John 1:1-18 – The Gospel of John

So, John chapter one.

Let me begin by asking a question of you.

It might be a little bit of a personal question, but I'll not get you to answer it out loud.

It's just something for you to reflect on.

And it's this how deep do you think your Christian faith goes?

How deep is your Christian faith?

Maybe it's a bit of a puddle.

It's something that you kind of paddle in from time to time.

Maybe you feel like it's evaporating kind of before your eyes.

You feel like it's getting less and less.

Maybe it's something that you just kind of play in the edges of.

Or perhaps your Christian faith is not a puddle, it's an ocean that fills your whole life, it fills your value system, you're immersed in it, and so it shapes how you how you work and how you love, uh, it shapes your uh your relationships, your marriage, how you parent your your children.

Maybe you're here this morning and you're not a Christian at all, and so answering that question seems a bit bizarre.

So I'll flip it round.

We're really glad that you're here if you're not a believer in Jesus, because we want to explore all of these things together.

But my question to you is what's your perception of Christians?

Do they take their faith seriously, those people who are around you who have maybe invited you to church or you might have been aware of previously?

Is your perception that they just kind of paddle around the edges that they kind of say one thing to another?

Or do you see it as something that it influences and shapes everything in their life?

Do we come across a bit shallow in our faith?

The central question of Christianity, which we will explore in a sense this morning, is who is Jesus?

Who is he?

And of course, people give many different answers to that, but as Christians, we can be a little a little bit puddle-like, a little bit shallow and playing around the edges, kind of like good boys and good girls at Sunday school, of course, you'll say, Well, Jesus is God.

But really, what does that what does that mean?

Because on the face of it, if you kind of step back, and certainly if you're not a Christian, you might think that that's quite absurd to say that Jesus is God.

That the man, Jesus, who lived and who died, who got hungry and tired and thirsty, and and who was executed uh by the Romans in the first century, was in fact God-made flesh.

It sounds kind of strange, doesn't it?

You see, John, in his what we call the prologue, that's these first 18 verses, would have us not paddle around the edges.

He wants us to go swimming this morning, to really get wet in the theology and the depth of what he's bringing to us here.

And that's why he uses this strange term to describe Jesus by calling him the word.

It's strange because it doesn't come up anywhere else.

It doesn't come up anywhere else in his gospel.

Jesus is called lots of other things.

He's called the King of Israel, he's called the Son of Man, which is an Old Testament name.

We don't need to worry about that too much right now.

But why does he call him the Word?

Well, in a sense, John, in starting his gospel, is almost looking for a term that kind of encompasses and encapsulates all of those other names of Jesus.

What the word means, and we looked at this more last week, in summary, is that he's saying that Jesus is ultimate reality.

That ultimate reality is not a it's not a force, it's a person.

And you might feel uh your your ankles and your calves getting a little bit wet mentally speaking, saying, oh, okay, ultimate reality, what does that even mean?

Well, we're going to explore it.

But even as we do remember something, when we say that this is John's prologue, the prologue is kind of like the overture to like the Harry Potter movies or the Lord of the Rings movies, or if you're a little bit more cultured, an opera or a place of classical music.

And what an overture does is it sets up some of the musical themes that you'll hear throughout the film or throughout the opera.

John's doing that, he's setting up some themes, which means is if you come away this morning kind of feeling a little bit overwhelmed, kind of feeling like you've uh drank a little bit from a fire hose, that's okay because John's going to develop the themes over the course of weeks.

It's an overture.

He's setting up some themes that he will develop.

But for our own time this morning, we're going to look at five things about the word that he tells us about the word who we know as the man Jesus Christ.

Five things.

The first is the word creates.

The word creates.

We explored this uh in more depth, and so I'll keep it brief in more depth last week because we were kind of introducing this series, looking just at the first five verses, uh, but just by way of refresher, or if you're new, what we're told in these first couple of verses is that the word was there in the beginning.

That whatever your conception is about the origins of things, how the world came to be, whenever you go back to that origin point, Jesus is there.

That's what John is saying.

The word is the originator, the uncreated creator, the first, the unmoved mover.

Moreover, that he was with God, God's own fellow in fellowship with God, and a distinct person from God the Father, that he was God, sharing in that divine nature.

The word is God's agent in creation.

