The Gospel of John doesn’t locate the beginning of the Christian story in John the Baptist, Abraham or even at Creation but in God. Kuyper says, “If we confess with Augustine, ‘My heart remains restless in me till it finds rest in God,’ then we understand how perfectly glorious and perfectly blessed that divine life within God himself must have been from all eternity, that holy interaction of God with God in the triunity of the persons.”
It is from this eternal harmonious unity of relationship that Jesus, ‘the Word’ who is the bearer of the thoughts of God creates and sustains all creation. The Eternal Word is everywhere, but He shines into an unwilling world. Ironically, “Man neither derives his light from elsewhere, nor from himself, nor did he create it. He lives by the eternal Word.” And it is this light which is both the source of human life and of its flourishing. “Light in the intellect, light in the choosing activity of his will, light in his social existence, light in his moral existence, light in his art and scholarship, light in the eye of the soul with which he sees God.”
With reference to John 1:15, Kuyper says that after the Fall, “the Word… shone into the darkness in such a way that the darkening could not progress further. So that a twilight remained in the midst of darkness. And that twilight in the midst of the darkness, those rays of light shining through the mists into the darkness—that is common grace.” This ‘pitying grace’ is the substance of the light which the darkness cannot overcome.