-Do you remember the song by Joan Osborne that came out in 1995 entitled “One of Us”?
-It was actually something of a hit for her
-The lyrics are really interesting
-They go:
If God had a name, what would it be
And would you call it to his face
If you were faced with him in all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question
And yeah yeah God is great yeah yeah God is good
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
-The song was written by Eric Brazilian.
-When asked about what idea generated the song, he said, “For me, the song was more about what happens to you when you look at something that has completely changed your world view, which could be meeting God, it could be meeting an alien, it could be a near-death experience, it could be anything like that. Just how everything you know is wrong, or everything you know is right, and you didn’t know it."
-The song dovetails so nicely with our text today
-You know, people have wished in the recent past, that Jesus lived in our era
-I think part of that is good, people excited to see what He was really like
-But part of that is not so good at all
-It was difficult for the religious leaders of Jesus’ day to recognize Him
-He was not, at all, what they expected out of the Promised One
-In verses 10 and 11, our text says, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”
-I think it is really audacious to think that we might do better at seeing Jesus than the people who were trained to recognize Him
-We kind of put the Pharisees and other religious leaders down for not recognizing the Messiah when He came but it wasn’t because they weren’t trying
-Next week, we’ll look at the text in Matthew when the Magi come to find the King of the Jews
-Herod goes to the chief priests and teachers of the law and they rightly point out that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem
-They knew all the right answers because they knew the Scriptures
-It was their job to know the Scriptures {PAUSE}
-Would you be able to recognize the Real Messiah when He comes?
-Do you know the Scriptures concerning Him?
-How are you going to be able to know who He is when He comes again?
-I know that it is not really your “job” to know the Scriptures like it was for the teachers of the law
-However, it is the “job” of every Christian to know and understand what the Bible says and to be able to defend their faith
-Peter writes in his first epistle, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”
-Oh, and by the way, did you know that the Apostle Paul, even though he was a trained theologian, he acted more like a layperson when he went on his missionary journeys.
-He actually was a tent maker. That is what he did when he stayed in one place long enough to get it going.
-In Acts 18, Luke records, “After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them. Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.” And in verse 11, it says that he stayed a year and a half in Corinth, teaching the word of God.
-Why is it our “job” to know the Scriptures? Because even the devil knows the Scriptures and he will use them to his advantage to deceive us.
-Peter encourages us again in his first epistle, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
-However, the devil is not easy to spot sometimes. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians that, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”
-A lot of really smart people missed Jesus in His first coming and continue to miss Him today
-How much more difficult will it be to miss Him in the present and the future?
-Jesus warns us in His great Olivet Discourse, “Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ’I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. At that time . . . many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. . . . those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. At that time if anyone says to you, ’Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ’There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect—if that were possible.”
-So we could say that you need to know the word in order to know the Word – Jesus
-The good thing is that the Word wishes to reveal Himself to us
-He wants to have a relationship with us
-In verse 14, John writes, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
-That is not a bad translation but it misses the point that a more literal translation gets across
-We could more literally translate the verse, “The Word became flesh and ‘tabernacled’ among us.”
-It is the noun of that verbal form that is used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that was the Bible in Jesus’ day, to translate the tent of meeting where the ark of the covenant was kept
-The tent of meeting and the ark specifically was the place where God’s glory dwelt
-It served as the visible reminder that God was with His people
-It was the place where the blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat to appeased God’s anger with the sins of the people
-His anger with their lack of attention to His word and direction
-Obviously, God chooses His words carefully
-He used that word for a reason
-He wanted to convey that Jesus was the manifestation of God’s presence with His people
-He was the visible reminder of how God cared for His people
-It was His blood that was sprinkled, so to speak, on the mercy seat to appease God’s anger with the sins of the people once and for all
-The writer to the Hebrews states, “Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest (Jesus) had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”
-By Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, He has paid for our sins once and for all
-By His glorious resurrection, He has paved the way for our resurrection from the dead on the last day
-He has made our way to eternal life secure because it does not depend on our action
-As John writes, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
-It doesn’t depend on anything that we do or anything that our parents have done
-It depends solely on God
-You can’t choose to follow Jesus, Jesus has chosen you before the foundation of the world
-You can’t be born into the family of God like the people of Jesus’ day thought
-When you are baptized as an infant or small child, it is not something that your parents do to make you be a Christian
-It is God’s work.
-Martin Luther pointed out that in baptism God uses the hands of men to bring about the faith of many people of all generations
-Now, knowing this, that our reservation at His feast is secure because it does not depend on us but depends on God, we can be more diligent in our study of His word that we might know the Word more intimately.
-God has become one of us and His name is Jesus.
