The Eternal Son

Amen.

Well, good morning, Sacred Mission.

Hey, my name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here, and it's my joy and privilege to be able to bring God's word to you.

If you're here for your first time, whether you're just kind of checking us out as a church or you're here to celebrate some baptisms, we got to celebrate two at the 9 a.m.

We get to celebrate two here at the 11 also.

But you have found yourself in the beginning of a two-year-long series where we're going verse by verse through the Gospel of John.

So we take seriously the call to preach the whole counsel of God.

And that demands of us to go verse by verse through the scriptures, through books of the Bible, so that we can understand and know God rightly as he's revealed himself through his word, but most importantly through his son Jesus.

Now, uh the gospels are all kind of bent in different ways, right?

We have Mark, it's more of an action-packed type of gospel.

Matthew really labors on the teachings of Jesus.

Luke, very detailed as a physician, uh, understanding and notating all these different details about the life of Christ.

John, very theological, right?

Very theological.

So John says in his gospel, he says, if I was going to write down everything that Jesus ever did, the entire world could not contain the books that would be filled, right?

And think about the magnitude of the life and ministry of Jesus that one of his closest followers said that if we were to actually curate and write down everything that he ever did, the world would not be able to contain it.

And so John says this.

John says, the things that I kind of curated from the life of Jesus and cataloged in this gospel was for a purpose.

I chose these stories for a reason.

And what we have to understand is John, in this prologue, that's where we're at right now, the introduction of his gospel, which is verses 1 through 18, John is helping to really fashion us around a Christological framework.

Here's what I mean by that.

Christology just simply means the study of the person and work of Jesus.

John wants us to get something right first, and that is who is Jesus?

When we get that right, who is Jesus?

We're going to be able to understand all that he wrote about Jesus following in the rest of the gospel.

And so the purpose that John writes in his own words is found at the end of this gospel account.

In John chapter 20, verse 31, he says this.

John 20:31

He says, But these, meaning these kind of accounts, these stories that I've written about Jesus, these are written so that, here's the purpose, you may believe what?

That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

So here's what John's whole purpose in writing his gospel is that you may believe Jesus is who?

Not a good teacher, not some philosopher, not some prophet, not some loving and kind person that we should model our life after.

That he is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing that, you may have life.

And so here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna really park in these four verses and really unpack some big theological premises.

Because we've got two years to go through this gospel.

And so we're gonna have a theology lesson this morning because in these four gospels, John just unleashes deep, robust theological realities about who Jesus is and what we should believe about him, okay?

So hang in tight.

If you're new with us, this is just what we do, right?

All right.

So uh make sure that you try to follow along.

We said at the beginning of this sermon series, bring a Bible, bring a notebook and pen, because we're gonna sit here and try to unpack everything that the Bible gives for us in this gospel.

So let's dive in.

Verse 14.

We're gonna just park here for the majority of our sermon.

And in verse 14, here's how we would summarize this verse.

The eternal son became man.

The eternal son became man.

So here's what John starts off, verse 14, as he's closing out his introduction, the prologue of the gospel, he says this the word became flesh.

Now, when we started off this sermon series in John 1, we talked about the word, right?

And that Greek word logos is that life itself, not the meaning of life, not the purpose of life.

Life itself was with God and was God.

So we talked about Jesus being that word, the eternal one who was both with God from all eternity, and John makes the bold claim that this word was God.

And here's what he's coming now at the close of his prologue.

He's saying, that word that was with God and was God from eternity now becomes flesh.

So here's something important for us to understand.

He's not using the language become in a matter of came into existence.

Jesus already was.

What he's saying is that what was has now become flesh.

So spirit became flesh.

That's what he's trying to help us understand.

His existence does not start at the virgin birth.

At his conception in the womb of Mary is not the starting point of the existence of Christ.

What that is is what we call the incarnation, meaning this, that God in spirit took on flesh so that he might draw intimately near to his people.

This word flesh is kind of crude in nature.

It is something that is almost uh has this disgust next to it, that that this divine deity who was spirit and eternal and sovereign would take on something as crude as our flesh, but he does it so that he might become near to us in proximity, that he might be our great high priest who suffers like us, who reconciles us to our Father.

The Word became flesh.

John 1 1, if we go back to the beginning of this gospel, we see the eternal nature of God in Christ in the Word.

He says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, uh with God, and the Word was God.

He, the Word, became man.