And you can think a little bit perhaps about Genesis 1.

Genesis 1 talks about God creating the heavens and the earth, and then in verse 3 it says, And God said.

So God speaks a word, and creation comes into existence.

And John is saying that Jesus was that word, he was that creative agent that brought light out of darkness.

That's confirmed and is picked up in other parts of the New Testament, Colossians chapter 1, Hebrews chapter 1.

Colossians 1 · chapter mention Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

We'll not go into too much detail about it there, but Hebrews chapter 1 is a particularly helpful one for our study because how does it begin?

Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

It begins, in many times and in various ways, God spoke to our forefathers by the prophets, but now in these last days, he has spoken to us.

See the spoken word theme, spoken to us by his son, who he has appointed heir of all things, and through whom he created the universe.

Many in the West, and this is where this kind of caches out for us, because the predominant worldview is that we tend to think, people around us, maybe you here this morning, tend to think that inanimate, unconscious matter gave rise to life and to consciousness.

That that tends to be what the kind of materialist worldview teaches us.

That's the kind of water that we swim in.

But the Christian worldview is the other way around.

It's that life and consciousness and rationality gives birth, gives, generates, creates life and all matter.

That is the Christian worldview.

So first point, see how quickly we're going.

The word creates.

Secondly, the word, excuse me, the word gives light and life.

Looking down here at uh verse four, in him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The word overcome here, and we'll pick this up in a second, it's better understood in terms of mastered.

You can master, you could master uh mathematics or French because you become proficient in it, or you could master a pet and your exercise authority over it.

It's better understood in that way, and I'll explain why that's important in just a moment.

There are some books, and maybe you you can think about this.

There are some books or movies or television programs that you'd very happily watch and re-watch or read and reread.

Uh, I've just started a re-watch of The West Wing because it's the best TV program that was ever made.

I don't know if you know that.

Um, if you're taking notes, you can write that down.

That's uh it's an application for later.

Um and one of the things of watching something like that, or you get that in you know perhaps Lord of the Rings or a movie that you particularly like, is you begin to see different things in the rewatch.

Or if you find a really good novel that you like, you read it, and then you immediately go back to the beginning.

And because you know how the plot develops, you're already thinking, oh, it was set up there.

When John talks about light and life, he's doing that.

He's self-consciously anticipating that you'll read through his whole gospel and then you'll start again with new eyes, as it were, and read light and life again, and it will take on new meaning for you.

Because in the immediate context, if you're just reading this straight, these first five verses, they this idea of light and life harkens back to creation.

God said, Let there be light, and there was light, and it pushed back the darkness.

And Jesus brought about life in terms of He created you, He created me.

But these dual themes of light and life, as they develop in the Gospel, they take on, uh they take on richer meaning.

Light as it develops in John's Gospel is not simply about physical light or the or the life that is given a creation.

Light in John's Gospel has an ethical dimension.

It's goodness.

That's what light is.

It's righteousness.

Moreover, it's the it's the revelation and disclosure of the character of God, do you see?

And we know that that's being hinted at because of verse 9.

He says, uh, the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

It can't just be you the light of creation.

It's got to be something more.

If it's coming into the world is this new thing in Jesus.

And what it is, is righteousness and the revelation of the character of God.

And so when John says here that the darkness has not mastered it, the darkness has not mastered it in the sense that the darkness cannot get its head around the revelation of God's goodness.

It can't comprehend it, it can't figure it out.

It seems so bizarre to the darkness.

That is, that is evil and wickedness.

But moreover, it is not mastered, it is not overcome it in the sense of being able to blot it out.

Because darkness, like evil, isn't a isn't a substantive thing in and of itself, it's the absence of goodness, it's the absence of light.

When we turned on those lights that are blinding me currently, the darkness was pushed back.

The darkness cannot overcome it, it cannot master it.

And we know that this light is giving us more than physical life because of these verses seven through nine, that this light was coming into the world that all verse seven might believe through him.

And then we read on that this believing in the light gives you life.

Now, just pause for a second and zone in on verse six and verse seven.

There was a man sin from God whose name was John.

It's John the Baptist, not John the Gospel writer.

John the Gospel writer is a different term for himself as he writes, and we'll we'll come to that.

He's talking about John the Baptist.

There's a man sin from God whose name was John.

