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Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be blind? To just see total blackness all the time? To not be able to see the beauty around you in the world God has created? To not be able to see the faces of your loved ones? To not know how to navigate well because you can’t see the obstacles in your path?
Being lost in total darkness is exactly how we would all be spiritually without the light of Jesus Christ in our lives. We would be trapped in our sin, with no way out. We would have no hope of anything other than the horror of eternal separation from God.
But Jesus came to bring light to the world. In John 8:12, he makes the claim,
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Let’s take a deeper look at this statement.
1. What is the story surrounding Jesus’ I AM statement?
The story surrounding Jesus’ I AM statement in John 8 takes place in John 7-9. At the beginning of John 7, we learn that it is time for the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles, which takes place in Jerusalem every year. It is one of the big three religious festivals that the Jews celebrate (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles). Jesus decides not to go to the festival with his brothers, but goes later secretly.
About halfway through the festival, Jesus goes up into the temple courts and begins to teach. The people are amazed at his teaching. When the people begin to question him about how he became such a knowledgeable teacher, Jesus says that his teaching is from God. Through all of this is the undercurrent that people are trying to kill Jesus. Jesus knows it, the crowds know it (eventually), but Jesus is able to slip away because his time to die had not yet come.
The day after the festival is over, Jesus makes this statement, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Now, the Pharisees, one sect of religious leaders, question the validity of Jesus’ testimony, and Jesus states that his testimony is valid because God the Father is his witness that his testimony is true. Once again, the religious leaders failed to seize him even though they were angry at his claims.
It is within the context of this conversation that the people begin to dispute who Jesus is and what authority he has to teach and to claim to be from God, and where Jesus makes his statement, “Before Abraham was born, I AM!” (John 8:58) that we talked about in Lesson 1 of this series.
After this, Jesus healed a man born blind, using this as an object lesson to connect the man’s physical blindness with our spiritual blindness. Jesus is the light that comes to bring us out of our blindness.
2. What would this statement have meant to the original audience?
The Festival of Tabernacles (also called Sukkoth or Sukkot today) is first mentioned in Leviticus 23:33-42. It lasts for 8 days:
Day 1 is a sacred assembly, a special Sabbath.
For 7 days, the Israelites were supposed to offer food offerings to the Lord.
Then on the 8th day, they were to again present food offerings and have a sacred assembly, another special Sabbath. The food offerings included burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings, and sacrifices.
This festival took place along with the agricultural harvest and was intended to help the Israelites remember God’s provision for them in the wilderness. In addition, the people were to live in temporary shelters for 7 days—tabernacles, if you will—to remind themselves of the temporary shelters they lived in when God brought them out of Egypt.
By Jesus’ day, the Jews had expanded this festival to include traditions involving light and water. We’ll focus on the light traditions here, and I’ll discuss the water traditions in a special bonus lesson after this lesson.
The light ceremony took place in the Court of Women at the temple, with four large oil lamps illuminating the courtyard. Some sources say that each lamp had four branches, for a total of 16 light sources. These lamps stood 75 feet high and were lit at the end of the first day of the festival. Due to their height and size, and the location of the temple on the top of a hill, the light from these lamps could be seen throughout the entire city at night.
The lights from the temple had several different symbolic meanings.
The lights were a reminder of the pillar of fire that led the Israelites in the wilderness at night, which was a symbol of God guiding them and giving them light (Exodus 13:21). Interestingly, the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire first appeared to the Israelites before they had even crossed the Red Sea when fleeing the Egyptians. One of the places they camped was called Sukkoth (Exodus 13:20), and it was after leaving Sukkoth that the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire first appeared.
The lights were a reminder of the Shekinah Glory, the visible presence of God filling the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11). God’s glory that filled the temple was considered the light of all lights.
The lights reminded the people of God’s promise in Isaiah 9:2 to send a Great Light: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”
At the end of the eighth day, these lights were extinguished. It was in this context that Jesus made his statement “I AM the light of the world.” It was a declaration that he was the Light that would never be extinguished.
Next Week
Now that we have some background into what “light” would have symbolized to the Jewish people, next week we will look more closely at what Jesus meant when he said that “I AM the light of the world.” Subscribe so you don’t miss out!
Sources:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/feast-of-tabernacles/
https://jewsforjesus.org/learn/jesus-and-sukkot-feast-of-booths
https://www.icej.org/understand-israel/biblical-teachings/why-we-celebrate-the-feast-of-tabernacles/
https://israelmyglory.org/article/the-feast-of-tabernacles-in-the-days-of-jesus/
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