And this sets up our first theological premise that we're gonna try to unpack and understand this morning.

It's something called the hypostatic union.

The hypostatic union.

Here's what this means, right?

This comes from the Greek word hypostasis, meaning subsistence.

If you think of about this way, uh what they're trying to communicate in this language is that in the one person Christ, uniquely and individually existed two natures, God and man.

So in the one person Christ existed two natures, God and man.

This is what we mean by the hypostatic subsistence, union in one person.

We like to work off of functional definitions here at Sacred Mission to try to understand these bigger premises or concepts.

Here's a functional definition for hypostatic union.

Not super functional, but it's functional enough.

Here we go.

The unipersonality of Christ, whereby in the incarnation, in the coming of Christ through the virgin birth, the Son of God was constituted a complex person with both a human and a divine nature.

Here's what we want you to understand in all this.

When God became man, he did not set aside his deity to take on our mortality.

He did not lay aside his God nature to take on our man nature.

What happened was fully God, he became fully man also.

In the one person Christ, we see two full natures, God and man.

Now at Sacred Mission, we have core values that kind of shape us and really put guardrails around who we're becoming in our pursuit of what we're accomplishing.

We kind of think of it this way, right?

There's a lot of dudes who go to their grave, maybe accomplishing the success, the power, the wealth that they set out to do, but many men go to the grave regretting who they became in the process of that.

We don't want to be that way.

As we pursue what God has called us to do, we want to be very self-aware and understanding of who we're becoming in the process of that endeavor.

And so these core values put these guardrails on the journey that we're on so that when we get to the end, we don't say, who did we become accomplishing this mission that God's called us to?

But we find joy in knowing that we have become all that God has called us to in his word.

And so one of our core values is this it's devotion, word, and doctrine.

Here's what we mean by that: knowing God authoritatively through his word and in honor to the ancient church.

Knowing God authoritatively through his word and in honor to the ancient church.

See, we actually love the historical faith.

We have grown up in a generation or more that actually discards the historical faith.

They say, oh, well, we've got it figured out.

We know better because of where we are on this chronological timeline of history.

C.S.

Lewis, a great author and thinker, he called this chronological snobbery.

The fact that we think we've got it more figured out than people from the past.

If anything, we're getting dumber.

Right?

Like AI, we're done.

We're humanity is over with AI.

It's just, we're just gonna eat and sleep.

That's the only thing we're gonna be able to do.

Uh there's a reality where these men wrestled in deep thought about what it means to say that you believe in God, that you live for him, of uh of what he's communicated through his word and through the person of Jesus.

And so we have an honor to the ancient faith and what it has communicated throughout time that we should actually look to submit to, not throw out.

And so let's engage with one of these ancient historical creeds.

This is called the Creed of Chalcedon.

This was written in A.D.

451.

So this is 451 A.D.

This was written, and this is what this helps us understand.

People were wrestling with this all the way back, just a few hundred years after the life of and uh resurrection and ascension of Christ, right?

They're wrestling with who he was and what it means to believe in him.

And so the Creed of Chalcedon states this about the hypostatic union.

Read these words one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person, in one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one in the same Son and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We can all go home now, right?

You guys got that figured out?

Understand?

Plain as English.

Here's what they're saying.

When the word became flesh, the fullness of his godness was not affected, but in the one person, Christ, who manifested the very image of the Father, both the fullness of God and the fullness of man dwelt.

Now, why is that even important to us?

You might be sitting here thinking, okay, great, cool, but what does that mean for me?

It actually means everything about how we know God and have relationship with him and how we worship him.

Let me just give you two points.

Number one is that this our eternal souls could only ever be satisfied by an infinite God.

Our eternal souls could only be satisfied by an infinite God.

I I once uh was a guest speaker at a class at University of Cincinnati, and I was called to speak on absolute truth and its existence in nature.

And here's what I told this class after they argued with me for several uh minutes is this here's an absolute truth each and every one of you have to wrestle with.

You will die.

That is absolutely true.

If absolute truth exists anywhere, it exists in the very nature and face of death itself.

But there's something in your chest that longs for eternity.

And there's a reason that that's the case.

Because God has made you in his image.

And an eternal God, an infinite God, put an eternal soul within your flesh, and only he can ever satisfy that.

And so for God Himself to be brought near to us in the fullness of his nature satisfies the longing and cry of our souls.

