GOD’S BEST WORD TO US
John 1:1-18
Bob Marcaurelle bmarcaurelle@charter.net
(Writing in the AD 90’s to counteract the teachings that Jesus could not be both God and man. John shows us how God reveals Himself to us through creation, conscience, contacts with individuals and the chosen people and their Bible. This comes through to us when we are converted by the truths of Scripture. )
A little girl, when asked by her mother what she was drawing, answered, “A picture of God.” The mother said, “Honey, no one knows what God looks like.” To which the girl replied, “I know, that’s why I am drawing Him”. The little girl is wrong. All we know about God is nothing. Close your eyes and picture God. Anything you come up with is wrong. A. W. Tozer said, “We ask what God is like and the answer is that He is not like anything. All we can describe Him with are things that came from Him but are not Him”.
With all our religion and philosophy John says “No one has seen God.” Looking at creation we are like soldiers on guard duty at night who, knowing someone is there, say, “Who goes there”.
Years ago two men watched a nice, quiet middle aged man come home from work to his family. His children ran to meet him and he often had treats for them and other children who were there. One day the two men grabbed him and threw him into a van and drove away. They were Nazi hunters who had just captured Adolph Eichmann, one of the cruelest followers of Hitler.
Creation tells us a little. We know He exists. The first word in the Bible assumes Him. There is no argument or proof. It just says he is there, deal with it. The Bible dismisses atheism with one verse, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” (Psalm 19). Mullins said, “He said it in his heart his head knew better.” The atheist hasn’t been born yet who can convince us the three little bones floating inside our ear, the laughter of a baby and the courage of a soldier are the products of slime and time.
That part of God we human beings can relate to is called the “Word”. If I open up to you and talk with you and listen to you, you get an idea of who I am. My words come from my “word”, who I am as a person. And God’s word speaking to us is first:
THE WORD OF MYSTERY
The Bible and John’s Gospel begin with, “In the beginning God”. This is the mystery of his eternal existence. We take this “by faith” (Hebrews 11:3) and can no more prove God than the atheist can disprove Him. Augustine said in the AD 400’s, “Arguments for the existence of God, for the unbeliever are unconvincing and for the believer are unnecessary.” The religious person’s faith is harder to believe than the faith of an atheist. He believes this vast universe is uncreated. But we believe the Creator, who is far more complicated than his creation. Our faith is instinctive. It is part of what it means to be human. A young Communist girl wrote on her test that Lenin’s Tomb was inscribed, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” When she learned she was right her first thought was, “Thank God.”
In Genesis God says, “Let us make man in our own image.”. John says that in eternity “the Word was God and with God. This is the mystery of how the one God has a plural nature. This introduces us to the term “Trinity” (Three in One) adopted by the Church around AD 200 to describe God as He is presented in Scripture. The Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are sometimes equated and sometimes seen as separate Persons. The only way to wrap our minds around this is to see it as the way we experience the mysterious God. The Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are sometimes equated and sometimes seen as separate Persons.
We know there is a God above and beyond anything we can imagine. We know that 2000 years ago God came to earth. His name was Jesus and right now he is in some kind of place called heaven with our loved ones who have died. And we know there is a God who speaks to us in our hearts.
We cannot explain it. No one can. It is something we experience. The thirsty man is thankful for water; the ice skater is thankful for ice and the engineer is thankful for steam. They are all thankful for one thing - water. A little girl was asked how big God was and she said, “He is so big the universe cannot hold Him and He is so small I can hide Him in my heart.
”THE WORD IN HISTORY (3-18)
Creation 1-3
God’s first word to us is our universe and it shows us He is a person. Electricity and gas cannot create the laughter of a child or the love of a mother or the courage of a soldier. In Genesis God comes on the scene deciding to create; telling Adam and Eve what they should and should not do; punishing their disobedience and calling out to them so He can cover their shame.
The existence of our universe tells us he is powerful and wise. His power threw billions of flaming suns into a place we call “space” which he created. His wisdom put our sun just the right distance from us and surrounded our planet with the ozone layer so we can have life and health.
The truths of the Bible have no problem with the truths of science. In the end we will find that both are God’s “Books” and both are true. We have no quarrel with how long it took to create because Scripture does not tell us how long one of God’s “days” is. The sun came on Day four. Computers show us the universe is expanding outward at thousands of mile an hour from some central point where everything started. They call it the “Big Bang. ” If true, we have no problem with it. We know there is a “Big Banger”
But creation tells us nothing about his love. Emil Brunner says the “universe with a million fingers points to the fact of God but not one tells us that He cares.” We like to talk of seeing God’s love in things like a baby dear standing by its mother and then we see it ripped open by jackals for food. We praise the goodness of God when we see rain and flowers on a spring morning. Then we learn that rain swept a busload of children off the road to their deaths.
Conscience 4-
We are made “in His image” (Gen. 1) and part of that kind of “life” is the inner “light” we call the conscience. We know instinctively that some things are right and some are wrong.
The Bible calls them “God’s laws written on our hearts / that will accuse or excuse us on the day of Judgment” (Rom. 2:14ff).
This tells us God is a moral and ethical person. He is on the side of right. You cannot love decency and kindness without being opposed to indecency and cruelty. God drew a line over which Adam and Eve were not to cross and when they did they were punished for wrongdoing.
