Advent: God's Word Made Flesh (John 1:1-18)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel-centered church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

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.

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

He came as a witness to bear witness about the light, that all might believe, through him he was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him.

Yet the world did not know 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 will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John bore witness about him and cried out, this was he of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.

For 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.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.

Glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, word made flesh.

Humbly you came to the earth you created.

All for love's sake became poor so that we may share in what makes you truly rich.

We come before you, Lord, to acknowledge that you are God.

You are altogether lovely, altogether worthy, altogether wonderful to us.

Would you speak your wonderful word once again into our hearts by the illumination of your Holy Spirit and renew us with grace upon grace?

It's in your precious name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So when I was in college, I read a clever little Victorian novel, kind of novella or whatever.

I don't know what the difference between a novel and novella is, by the way.

If you can clarify that for me after the service, I'd appreciate that.

It's a short little story called Flatland by Edwin Abbott.

Flatland takes place in a world where everything exists in two dimensions.

And so two-dimensional geographic geometrical shapes sort of relate with one another and have a complex kind of government and hierarchy, all that sorts of things.

Anyway, into the life of this two-dimensional flatland, one day, the narrative is transformed when Mr.

A Square, as clever as it gets, I suppose, meets a sphere, a three-dimensional sphere.

First, it appears in front of them as a single dot, and then becomes a growing circle until it reaches its full diameter, and then becomes a contracting circle until once again it's a single dot.

That's how a sphere would appear to a two-dimensional object, wouldn't it, as it's passing through flatlands?

And the narrative is a dialogue between this square, two-dimensional square, getting to know this three-dimensional sphere and what life is like in spaceland, where there's now a third dimension added.

Now I'll spare you all the details of the narrative, but the point is simple enough.

The point is about how can we comprehend something that is truly beyond us.

Right?

As if we are two-dimensional objects who can comprehend length and breadth, but not depth.

Right?

How would you communicate that third dimension?

And Abbott's essential point here is that if that lower beings are going to understand a higher being, it cannot be that those lower beings conceptualize that higher being.

It has to be that that higher being comes into that lower world and reveals itself.

See the point there?

We cannot intellectually ascend beyond what we are creaturely capable of.

We need what is beyond us to speak into our situation.

And that, you might be surprised to learn, is essentially John's point in his prologue.

It's one of the most dense and poetic passages of Scripture that you will find.

And it has been given the unfortunate name by scholars of the prologue.

But John is making a really key point.

We read some of John, the same author John, last Sunday, when we read the first chapter of his letter, a letter to the church, in which he says he was an eyewitness to Jesus.

He can personally vouch for Jesus as trustworthy and true.

And he can personally vouch for the fellowship and joy that results with joining Jesus, following Jesus in the light.

It's this same John who writes to make Jesus known in his letter that authors this biography in front of us.

And it's the first passage of this biography we have in front of us.

John uses an incredible word to describe Jesus.

And if I had my passage in front of me, I would even read it.

There it is.

John says that in the beginning was the word.

The word was with God.

The word was God.

So in some sense, there is a unity and plurality in the life of God.

This selfsame word is also distinguished from the transcendent God.

He makes himself known.

He was in the beginning with God.

In every sense that God is God, the Word is also God, and stands beside God.

All things were made through this word, and without him was not anything made that was made.

In him the word was life, and life was the light of men.

And darkness has not overcome this light.

John wants us to know that it's through this word that all things were created.

All things subsist.

All things hold themselves together.

It's this word, this divine person that brings it all together.

And the word word is a loaded word.

That's a lot of words.

If you were a Jewish reader in the first century reading John's gospel for the first time, surely what would come to mind is so much of what the Bible has already said about God's word.

Psalm 33 says that by the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

The word and creation go hand in hand.

And then elsewhere, the prophet Isaiah says that the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever.

The word has permanence in an impermanent world.

And the word always accomplishes God's saving and healing purposes in the world.

My word, the Lord says, shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

If you were a Jewish author, you'd be thinking of God's creative and sustaining and healing word spoken into creation.

It's the means by which God is making himself known to creatures created in his image.