But also, it's so important for him to be fully man because this our only m only our mortal and depraved flesh could be justified by a finite man who would stand condemned in our place.

You see, we can't work hard enough to make God love us, we can't strive and scrape and claw to make God show favor to us and blessing toward us and love for us.

That is something that we will fail in every ounce of endeavor we put forward.

But God became man so that he perfectly, even though perfectly he obeyed the the law of God and was obedient unto his word, he would stand as a man condemned in our place.

You see, Jonathan Edwards is a great preacher of the first or second great awakening.

Uh, which one is it, Rob?

The first, you got me, my local historian.

Thank you, sir.

He says this in a sermon he preached about this one person, God man.

We find an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.

All glory and praise and honor be unto his holy name.

Amen.

So hypostatic union, the word became flesh.

Now we're gonna move on to the fifth word of this verse.

And dwelt among us.

Dwelt among us.

Here, John's doing something really interesting here because he's pointing us back to the Old Testament to interpret and understand the New Testament.

You see, all of the scripture was written so that we might know Christ.

It all points to him.

And so he's using that as a tactic in his very opening of this letter so that we might see in the Old Testament the partialness being fully realized in Christ.

And that word dwelt literally means tabernacled.

If you know anything about Old Testament history, what we see is that as Israel was sojourning through the wilderness as their exodus from Egypt, God commanded them to construct a tabernacle, a temporary residence of his dwelling place.

And what we see is that in pointing to the Old Testament, the temporary residence of God in the wilderness, John's helping us understand and see what's being realized in the permanent residence of God in the flesh, the God man, Jesus Christ.

You see, this theological understanding to Jesus that he became flesh and that he tabernacled among us is imperative to our faith and salvation.

This very same apostle John, who will write other letters that we have in our New Testament canon, will speak to the imperative severity of this understanding, that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

He says this in 2 John verse 7.

He says, For many deceivers have gone out into the world.

Here's what they say those who do not confess what?

The coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.

What does he label these people as?

Deceivers and the Antichrist.

This is when we talk about how important it is to have a theological understanding of who Jesus is and what he's accomplished for us.

Eternity is on the line.

John himself says if you don't confess or if you deny that Christ came in the flesh and dwelt among us, you're an antichrist, a deceiver.

Going back to historical confessions of faith, we see in the Athanasian Creed, probably the most robust creed on the Trinity and the person of Jesus that we have.

It was written sometime between 450 and 600 AD.

It says this about this.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly, the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.

This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.

Now, unless you get tripped up on that Catholic word, let me help us understand what he's saying there.

He's not talking about the Roman Catholic Church, he's talking about the language of Catholic being universal unity.

So, Catholic, before it was ever actually ascribed to the Roman Catholic Church, meant something.

And what it meant was this universal unity of our faith.

And so when you become a believer, you confess to be Christian, there are universal truths that build unity around the church that we must embrace and confess ourselves.

And so the Athanasian Creed is simply stating that the church must submit to and believe in its confession that Jesus the Christ was God in the flesh and he dwelt among us, right?

That's imperative to our salvation.

It has eternal weight to it.

John goes on to say, and we have seen his glory.

John's still staying in this Old Testament theme because the tabernacle that was in the wilderness was actually the residence of the glory of God.

It was the temporary dwelling place of the glory of God.

And so John is saying, This word became flesh.

He dwelt among us, he tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory.

Now, if you grew up like me, right, in uh uh in a Pentecostal setting or a charismatic setting, you might have heard this word Shekinah glory, right?

We always we loved the Shekinah glory.

We didn't know what in the world it meant, had no clue.

Somebody used a big word sometime.

We're like, yes, Lord.

Shekinah.

Uh here's what Shekinah means in its most simplest form: dwelling.

That's what it means.

It literally is a Hebrew for dwelling.

So it's the dwelling glory of God.

And the tabernacle uh uh held that, it was its residence in the wilderness.

If we look at Exodus 4, uh Exodus 40, 34, it says this then the cloud covered the tent or the tabernacle of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

At the tabernacle, this Shekinah dwelling glory of God resided.

Yet the glory that was seen by John, these witnesses, John, his other apostles, followers of Jesus, was distinct from the glory that was in the tabernacle.

Because here's what John says.

John says that the glory that we saw was glory as of the only Son of God.

You see, the glory that John and the others were witnesses of was that as the Son from the Father.

The NASB, the New American Standard Bible, actually translates this differently.

