’s assessment of this passage is perhaps the best: “The enlightenment of every man is probably not universal reason or intellect or the common grace of knowledge (as Calvin said) because: (1) the next verse shows people unknowing and blind to the light (Augustine’s reason for his claim); (2) light in this Gospel comes as judgment into the world and causes people either to approach or reject; (3) the meaning of photizo (1 Corinthians 4:5; 2 Timothy 1:10) means ‘shed light on so as to bring out the true quality of.’ This is probably the meaning here.”

Therefore, when we read that the true light gives light to every man, we ought to understand this to mean that Jesus reveals the condition of every man and the condition of the world, that is, a state of corruption, total depravity. Again, this foreshadows John 3:19-21, where we learn the reason for the world’s failure to recognize the Light. By choice, due to the sin nature of darkness, the Light is undesirable. Isaiah 53:2 “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.” Calvin says that “no proper excuse can be found for the ignorance of the world in not knowing Christ,” even for those in the world before the Incarnation, as His rays of light give light to the world.