Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                 Chapter One

                                                                                                                                    Verses 9-10

John 1:9 has a double meaning. It means that God has put the light of His created image into every living human, but it also means that Christ will provide an opportunity for all living humans to become saved by His grace. The Holy Spirit certainly has the power to preach the gospel of salvation by grace to every human who ever lived, and in fact He does. Colossians 1:27. Christ did command His believers saved by grace to be a witness for Him and preach His gospel to the lost. But that command happens to be only one of the methods that the Holy Spirit uses to get the gospel to the world. Christ commanded His followers to preach His gospel so that those who obey Him will receive great rewards in Heaven. I Timothy 5:18. Christ also desired that His followers form local churches composed of believers who confess Him and get baptized in water so that those members of those churches can grow in grace as they worship God and hear the Word of God preached, and as they regularly read His Word and pray. Matthew 28:18-20. All living humans who have never heard the gospel, Christ may give them an opportunity to repent and believe in Him immediately after their physical deaths. Most of them will refuse to believe in Christ even then because the atheists will think they are just having an hallucination, and the others will still cling to their false religions. Hebrews 9:27 means a judgment by Christ, not an immediate condemnation.

In verse 10, the phrase "and the world knew Him not" means that the evil, spiritual deaths that the Devil has injected into all living humans has blinded most of them to the fact that God created them and loves them. Romans 1:18-23; Matthew 13:39. Only a small minority will ever become saved by grace because only they will be capable of rejecting the lies of the Devil and hearing and believing the gospel of Christ. Matthew 7:13-14; Matthew 16:13-16.

Lucifer's rebellion against God caused doubt about the Almighty Power of God's Love to enter into His creations. Genesis 4:1-5; John 20:24-25. God decided to make a plan to prove that His Love can never fail to save all of His creations that He loves by His creation of a human race in His image with free will that He would allow to be put in danger of eternal separation from His Love and that would suffer terribly from sin and evil. Yet, because God Himself in His Love would suffer that eternal death for all of them, then God would be able to prove that His Love is Almighty and can never fail by devising a plan that will cause every one of them to return to faith in Him of their own free will. Their terrible suffering caused by sin and evil will never cause them to lose the faith that God put into them when He created them in His image. Hebrews 2:9-15; I Corinthians 13:8; Revelation 5:11-14. As God made His plan, He noticed that some living humans were capable of believing in His loving sacrifice for them while they were still alive in the flesh. God provided His blood and water that He shed on the cross to cleanse and save these believers by His grace and give them the righteousness of Christ Himself so that He could accept them into a home in Heaven with Him forever. Revelation 1:5; II Corinthians 5:21; I Peter 1:2-5. All living humans who become saved by grace actually chose their salvation in God's plan before He ever created the world. I Corinthians 2:7; Acts 15:18; II Timothy 1:9; Hebrews 4:3.