The Word Made Flesh (John Pt. 3)
Text: John 1:14
When you think of the Glory of God, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it a majestic throne room filled with light? Is it fire, thunder, and earthquakes, and angels filling the sky singing and shouting? Or maybe some kind of shimmering cloud that you can just feel the power coming out of? I know there was a charismatic church, a few years back, that was buying hundreds of pounds of gold glitter and putting it up in containers on their ceiling… and when the preacher would get to an exciting point in his sermon, they would dump those containers and the glitter would fill the air inside the church, and the preacher would shout, “It’s the Glory of God!” And the people in the congregation would just go wild. Well, let me just say, man-made, emotional responses is NOT the power of God, the Spirit of God, or the glory of God. It’s actually deceitful – and you know where deception comes from right?
Well we’re in John’s Gospel, and just as a quick review, I want to remind you of what we’ve already talked about. FIRST of all, we learned that Jesus is the Word. He is the Word who was with God in the beginning, and the Word who was God in the beginning, and that He created all things. And when I say “all” I mean, “all”. Everything that was created, was created by Jesus. So Jesus is God, along with the Father, and the Holy Spirit…
Now what I’m talking about is something we call the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all eternally existent, uncreated beings. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God… not three different God’s, but one God. Each one is fully God. So it’s not like they are each 1/3 of what makes 1 God… each of them is fully God, and they are one. I even wrote up a little hand out and put it in your bulletins just to give you some of the Scripture references that teach the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s an essential doctrine of the Christian faith.
THE SECOND THING we learned was that even though Jesus is fully God, and even though He’s the Creator of all things… man still rejects Him… men love darkness rather than light.
So what happened was that for 4000 years God had been sending His Word to His people… He had given them the Law, and the Prophets… and they were all speaking of; and talking about that one point in time when God would send His Son… when God the Son would come… but what did man do? Well… Jesus actually tells us in Luke 13:34 when He says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” And in Matthew 23 He says to the Pharisees, “Your fathers murdered the prophets I sent.” So from the fall of Adam and Eve all the way up until Jesus day, God has been reaching out to His people, He’s been sending men to prophesy and prepare them for the fulfillment of His promise. But they wouldn’t hear it, they rejected God, and His Word, and His Law, His prophets, and His promise.
So what does God do?
Well… our text this morning tells us. It’s in John chapter 1, and we’re going to look at just one verse today. John 1:14 (READ).
We’ve already talked about how the Word (the Logos) was with God and how the Word was God, and how it existed with God in the beginning, but now John is making it as plain as he possibly can. THE WORD BECAME FLESH.
Now what does that mean? Well for starters it means that Jesus; God the Son, became a man. He was born of a woman, and became a human being. Now… understand, when we say God became a man, that didn’t mean that Jesus stopped being the Son of God… He was 100% God, and 100% man. And yet He was a single person.
And this is taught in Scripture. It was taught and believed by the Apostles… And it was taught and believed by the early Church Fathers… We see it in the Apostles Creed, we see it in the Creed of Chalcedon… This is what the Church has taught since its inception.
And anyone out there who teaches something other than this isn’t lining up with Scripture, and they’re not lining up with the Church… and we’ll call them what James and John, and Peter, and Paul, and Jesus Himself called them – false teachers! Or false prophets!
1st John chapter 4, verses 1 – 3 says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.”
Now… why is this so important? Why is it so important, and even vital, that we believe that Jesus was not only 100% God, but also 100% man?
Well; the reason Jesus came as a human being is tied up in His mission. Do you remember what the angel said to the shepherds when Jesus was born? It’s in Matthew 1:21… It said, “For unto you is born this day, in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” Jesus comes as a man, so that He can be our Savior. So how does that work?
Well, it goes back to the character of God. God is perfectly righteous, perfectly holy, perfectly good, and perfectly just. And because God is all of these things, He demands that sin be punished, and that sin be dealt with. The Bible tells us over and over again that God must punish sin. He is of purer eyes that cannot behold evil or even look on iniquity (that’s Habakkuk 1:13 BTW). So God’s righteousness, and holiness, and goodness, and justice demands that every sin be dealt with, and that every sin be punished. But at the same time, God is merciful, and loving, and kind, and compassionate. So He has to punish sin, and yet He wants to forgive man, and show us mercy. But His justice won’t let Him do that outright. If He just forgave us, without sin being paid for, He would become unjust, and therefore He would cease to be God.