It translates it more historically, as you and I have probably interacted with it throughout our time.

As the only begotten son of God.

The only begotten son of God.

This brings us to our next theological premise, something called eternal generation.

Eternal generation.

What does this refer to?

Eternal generation refers to the son's coming forth from the father's essence.

The son's coming forth from the father's essence.

This concept really takes us to the very heart of what it means for a son to be a son.

Because think about this, even in its most natural state.

The man dictates the sex of the child.

The man generates a daughter or a son.

And so when we're looking at Christ, we have to look at it from an eternal state of this relationship between father and son.

And what John's helping us understand is that the glory that was witnessed about Jesus testified to the reality that the eternal word was the son of the Father.

But it was before even he was conceived in the womb of Mary.

You see, the mother doesn't dictate the gender of the child.

This is why John was very important to not use birth from the Father.

But he says, generated or begotten from the Father.

Here's a functional definition for eternal generation.

From all eternity, the Father communicates the one simple, undivided, divine essence to the Son.

The one simple undivided divine essence to the Son.

A son is one who is generated from his father.

So he was son before he was ever born of a woman.

Therefore, Jesus is the son of God who eternally comes from the Father, never created, but eternally generated.

This is extremely important for us to understand.

Jesus was never created, he is eternal.

And in that eternity, he's eternally generated from the Father as the Son.

Here's what the Council of Nicaea said about this.

In 325 AD, they got together to try to understand and articulate this concept.

They said, We believe and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten, or you could say eternally generated, Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

So John is saying something here.

He's saying, We have seen his glory, but we saw a glory as of the only Son of the Father.

So what about Jesus' glory was distinct that actually pointed to that evidence?

You see, it wasn't just his wisdom, his teaching, his signs, or his miracles, because he actually shared that with other people.

If you look at the Old Testament prophets, they spoke the words of God.

They were as oracles of God.

They performed miracles, they even resurrected people from the dead.

They performed signs and wonders.

And so Jesus' glory was not one shared with another.

What was distinct about Jesus' glory that affirmed him to be the Son of God?

Well, it's nothing more than his death, burial, and resurrection.

It is the death and resurrection of Christ that appoints himself as the very Son of God.

You see, yes, his glory was revealed in his wisdom, in his authoritative teaching, in his signs and wonders, but most importantly, his glory was revealed in his death and resurrection.

John 12, Jesus actually talks about this with his disciples.

He says, and Jesus answered them, the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone.

But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Jesus is trying to communicate the necessity of him going to the cross, being crucified and put to death, because this is how he would be glorified.

He even pointed to this after his resurrection.

In the Gospel of Luke, he records this event where Jesus, having been resurrected from the dead, comes to his disciples, and he's unpacking the whole scriptures, all of the Old Testament to help them understand who he was.

And he says this about Luke 24.

When these dudes still couldn't get it, after they seen him resurrected from the dead, and it wasn't getting through their thick skull, he says this.

Full of grace and truth.

Jesus, the God man, taking on our flesh, dwelling among us, and ultimately dying as our substitute under the wrath of the Father, is the fullness of grace.

The gospel of Jesus is the fullness of grace that you and I could ever even imagine.

I mean, look, if we're honest with ourselves, we might try to convince ourselves that we're good people, that we're kind, that we're honest, that we're generous, that we're nice.

But the reality is that that's not even what the Bible calls us to, to somehow earn God's love and favor upon our life.

The Bible calls us to be holy, not nice, holy, not kind, holy, not generous, holy.

And when we go to bed at night, in the quiet and stillness of the dark, in our own mind and heart, we know we're not that.

We know the places that we failed, whether publicly or privately.

We know the desires that we had that did not line up with holiness.

We know the thoughts and actions and behaviors and choices that we made that do nothing else but classify us as falling short.

But grace.

Grace is this the word became flesh and dwelt among you.

And the beauty of the gospel is that that word, Jesus, lived the life that you and I could never have lived.

We could never accomplish the life that Jesus lived.

But then he, Jesus, died the death you and I should have died.

As a criminal, as a rebel against our Maker, as committing treason against a holy king.

And in that condemned state that he stood in our place, you and I get to receive grace.

The fullness of grace is in Jesus.

Jesus, the God man, displaying his glory through his wisdom, teachings, miracles, and ultimately in his death and resurrection is the fullness of truth.

You see, I believe that the genuine authentic pursuit of truth will always lead us to Jesus.