But if you weren't Jewish, if you were a Gentile and you were reading this for the first time, maybe you're familiar with a little bit of philosophy 101.

And what would come to mind is this really powerful Greek word logos, which is the Greek word that John uses here.

And the word logos signifies the single purpose or principle that holds everything together, that gives the whole universe its meaning and purpose, its goal, its outworking.

So one philosopher named Philo says this.

He says the logos, the word of God, is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts and preventing them from being dissolved and separated.

The logos is this philosophical way of describing what it is that holds the universe together.

And that's not just ancient philosophy, by the way.

Stephen Hawking, in his book A Brief History of Time, says in his introduction that the eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.

If there is a single principle we can find that holds the whole universe together, what we're talking about is we're talking about the Lagos.

John would surely have read that and gone, well, yeah, obviously.

We're talking about the word, but we're not just talking about an abstracted word.

A word that is out there way beyond us in space land that we can't even begin to comprehend.

We're talking about a word that has become human in the person of Jesus and personally revealed the life of God to us human beings by taking on our human life.

That is the startling, remarkable, unbelievable, almost blasphemous claim that John is making.

Surely, if you were a Jewish person thinking about monotheism, this would be mind-blowing.

What are you talking about?

It's a stumbling block to the Jews, it's foolishness to the Greeks.

It's mind-blowing.

If you want to know who the true God is, John is saying, look long and hard at Jesus.

He is God's word made flesh.

This truly is one of the most densest passages I've ever had to prepare a sermon on.

So what we're going to do this morning is we're going to zoom in particularly on verses 14 to 18 here.

The word became flesh is John's claim.

He dwelt among us.

And when we look at the word become flesh, we see his glory, God's glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

What's John saying here?

The word has become human.

And when we look at the face of Jesus, whether John looks through his eyes or we look through the eyes of faith, we see number one, God's glory, we see number two, God's grace, and we see number three, God's truth.

The word has become human to reveal God's glory, grace, and truth to human beings as a human being.

That is the startling claim of the gospel.

That's what makes it such good news.

So let's dive in together and understand what John is claiming here.

Jesus is God's word become human, and he reveals God's glory.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

We have seen his glory.

Glory is of the only Son of the Father, John writes.

Glory is God's inexpressible beauty and majesty.

One commentator writes that glory is the manifestation of God's presence and power.

It's everything that makes God radiant and splendid and magnificent.

And it's also everything that makes God serious business, makes God holy, makes God weighty.

And it's this connection between magnificence and holiness that gets conveyed in a related word that we see used in the Old Testament to describe God's presence in the temple.

With regards to God's glory, we read in Exodus chapter 40 that the cloud, which is God's incomprehensible presence, covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

Exodus 40 · chapter mention

I mean, this was the theology of the temple.

This is where we go to meet with the glorious God of the universe.

His glory is made manifest here in our space and in our time.

It's where God's incomprehensible beauty and majesty are being made known.

If you want to know that, go to the temple is the claim in the Old Testament here.

But John is making a pretty remarkable claim.

He's saying that now we have seen an even greater glory.

If we want to see God's glory, we don't have to go to that geographical place called the temple.

We have to look at Jesus to see God's glory revealed.

Everything that makes God radiant and wonderful is what we see when we look at the faith or look at the face of Jesus.

We have seen his glory.

Glory is the only Son of the Father.

There's a selfsame image here.

What we see in Jesus is reflecting the Father's own character and wonder and beauty.

Many of you know that.

I took a recent trip to Washington, D.C., and I gotta say, I was pretty blown away by the city in a way that I wasn't prepared to be.

It's just a really incredible.

I mean, I'm a bit of a history nerd, and I went with history nerds, so we were all nerding out.

But we stumbled, on our first night there, we stumbled into the National Portrait Gallery, which I just highly, highly recommend.

And we were really pleased to discover that in the National Portrait Gallery they house every commissioned portrait of all the presidents in American history.

So every president has commissioned a portrait of himself, and here they're all, you know, displayed, one after the other, right?

Fascinating to look at one portrait after the other and see how each president, uh, who personally commissioned it, selected their artist, selected the scene, wanted themselves to be portrayed.