He came as a witness to bear witness about the light.

The reason why I want you to pause and just kind of ruminate on that for a second is because up until this point, it's almost as though we've been turning over some interesting philosophy.

You know, you might have gone to a philosophy class or watched some philosophy videos on YouTube, and in a sense, it's it's quite nice to kind of turn that over in your head and think about ultimate reality and all of those things, what it means to be a person and what a being, you know, what it means or the implications of having a creator out there.

But what John does in verse 6 is he takes it from the realm of the academic, he takes it from the realm of just thinking uh these things through, and he plunges us into history.

It's not just that these are nice thoughts to think with your with your student friends around a uh a nice cheap bottle of red, you know.

You kind of you might be talking about these things down the pub.

No, John's like this actually happened in history, and so he's saying, Let me tell you the first witness that I've got in that kind of in that in that in that litany of people who are going to come into the into the courtroom, as it were, and bear witness to the veracity and truthfulness of this.

He says, Let me tell you about John.

John came as a witness to the light, he wasn't the light himself, but he came to bear witness.

Simply what that means is that when we talk about these things, about life and light and what it means to be made and what it means to be a human being, John roots it all in history, in the person of Jesus Christ.

The belief in ultimate reality, in that life-giving word, is belief in a person who stepped into history.

Third.

The word creates, the word gives light and life.

Thirdly, the word divides.

Verses 10 to 13.

He was in the world, but the and the world was made through him, yet the world did not receive him.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

We can kind of have this uh inaccurate image in our mind's eye of Jesus, who is kind of pious and inoffensive.

He's the kind of guy who drinks weak tea and doesn't like spicy food, you know, he's just kind of flies below everybody's radar.

But not here.

The word divides.

When John talks about the world here, he's talking about something quite specific.

When John talks about the world, he's not talking about the spinning ball that we're all living on, he's not talking about the uh the earth.

No, in John's Gospel, the world means something quite different.

The world in John's Gospel means this humanity arrayed in opposition to God.

That's what the world means.

All of humanity in opposition, in rebellion against the God who made us.

And what he's saying here is that the world, all of us, in our hostility towards God by nature and by choice, we saw the light of God's goodness, the light of the revelation of his character, and we withdrew, we shrunk back from it.

And John will tell us in chapter three when we get there that the reason why we do that is because our our deeds are evil and we don't want to be exposed, or we don't want to give them up.

We just kind of want to live the way we want to live.

And so we shrink back from the light.

He zooms in and says that even his own people didn't receive him.

John isn't singling out uh the Jewish people as worse than everyone else.

No, rather, he's making the point that they're the same as everyone else.

That even they reject him, even they shrunk back from the light.

That's because, and this is what he means by uh verse 12 and 13, that's because the salvation that the word brings, that's the salvation that Jesus brings, it doesn't depend on your upbringing, it doesn't depend on your ethnicity, your ethnic background, it doesn't depend on your heritage or your family or your education level.

No, what does it depend on?

It depends on the will of God.

That all who believed in his name would be given the right to be called children of God.

That while there are many in this world who are turned off by thoughts of Jesus, in a sense, kind of shrink back from that light and don't want to engage, yet in God's gracious kindness, there are those who find that light strangely compelling, strangely intriguing.

And we feel like, no, we want to know more about that light.

And maybe that's maybe that's you this morning.

No, I want to be drawn into that light.

Yeah, it feels a bit exposing and a bit strange, but I want to know more of what that is.

John's saying that those people, those people who believe in the light that's come into the world, they're made children of God.

John's saying that that's possible for anyone.

That's possible for anyone here.

That they might be able to turn aside from the uh from the legacy of their of their birth family and the heritage that uh that has perhaps come from them that is maybe full of destruction and strain and stress, and be born of God, a part of his family, given a new family name, a new identity in that sense.

The word divides.

Fourth, we'll spend a bit more time uh ruminating on this one.

Fourth, John tells us that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Verse 14 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John already in these 18 verses has encouraged us to cast our minds back into the Old Testament.

He's done that in the very first words, in the beginning.

He wants us to be thinking Genesis, but that's not the only place where he wants our minds to go in the Old Testament.

Here in verse 14, he wants our minds not to go back to the book of Genesis, but to the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

The book of Exodus is the story of the rescue from Egypt of the people of God.