If we come humble, if we come uh authentically into the pursuit of truth, we will always find Jesus.

Our problem is, you and I, is that we don't actually approach the pursuit of truth in this humble state.

Most of us, if we're honest with ourselves, we pursue truth with presuppositions.

And here's what we're really doing: we're not really looking for truth.

We're looking for partial truths and falsehoods that would affirm the presupposition that we have coming with us so that we can be emboldened in our prideful state.

That's what we're honestly doing.

But if we were able to abandon those presuppositions, if we were to humbly come before the maker of our universe in a genuine and authentic pursuit of truth, we would find Christ.

Because he is truth, he alone is full of grace and truth.

And the Apostle John's laboring us to comprehend this fullness that's found in him, that he alone is the eternal son who became man.

Verse 15 the eternal son was testified about.

The eternal son was testified about.

So here there's this caveat that comes into verses 14 through 18 at the end of John's prologue.

And it seems a little out of place if we're honest with ourselves.

John's going up on this theological uh uh uh like pathway of who Jesus is and what we should believe about him, and all of a sudden he's like, hey, yeah, by the way, there's this dude named John the Baptist.

Uh here's kind of what I think is happening here.

I think that what we're gonna see in verse 19 next week is the introduction to John the Baptist's ministry, where he's actually making the way uh for Christ to come and reveal his glory uh to his people, right?

And so John is one that testifies about Christ.

And so, because we're gonna jump into that in verse 19, and Pa and uh John is also here trying to help us understand and communicating who Jesus is, I believe what John's establishing for us is a biblical principle that out of the mouth of two or three witnesses must a word be affirmed.

So here's the beauty of what you and I believe.

If you're a Christian in this room, the beauty of what we believe is that we don't believe in some private revelation that was given to an individual that we now have to come out and submit our lives to.

You know, whether we're talking about Muhammad in the Middle East or we're talking about John Smith in upstate New York, these are every other world religion is private in its very essence and nature, meaning this some dude said that he had a dream, a vision, or whatever about who God is and what he's like and how we should live our lives in response to that, and they come out of the darkness of their privacy and expect us to submit our lives to it.

But the gospel is radically and entirely different because it's the only revelation of God that is public in its very nature.

Paul even states about this he says in 1 Corinthians about the resurrected Messiah, there's about 500 other dudes who you can go and ask, did he raise from the dead?

Yes, he did.

We can publicly testify to that nature.

Every time that God reveals himself to his people, it is this public reality of communicating his very essence and nature and personhood to us, his image bearers.

And John's just saying, hey, there's another testimony I'm about to set you up with.

So that's verse 15, a little caveat, we'll move on.

Verse 16.

The eternal son gives grace and truth.

I told you we're gonna dig in deep to this word, all right?

So we're we're getting there.

Verse 16 the eternal son gives grace and truth.

He says this, for from his being Jesus, his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.

Uh, the fullness of Christ benefits mankind.

We receive something from him, right?

So, what are we receiving from him?

What benefits us is the fullness of his grace and truth.

The fullness of Jesus communicates the radical grace of God to forgive and reconcile sinners, but it also communicates the preeminent authority of his truth that we must submit to.

And the fullness has benefited us through the outcome of what John calls grace upon grace.

Grace upon grace.

If we were to literally translate that out, it's grace that replaces grace.

Grace that replaces grace.

So John's gonna use a comparative conjunction to help us understand what he's talking about.

So he's gonna throw out this word, grace upon grace.

We have all received, right?

Grace and truth from Christ, grace upon grace, and then he's gonna say, for.

All right, this is gonna help us understand what he is talking about when he says a grace that replaces grace.

For the law, so he's talking about the law, came through Moses, but what comes through Jesus Christ.

Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

The law was a means of grace.

We have to wrestle with that.

We have to be honest about that.

Some of us want to throw away the Old Testament, some of us want to throw away the law of God.

That was a means of grace for us as his people.

Here's how we understand that.

Does God owe you anything?

We do this.

We go, we go.

Nope, he doesn't, right?

God doesn't owe you anything.

Anytime God chooses to reveal himself to us, that's grace.

That's grace.

He doesn't owe us anything but to crush us.

But in his grace, he's not a God who conceals himself in darkness, he's a God that reveals himself in light.

And so God has given us grace in the law.

Because the law does two things.

The law does two things.

Number one, it communicates to us as his image bearers what it would look like for us to flourish in our humanity.