It says something about each and every person on display there.

What style, what artist, all those sorts of things.

Bill Clinton was truly a strange painting, I just gotta say, but that's beside the point.

Google it and you'll agree with me.

But it says something about the personality, and it says something about, well, it says something about the presence and the power and how these men understood themselves and how they want themselves to be portrayed.

Right?

When we look at a portrait, we're seeing something of the presence and power being put on display of the person it portrays.

John is saying it's something like that in Jesus, but even more so.

Because when we look at Jesus, we're seeing God's actual presence and actual power and actual beauty, all these things manifest not in a still portrait, but in a living person.

So when we see Jesus going about his life and his ministry and his business, we're seeing God go about his life and ministry and business as a human being.

There's no God hiding behind the back of Jesus with ulterior motives.

One commentator says that God, by definition, is Christ-like.

Imagine that.

When we look at Jesus, we are seeing God's presence and power manifest.

We're seeing his glory.

Glory is of the only Son from the Father, with as close a family resemblance as you can get.

So we read in the Westminster Confession, I think, Catechism.

Yeah, Westminster Catechism.

The chief and purpose we were created for is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

That's the purpose of human life, so says the Westminster Catechism.

Delighting chiefly in Jesus is the point of our life because that's what it means to glorify God.

We can use that phrase so flippantly, right?

And so often sometimes we use these Christianese words, they seem to lose meaning.

What does it mean to glorify God?

According to John, it's to look upon the faith of Jesus and delight in him.

There is no greater revelation of God's glory.

I love how it's portrayed in the hymn, How Great Thou Art.

We begin by singing, O Lord my God, when I, in awesome wonder, right?

We're just wondering, consider all the worlds thy hand has made.

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, the power of the universe displayed.

We're looking around and seeing God's glory made manifest in the natural world, and then sings, My soul, my Savior God, to thee, how great thou art, how great thou art.

But that's not where the author stops.

The very next verse, when I think that God, his son, not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in, that on that cross, my burden gladly bearing, he bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee.

What's the author saying here?

Yes, we can look all around the world around us, we can look at the glory of a sunrise, we can look at the majesty of a mountain range, we can see God's glory evidenced around us, but if we want to see God's glory most fully, most chiefly manifest, we have to look at Jesus, crucified and risen.

That is the fullest revelation of God's power and presence.

So that's why John Piper can write that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

We glorify God when we go to Christ and Christ alone.

When we look at Jesus, we see the Word become human.

We see God's glory manifest.

We also see God's grace manifest, is what we continue to see in verse 14.

Pardon me.

Yes, verse 14.

We see God's glory.

Glory is of the only Son of the Father, writes John, full of number one grace, and number two, truth.

We see God's grace on display as well.

Grace is God's unearned, unmerited, undeserved favor and kindness towards us, all of which brings blessing and joy.

There's nothing we can do to earn it.

This isn't cashing a paycheck.

This is God's sheer generosity towards us because he loves us and because he delights in us.

That's God's grace.

And it's related once again to this Hebrew word Hesed.

And if you joined us, this would have been probably a year ago now.

We went through Exodus chapter 34, God's proclamation of who he is to his people, right?

Exodus 34 · chapter mention

This is who I want you to know I am.

What God says to his people, having just exited Egypt, he says, I am the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

That's that word chesed, and faithfulness, which interesting enough is the word emet, which means truth.

Here we see grace and truth being held together in God's own character.

How interesting is that.

That's God's heart.

That's what he wants his people to know about him.

Grace is the story of God and his people.

The Bible begins with God graciously creating us.

He didn't have to create us, but he was delighted to do that.

And when we turned away from him, he graciously came to us to gather us to himself once again.

When his people were in bondage and slavery in Egypt, he came to rescue them and lead them into freedom.

Grace is Is the story of God and his people.

And that's why John can say, from his fullness, the word made flesh's fullness, we've received grace upon grace.

Every chapter of this story has been a chapter of grace, and now we see the greatest chapter of all in Jesus.

I'm going to risk repeating a sermon illustration because I might have used this before, but it's just so well suited.