You might have seen Prince of Egypt or uh, I don't know, gone seen like you know Joseph's technical or dream, whatever.

That sort of thing, but it's it's that sort of thing, that rescue from Egypt.

God rescues his people from Egypt and brings them to himself at Mount Sinai and makes them his people by giving them the law.

They and just pause on that for a second.

It's rescue, then law.

It's gracious salvation, and then here's how you live under my good rule.

Very, very often we get the gospel confused, and we think it's obey and work out how to live in a way that pleases God, and then he'll save me, then he'll make me his own.

No, that's never how it's worked.

That's not how it worked in the Exodus.

God graciously saved his people in commitment to his promises.

And then he constitutes them.

He gives them his law.

But what the other thing that God does in the book of Exodus is he comes and lives with them.

They are out there in the desert with their tents.

And God says, in a sense, build me a tent.

What's called the tabernacle.

It becomes the temple later on.

He said, Build me a tent, and I will live in the midst of the people.

When John says that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, he's using the word tabernacled.

That he pitched his tent in our midst.

That God came and lived among us.

The tabernacle, the tent where God dwelt in the Old Testament, it was the it was the place where God made himself known.

It's the place where heaven and earth overlapped.

It's the place where heaven and earth kissed.

It's the place where where rebellious humanity found peace with a holy God.

That's what the tabernacle was.

And John saying that Jesus is that place.

He is the place where humanity goes to to find peace with God.

He is the place where we go to if we want to see the full disclosure and revelation of the character of God.

He is the place in his own being where heaven and earth overlap.

He tabernacled among us.

But we're not done with our Exodus reflections because John in the second clause says, and we have seen his glory.

Glory as of the only Son of the Father.

We have seen his glory.

John doesn't want us to leave Exodus.

Sorry if this is a bit of uh bit of an uh kind of a crash course in the book of Exodus, but one of the things, because the people of God are human beings, right?

So they get rescued, and uh God's been so gracious and kind to them.

He's brought them, he's spoken to them, given his good law, which instructs them how to live in a way that maximizes their flourishing and goodness and and and projects the character of God to the nations.

And what do the people of God do?

Uh they decide to have a drunken orgy.

Uh yeah, but don't do that.

That's not that's not what's happening afterwards.

That's just coffee, okay?

But that's what the people of God did in the Old Testament.

They decided to bow down to the golden calf.

And Moses comes down from the mountain and uh and sees that what is going on, and in his in his despair and in his rage, he he breaks the tablets of stone and he goes back up in the mountain, he's speaking with God, and he's he's just wrung out and he cries out to God, and what he says to God is, Show me your glory.

And God says to him, I will cause all of my goodness to pass over ye.

And so he takes Moses and he hides him in the cleft of a rock and behind a rock.

And God passes over Moses, and Moses catches a glimpse of the tail end of the glory of God as it passes by.

And God proclaims his character.

The Lord, the Lord, the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Now we hear John's words, that we have seen his glory.

We, when we think of glory, I guess we our minds immediately go to something kind of grand and magnificent.

The swelling of a of an orchestral score that kind of makes your the the hairs in your head kind of prickle up, or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or something like that, and thinking, glory.

Glory in John's gospel is quite different.

When Jesus turns the water into wine in the very next chapter that one day we'll get to, the disciples were told saw Jesus' glory.

The people who were at the wedding saw the miracle, they drank the wine.

But the disciples saw something of his glory.

And then in chapter 12, some Gentiles come and they put their trust in Jesus, and Jesus prays to his father and says, Father, the hour is come that the Son of Man might be glorified.

And then we get to John 17, the night before Jesus' death on the cross, where Jesus prays to his father that high priestly prayer, and he says, Father, the hour has come.

Glorify me now with the glory that I had with you before the worlds began.

What is glory in John's Gospel?

Where is the Son of God glorified?

It is when he is lifted up on the cross.

Where do you see the goodness of God in full display when the Son of Man is glorified by being lifted up on that Roman cross?

Some look at that and see shame and ignominy and being rejected by humanity and maybe even by God.

But those who have come into the light, we see that as glorious.

And so John says, we have seen his glory.

We have seen the Son of God lifted up upon that cross, dying for the sins of the world.

That is where the goodness and glory of God is most fully displayed.