You want to live the life that you always have imagined and dreamed of?

Submit to God's law.

Because as his image bearers, he's communicated to us.

If you want to know what ultimate flourishing looks like for you and your life, I have prescribed it to you in my law.

But what do we see the law as?

We see the law as oppressive, as something that binds us and holds us down.

That's a completely depraved and sinful view of the law of God.

The law of God was given to us so that we might thrive, that we might flourish, that we might have our best life now, as some heretics say.

The other thing that the Bible does, or the law of God does, is that it actually communicates who God is to us.

So not only does it communicate the way that we could flourish in our life, but it communicates who he is.

Because he's communicating to us his very person and nature through his law.

You want to know what God is like?

Look at his law.

God is holy, there is no other God but him.

God is a God that deserves all the glory.

We shall not have idols in our life.

God is a God who gives, we shall not steal.

This is who God is.

Throughout his law, he's actually communicating who he is to us.

But the reality of the law was that it was partial and insufficient.

This was always the plan of God, not to fully reveal himself in his law, but to fully reveal himself in his son.

Because Jesus is the fullness of what was once partial, allowing us to receive saving grace and authoritative truth.

Verse 18, he goes on to say, No one has seen the God, the only God who is at the Father's side.

Now, if we were going to read this verse 18 quickly, we might get our words kind of uh jumbled up, right?

So if you kind of read it quickly, it sounds like no one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father's side, right?

We we have to take a breath because John is helping us understand something.

Uh, the the Father and the Son in their oneness.

Okay?

Here's what he's trying to help us understand.

No one has ever seen God.

Selah, the only God.

Now he's referring to Jesus Christ, who is at the Father's side, who has been ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father.

He, Jesus, has made him, the Father, known.

You see, in his essential being, God has never been seen by people.

Now, if we go back through the Old Testament, there are people who had visions and experiences and encounters with God, but they were always partial.

If we look at Moses himself on Mount Sinai, what took place?

God said, I'll reveal myself to you, Moses, but let me help you understand something.

If I fully revealed myself to you, you would die.

And so I'm gonna hide you in the cleft of the mountain.

And as I pass by, I'll let you see the backside of my glory.

I'll let you see part of who I am.

And that experience, that encounter with God, changed the very physical nature of Moses.

As he came down with the law of God in his hands from Mount Sinai, his face shone like the sun.

Imagine coming face to face with the holiness and fullness of glory of your Maker.

Let me share something with you.

You cannot come out the other side of that alive.

And Christ fully makes that known.

Because Christ Himself, as man, encountered the very face of his Father, and he came out on the other side dead for you and for me.

But he rose in glorious life that we might know and see him clearly.

And so no one has ever seen God, but these theophanies, these personal encounters with the deity that we see in the Old Testament did not and could not reveal God's essential being.

But Christ, the only God, has fully revealed what had only partially been seen.

Christ has fully revealed what could only partially be seen.

A glory cloaked in flesh.

John Calvin, very famous reformer and uh theologian from the late 1500s, early 1600s, says this about seeing God in Christ.

When he says that none has seen God, it is not to be understood of the outward seeing of the physical eye.

He means generally that since God dwells in inaccessible light, he cannot be known except in Christ, his lively image.

So, what does John want us to walk away from in this prologue, in this introduction of his gospel?

I believe here's his conclusion Jesus, the eternal son, gives grace and truth to know the Father.

This is what John's working toward.

This is what his whole aim and endeavor is for, to help us realize Jesus, the eternal son, gives grace and truth that you and I might know the Father.

All of this, the person and work of Jesus finds its accomplished aim in the glory of God and the salvation of his people.

To be reconciled with the Father, brought into his household as children of his own possession.

John 1 12, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

This is the purpose and plan of the coming light and life known only in Jesus.

And I pray that this helps us understand something that if you've been in the church for a while, you've probably heard this quoted or said, but not really understand it fully.

I hope this brings a new level of understanding to us this morning.

John 14, 6 through 7, Jesus is revealing again who he is to his followers.

He says this Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.

From now on, you do know him and have seen him.

You see, to gaze upon the glory and beauty of Christ is to gaze upon the glory and beauty of the Father.

The Word, the Son, became so that we might know rightly our Father.

And church, my prayer for us this morning is that our souls would be filled with the fullness of grace and truth that is only found in Jesus.

Amen.

Let's pray.