I'm going to go for it either way.

A little while ago I watched a Danish film called Bebet's Feast.

Don't let that suggest that I'm, you know, a film person.

Rebecca's the film person.

I watch Marvel movies mostly.

But Bebet's Feast is a wonderful film that I cannot recommend highly enough.

In Babet's Feast, you have a 19th-century isolated Danish community, and you follow two sisters who were fought or were raised by a pretty stern, austere, very pietistic Lutheran pastor father.

And they feel compelled to follow their father's pretty strict, rigorous, moralistic teaching kind of to the bone.

That's what's going to earn them favor, let's say, with God and others.

And they teach others in this community to do the same.

So as the story progresses, Babette is a French refugee fleeing violence in Paris, and comes to this village as, well, someone looking for shelter.

And so she's taken in by these two sisters, becomes the uh the helper of the house.

She's taught how to make their favorite meals and how to do, you know, the house chores the way that these sisters prefer.

Eventually, Babette comes into an enormous amount of money.

And the thing she says she wants to do with this money is she wants to put on a feast for the whole village.

But here's the deal: you have to let me pick the menu.

And so very reluctantly, this very pietistic village says, okay, you get to pick the menu, and now they spend the movie watching all these exotic foods being shipped in from all the parts of the earth.

And the richest wines and the most exotic food come in, and this village is getting more and more skeptical about what's to take place, and they're more and more sure that the devil's at work here.

Eventually the feast is put on, and one course after the other gets richer and richer and richer until all of the austerity, hostility, resentment that has been deep set into this community melts away one course at a time until they are in tears, hugging and laughing and singing hymns together at the end of this meal.

It's a symbol of grace.

It's a symbol of grace to reluctant, resistant people like us.

That melts us away, that transforms community.

This is grace upon grace, one course after the other.

And John is saying this is what we need in Jesus.

God has only ever been gracious to his people, and we have only resisted.

But grace upon grace means we behold God's most gracious heart towards us when we look at Jesus.

So what an assurance, right?

This is God's very heart towards us.

If we've wondered, but God, what do you really think about me?

We have to look at Jesus to see exactly what God thinks about us.

We look into his word and we see his promises.

We see what God has done on our behalf in the cross and in the resurrection, in the hope that he gives us.

We come to the Lord's table and we hear, this is my body broken for you and my blood shed for you, so that we could share in the life of God.

That's his gracious heart towards us.

That's why someone like John Calvin can write that it is certain that the Lord offers us his mercy as a pledge of his grace in both his sacred word and in the sacraments.

When we come to Scripture, when we come to his table by faith, we look upon the face of our Lord Jesus, and we see his grace and goodness towards us.

And we're rest assured that this is how God truly regards us.

When we look at the word, become human, we see God's glory put on display.

We see his grace, his unearned favor, blessing, and joy put on display.

And finally we see his truth.

We see God's truth put on display.

Verse 14.

We see God's glory, glory from the only Son, from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Truth is this quality or state of being real, actual, dependable, trustworthy, reliable, something like that.

And literally the Greek word here is halathea, which is a combination of lefe, which is to conceal, and then this kind of negative prefix, ah, right?

So it's the idea is he is not concealed.

Right?

You know what it's like to conceal something.

You don't want it known.

You've got ulterior motives, you're trying to pull something, right?

Not so with God and Jesus.

There's nothing concealed.

He's here to put God on display.

He's here to put God's truth on display.

His faithfulness, his steadfastness, his consistency, all of this is revealed in the face of Jesus, which is why once again John can write in his letter to the church, we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true, and we are in him who is true, in his Son, Jesus Christ.

He is true God and eternal life.

Why did Jesus come at all?

Because he wanted to show us God's truth.

He did not want the life of God concealed from us, he wanted to share it with us.

He has come to put his truth on display.

No one has ever seen God, writes John.

The only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

How could anyone see God?

How could anyone comprehend God on their own?

Here we are, finite creatures, muddling away at life.

Who are we to think we can apprehend God for ourselves, climb the intellectual ladder, and make it to the mountaintop?

