Before there was a sun, there was light. This is one of the subtle yet astonishing details hiding in the opening lines of Genesis. It's a detail we read past so quickly, yet one that carries the weight of the entire biblical story inside it. God speaks. Light comes. And the sun? It doesn't arrive until the fourth day.
So what, exactly, was that first light?
If we sit with the question long enough, we begin to sense that this light was not a cosmic accident, not mere photons thrown out into a formless void. This was something else. Something older than creation itself. This was a primordial light, a light that preceded all things — or akhon, the original light — too holy for fallen eyes, hidden away for the righteous in the age to come.
"In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." — John 1:4–5
John begins his Gospel the same way Moses begins his Genesis account. In the beginning. It is not an accident. John wants us to feel the echo. And into that echo he places a person. The Word, who was with God and who was God, and in him was light.
The writer of Hebrews gives us one of the most luminous sentences in all of Scripture: Jesus is "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature." Not a reflection of God's light... the exact radiance. The shining itself. The way the sun and its light cannot be separated, so the Father and the Son cannot be parted. To see Jesus is to see what God's glory looks like when it puts on skin and walks down a dusty road in Galilee.
Which means that the light spoken into being at the dawn of creation was not some anonymous energy. It was the presence of God, the same presence that would one day be called Jesus. The same voice that said Let there be light would one day say I am the light of the world. The same light.
He did not come to bring us a new light. He came to be what he had always been, and to bring us into it.
We were made for this light. We did not begin in darkness. Adam and Eve walked in the garden in the cool of the day, under the light of a God who was near. Darkness came later... with silence, with distance, with the shadow of a wrong turn made in a garden long ago.
But the light was not extinguished. It came down. It entered the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The darkness could not swallow it. It never could. Light always wins, even when it flickers in a stable in Bethlehem, even when it is wrapped in linen and laid in a tomb.
Paul writes to the Ephesians: Walk as children of light. This is an announcement of identity. You are not guests in the light. You are not visitors trying to borrow some illumination to find your way home. You are, by grace, children of the light, born again into the same radiance that God breathed before the first sunrise.
We are now creatures of Light.
The story of Scripture is, in one sense, the story of a light that cannot be put out. It shines in the first verses of Genesis. It shines in the tabernacle and the temple. It shines on a hillside in Galilee, on a transfiguration mountain where a handful of disciples briefly see it in its full, unveiled glory. It shines from an empty tomb. And Revelation promises a city with no need for sun or lamp — because the Lamb himself is its light.
That light has always existed. It has always been Jesus. And now, by grace, it is the light in which we live and breathe and have our being... not because we earned it, but because the light chose, in love, to enter our darkness and conquer the night.