The glory of being human is that we cannot do wrong without feeling bad. The Bible calls conscience, “God’s laws written on our hearts.” (Rom. 2) No animal feels bad about the food it has stolen and brings it back. It can be trained to do it but never feels it “ought” to do it. The IRS has a “Conscience fund” where people, who have gotten away with keeping what they owe, can give it without giving their name. Many are accompanied by notes. One man, wrote: “Here is $500 I owe you. If I still can’t sleep, I’ll send the rest”.
This doesn’t help us, it hurts us. Knowing this God with limitless power, is a moral God who we instinctively believe will punish wrongdoing is frightening because we have done wrong. A child TV star had a wrong relationship with her rock star father beginning in her early teens. In her early twenties she walked in said, “Daddy you and I are going to hell for what we have been doing.” One man wrote on his note to the IRS, “I’m not going to hell for one thousand dollars” We still don’t know if God loves us and will forgive us.
Personal Contacts 6-7 In Genesis 1-11 God spoke to people like Adam and Eve and Noah. John the Baptizer’s name appears here because “the word of the Lord” told him to come and announce Jesus. This was a private and personal encounter. The world knows nothing about this and laughs at it. A man told Archbishop Trench, “What you religious people call answered prayers, the rest of us call coincidences.” Trench said, “That may be true but all I know is that the more I pray, the more coincidences I get, so I think I will keep on praying.”
Genesis 12:1-3 / Job 9:9-24
Chosen People and Their Bible 6-8;15
None of this tells us God loves us so God in Genesis 12, around 2000 BC God began speaking to us through His chosen people and their Bible. John the Baptizer marked the end of the OT witness and the beginning of the NT witness. The OT said God was coming (Isa. 40:1-10) and John said He is here (1:29). Making a nation out of Abraham and interacted with them for 1400 year, and led them to write down a record and interpretation of those interactions. The collection of these writings is what we call the Bible. In that Bible He tells us He loves us and will forgive us.
Hebrews 1:1-3
Christ 7-8 /14-18 Hebrews 1:1-3
Hebrews three tells us, the OT written in a strange and ancient culture, gives us glimpses of God in fragments; in bits and pieces (Hebrews 1:1-3). It is like listening to someone across the world talking through a radio filled with static. Two thousand years ago God left the broadcast station and came to us in Jesus as a human being. He was not God disguised as a human being, He was a human being
Deity
Jesus reveals God because He is God. The Old Testament said God was coming (Isaiah 40:1-10) and called Him, “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” (Isa. 9:6). Jesus claimed to be God. When asked by Philip, “Show us the Father” He said in Jn. 14:
“Have I been with you this long and you don’t know Me? The Father and I are one. He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Jesus assumed the rights of God to forgive sins (Mk. 2:5); and to be the coming judge all men (Mt. 25). He accepted the worship of Thomas when he said, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20:28). If He was not God; this was blasphemy (Acts 14:14-15). The NT writers call Him God. John calls him the creator (Jn. 1:2). Paul says of His return, “We wait for the / appearing of our God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Talking about God Paul told pastors to shepherd the church of God “which he (God) “purchased with His own blood” (Acts 20).
C. S. Lewis reminds us we cannot say Jesus was a good man but not God. A good man, he says, does not claim to have no sin; to have the right to forgive sins on behalf of God and to be the coming Judge all men. Lewis says, “Call him a fool; or a charlatan; but don’t call him a good man if you don’t call him God. That is one option He has not left us.”
Humanity 1:14, 18 / Hebrews 2:14-18; 4:14-16; 5:7-8
But Jesus was also a real, flesh and blood human being. Hebrews 2 He “had to be made like His brothers” with “flesh and blood” / “like us in every way”. There is one exception. He was born “holy” and did not have a depraved sinful nature (Lk. 1:35).
He lived a perfect sinless life even though He was tempted “in every way” like we are. (Heb. 4:15) He offered that life to God on our behalf as a “sweet smelling sacrifice” (Eph. 5:1) so we, by “faith in his blood” can be forgiven. (Rom. 3:24-27 NIV)
How God could become a real human being and remain God is part of the unfathomable mystery of God. Paul said, “Great is the mystery of godliness, God manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16). We can only say
“I know not how that Bethlehem’s Babe
Can in the God-head be
I only know this manger Child
Has brought God down to me
Conversion 9-11 (More Next Week)
Some things cannot be learned in books, they have to be experienced. No one can tell you what it means to be married unless they have been married. Christianity is something personal. It involves a relationship with a living person. I did not know ten Bible verses when I was saved at age 22, but one I did know was how Jesus forgave those who killed him (Luke 23:34). Our hymnal says:
Praying for sinners
While in such woe
No one but Jesus ever loved so
Convinced of my sinfulness and tired and ashamed of the way I was living, I thought of the cross and prayed, "Jesus, I am a sinner from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet; but you forgave the people who crucified you and I believe you will forgive me. I ask you to forgive me and help me live for you. Aman!" This was a personal encounter. It was something between me and Jesus. From that day to this, I say with Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ. The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved ME and gave himself for ME." (Galatians 2:19-20."