No, we're like citizens of flatland, aren't we?

We need God to come to us if we're going to know anything about him.

And that's the claim of Scripture.

The claim is that God has come to us and revealed his own life to us, his own truth to us as one of us.

And the concept of truth, I think, has become increasingly questioned in our moment, like that we're living in right now.

Truth seems suspicious.

Truth claims seem.

Hmm.

We're never confident that we've reached the truth of truth, the truthiness of truth, something like that, right?

We're always very skeptical people.

And I think this is most vividly portrayed in a book that's had, well, real impact, I think, in popular culture called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This is a very absurd and silly adventure through outer space.

But it's written by a very cynical and atheistic author named Douglas Adams.

And he wants to portray how absurd it is that we could ever think we could apprehend something that is truly true, right?

We're just such fickle creatures, something like that.

And so in this uh novel, there's a supercomputer called Deep Thought.

And Deep Thought is told your purpose is to figure out the meaning of the life, of life, universe, life, the universe, and everything.

That's your purpose.

So Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years thinking through its input until one day it very unexpectedly spits out an answer.

And the answer, you might know, is 42.

Which has everyone scratching their heads because they have no idea what the question is.

They've forgotten.

You have an answer without a question.

Douglas Adams is satirizing this idea of truth for in two ways.

He's saying, one, it's absurd to think that there could be a singular answer to all things in the universe.

And number two, even if we could arrive at an answer, it will be incomprehensible to us.

Right?

The point is this the finite creature's pursuit of one unified answer is absurd.

We are trying to think God's thoughts after him, something like that.

And that is an absurd quest until you consider what John is claiming here.

John is saying it's not our job to make it up the mountain.

God takes it upon himself to descend.

God takes it upon himself to speak into our situation, and that is who Jesus is.

It means that faith, our Christian faith, is reasonable.

We can practice a reasonable faith.

Having faith in Jesus does not mean switch your brain off, lest you think yourself out of what you believe.

No, engage your brain.

Engage your thinking capacity, engage your rational nature.

It is not irrational to have faith, it is simply to recognize that rationalism alone can only take you so far.

At a certain point, we need something to descend the mountain to speak to us.

And that's what's happened to Jesus.

It's perfectly reasonable to receive him on the basis of his own claims, because he's God speaking into our situation.

Faith is not irrational, it is suprarrational.

One of my favorites on this idea is Kierkegaard, another great Dane.

Kierkegaard says it is the paradox of Christianity that the eternal truth has entered time, and that the divine has become human, and that God was willing to take the form of the servant.

One must choose to believe, to make the leap of faith.

But as Kierkegaard frames it, the leap of faith is not irrational, it's not unreasonable.

It's receiving the claim for what it is.

Otherwise, Kierkegaard would say we have to reject the claim of who Jesus is and remain within the realm of human reason alone.

What if Jesus really is who he says he is?

What if this is the real deal?

John wants us to think it's the real deal.

He's experienced it as the real deal.

Jesus is God's word, become human.

He reveals God's glory and grace and truth to human beings as a human being.

So if you're here this morning just trying to figure out who this Jesus guy is, I want to save you some time.

Consider Jesus for who he claims to be, not who we would like to make him out to be.

It's a lot easier to make Jesus out to be a great moral teacher along many other great moral teachers.

But Jesus really doesn't leave this avenue open to us.

His claim, John's claim, is that he is God, and we can take it or leave it.

That's the claim here.

So get curious.

Investigate Jesus, but investigate him for who he claims himself to be.

And if you're following Jesus here this morning, I want to share good news with you.

Because if you are following Jesus and looking around for where true beauty can found, we can say, look no further but the face of Jesus.

You will see God's glory manifest.

If you've been looking for joy and blessing, look no further than Jesus.

He is God's grace fully revealed.

If you've been looking for what's true, look at the crucified and risen one, Jesus.

And you will see what is truly true.

The Christian life begins, continues, and ends only in Jesus.

He is the word.

Become human.

So, friends, let's worship the word.

Let's worship a man, God with us.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

Newsong's ministry is entirely funded by the generous giving of those who worship and journey with us.

If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.