Welcome to Life and Books and Everything.

I'm Kevin DeYoung, and today I'm reading the short article, a devotional article I wrote for Decision Magazine, put out by the good folks at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

And this is a Christmas piece entitled The Darkness Does Not Win.

The title of this article, The Darkness Does Not Win, is hard to believe, isn't it?

Doesn't it seem like every week we hear about wars and rumors of wars, about terrorism or mass

shootings, about Christian persecution or cultural degradation. We can look back on this past year

and think of loved ones who've died or friends who've been diagnosed with cancer and others who are

gripped by addiction or saddled with chronic pain or mired in a depression that will not lift.

In our own lives, there are too many tears,

too many unknowns, too many closed doors. It's not hard to be discouraged, maybe even to despair.

And yet, the spoiler is true. The darkness does not win. In the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.

In Him was life.

The life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness and the the darkness has not overcome it. John 1 through 5. The symbolism of light in John's gospel has

many layers. Light can refer to Christ, as in John 812, I'm the Light of the World, or to obeying the will of God, as in

John 320, everyone who does wicked things hates the light, or to eternal life and the

abundant life that can be found only in Christ, which is what verse 4 means by saying in him was

life, and the life was the light of men. I think John is being deliberately

ambiguous in verse 5. What he is saying is that the entire light side is victorious over the entire dark side.

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