When Moses was hidden that rock, God passed over and declared his character, and he declared that he was abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Those words, steadfast love and faithfulness, throughout the Old Testament and other places can be translated differently.

The words steadfast love and faithfulness can be translated as grace and truth.

Grace and truth.

We have seen his glory, the glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of steadfast love and faithfulness.

The true and full embodiment of the character of God.

John is saying that in Jesus, in the person of Jesus, we see fully what Moses only glimpsed.

And this leads us to our final point.

Fifthly, the word supremely reveals God.

The word supremely reveals God.

Verses 16 to 18.

And from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.

For the law was given through Moses.

Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

You read verse 16, and this phrase that we have received grace upon grace, and you might initially be minded to think that what John is talking about here is something of God's generosity.

Grace upon grace.

Like when you were a child at Christmas time and you came downstairs, and all of the all of the presents were stacked one on top of the other, grace upon grace.

And yes, our God is abundantly generous, and and we have seen his grace in creation and now his grace in in redemption.

But actually, this idea of grace upon grace is better understood like this.

It's better understood as grace that replaces a grace already given.

Grace replacing and surpassing a grace already received.

What John is saying here is that the law, the Old Testament, everything in the first two-thirds of your Bible, all of that was a grace.

God was disclosing himself.

Because we're tempted to read verse 17, uh, and as you know, as as good, as good uh Christians, perhaps in that kind of reformed tradition, think, oh, law bad, gospel good.

That's not what John's saying.

John's saying the law was a grace.

God constituted a people for himself, he disclosed his character.

That was a grace.

But now that grace has been fulfilled and surpassed.

We've received a grace that replaces that previous grace.

A grace upon grace.

That's why John has been referring back to Moses in the Exodus.

It was a grace to see how God acted, how God saved his people, how God disclosed himself, but now that has been surpassed.

So verse 17, the law was given through Moses.

But in Jesus, God comes into the world full of that unmediated grace and truth.

So John concludes in verse 18 that no one has ever seen God, and that was true, right?

God says that to Moses, He says, You cannot see my face and live.

That's why I gotta kind of put you behind this rock, and you can just kind of see the tail end, the vapor trail of my glory, because you cannot see me full on and live.

And so John's right, nobody has ever seen God.

But Jesus, by becoming a man, he has shown us the face of God.

Do you know when there's an uh an eclipse?

I were told if you want to go out and look at the eclipse, you don't go and look at it with your with your normal eyes, right?

You get a you get a special pair of sunglasses or you get uh you get a little periscope and you you you look through it so that you can see the uh the glory of the of the eclipse.

You can see that corona around the sun and it's it's beautiful and it's wonderful.

Jesus, in a sense, allows us to look at the full glory of God.

Think of the Christmas hymn that we say, one of the most well-known Christmas hymns, Hark the Herald Angel Sing.

One of the lines in Hark the Herald Angel Sing is this Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.

Hail the incarnate deity.

So because Jesus has taken on humanity and become a man, we can look full in the face of God, and so later on in his gospel, he will turn to Philip and he will say, If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

He is the supreme revelation of God.

The one who made you, the one to whom you owe your life, who calls you into his light and offers you a new identity as a child of God.

He is the one who shares your humanity to bring you face to face with the God who made you in all of his grace and goodness and glory.

Maybe you love the thought of swimming in those waters, of adding more depth to your faith.

You don't want a puddle, you would like an ocean.

Maybe it all feels a little bit overwhelming and you have questions.

Wherever you're coming from this morning and wherever you're kind of concluding your thoughts as we wrap up, let's just not let's all paddle at the edges together.

Let's over the course of these twelve or so weeks as we begin John's Gospel.

Let's go swimming.

Let's plunge down into the depths of the ocean of his grace.

That we might know him better and know the goodness of light and life through him.

Let's pray.

That Jesus has come into our world in history, that he has made you known, and that by his life and death and resurrection has rescued us and made all who believe and trust in him children of you, God our Father.

We pray that by your Spirit you would instill greater depth and I don't know, a strength, a rigor, a robustness in each of our faith individually and corporately.

That you would astound us with these things, thrill our hearts, stir our affections for the Lord Jesus, that we might not just paddle around the edges.

But have this as something that fills and floods and permeates everything we are and everything that we do.