So what does God do? He sends Jesus. And Jesus becomes a man in order to be our substitute. He came to pay for our sins so that we could be forgiven. How does He do that? Hebrews 9:22, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.” The blood of all the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament could never wash away our sin. The Old Testament sacrificial system was just a temporary fix, until God sent His Son to be the once and for all ultimate Sacrifice for sin.
So here’s what Jesus does. He comes as a man, like Adam… in-fact the Apostle Paul even calls Jesus the 2nd Adam, or Last Adam. Jesus lives a holy, upright, and sinless life as a man… so He does what Adam failed to do… and Jesus perfectly keeps the Law. And then He goes to the cross, and dies for our sin. He takes our place and is our substitute. And in doing that, He satisfies God’s justice, God’s wrath, God’s holiness, God’s goodness, and God’s righteousness. Which only leaves God’s mercy, and love, and kindness, and forgiveness to be poured out on us, undeserving sinners. And as a bonus we get eternal life as well.
How can God do that? How can God not count our sins against us? Because He’s already counted them against Jesus that’s how! When we say, “Jesus paid it all” we mean, He really paid it all… How can God give us eternal life? Because when we’re born again, we are born with a Christ-like nature… a nature that has no sin. We still sin while we’re in this world, but our new nature is from above. So when we leave this world, whether it’s through death or the rapture, this body goes back to the dust, and our born again spirit is given a new glorified body to dwell in. And because there’s no sin, there’s no death… The wages of sin is death. But when there’s no sin, there’s no death… And God does something else that’s totally amazing. He says, “This gift of salvation, and forgiveness, and eternal life… it’s all paid for, and everything that needs to be done in order to secure it for you has been done.” And He gives it to us freely through faith.
“By grace you have been saved, through faith.” It’s a gift from God to us.
Ok… let’s go back to our text in John 1:14 and look at it one last time (READ TEXT).
So we’ve talked about the Word that became flesh… but then John says, “And we have seen His glory…” What’s John talking about there? What does he mean that he has seen Jesus’ glory?
We started out this morning by talking about God’s glory… so what does John mean when he says, “We beheld, or seen His glory”?
Well, he goes on and says, “glory as the ONLY Son from the Father…”
The KJV and the NKJV say: “As the Only Begotten of the Father.” And the NIV says, “The one and Only Son who came from the Father.”
Of course the best translation is the original translation, which is the Greek, and it just uses the word “Monogenes”, which literally means, “the Unique One”. You see; when we receive the Word and trust Christ, we become children of God… but we are not children in the same way as the Word who became flesh is God’s Son. Remember, the Word who became flesh was in the beginning with God, and was God. We have become sons and daughters by receiving the Word. We have become children of God by believing in His Name. But the Word who became flesh has always been uniquely God’s Son.
Hebrews 1:3 says this about Jesus… it says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the Word of His power…”
Basically what John is saying here, and he’s been saying it since verse 1 is that Jesus and the Father are equal. Jesus’ glory and the Father’s glory are equal. Jesus is the glory of the Father, and Jesus is the manifestation, or revelation of God’s glory to us in these last days. He is the radiance and glory of God… we don’t need a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. We don’t need this room to be filled with glitter, or shimmering lights and fog.
WE HAVE JESUS!
Turn with me to John 17:1 – 4 (READ).
So how does John see the glory of Christ? He sees it because Jesus perfectly displays the glory of the Father, and Jesus glorifies the Father, through His life of perfect obedience, through His death on the cross for our sin, and for His resurrection from the dead because of our justification. And if there’s no Jesus, there’s no grace and truth available to us. If there’s no Jesus, there’s no hope of salvation.
The question is… have you beheld the glory of Christ as your Lord and Savior? You can’t see this glory of God until you’ve received Christ. You can look for it in vain, but until you experience the majesty and awesome wonder of being saved by His grace, you’ll never see the glory of God.
CONCLUSION
