The Journey He Made Series

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about when is the right time to get into the Christmas spirit? How do you know you’re ready to celebrate this holiday? For some, it means putting the outdoor decorations up as early as the day after Halloween (after all, why not get that done before it’s freezing cold outside). For others, they know they’re ready when the gifts are purchased and all wrapped up under the tree (by the way, men, if you haven’t done your shopping yet, this afternoon is a good time to get going). Still others know it’s time when they’ve begun the preparation of the Christmas meal.

The weather often is a gauge that Christmas time has come. In fact, the lack of snow this year has caused some to struggle with getting into the Christmas spirit. Another indicator is the presence of family. This one comes with mixed emotions- there’s the joy of getting together, yet the longing to see loved ones who are no longer with us. For me, it’s the gathering of people- whether it’s to go caroling, hold a party, or gather at candlelight service on Christmas Eve and singing Silent Night by candlelight.

Nonetheless, Christmas has arrived. We’ve spent the last month preparing for it as we’ve talked about emptying the jar. We looked at how the wise men prepared for the journey, how King Herod missed the opportunity to worship, the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, and the sacrifices made by Joseph and others so that Jesus could fulfill His mission. Today, I want to focus on the journey that Jesus made because that’s what Christmas is all about.

The journey of Jesus began at creation. Read John 1:1-5. John begins with a familiar phrase, “In the beginning.” It’s reminiscent of how the Bible starts in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God.” Now, I love this truth. In fact, the dad joke maker in me couldn’t resist turning it into the theme for next week’s Final Friday Lock-In. You see, two years ago, the final Friday was New Year’s Eve, so we celebrated the idea of entering the new year and had everyone lift their left foot in the air at midnight and took a picture so we had proof that we’d all started the year out on the right foot. Last year, the final Friday fell on December 30, or New Year’s Adam since he came before Eve. This year, final Friday lands on December 29, so we’re talking about a new year with God because before Adam and Eve, there was only God.

John begins his gospel by identifying the deity of the Word because of the Gnosticism that had begun to penetrate the early church. Gnostics believed that there was a secret knowledge that could only be gained by joining their inner circle. One of their positions was that this Word (or in Greek, Logos) was a lower demigod created by the one true God. In fact, there are still groups today that are trying to deny the deity of Christ.

For example, one of our teens brought a New World Translation to Sunday school recently. I thought I recognized that name and asked if I could look at it out of concern. Sure enough, I turned to John 1:1 and recognized the error held by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because there’s no definite article in the Greek, they insert the article “a” in front of God, lowering the Word to demigod status. Mind you, the same structure is repeated throughout the chapter and they leave out the article in every other instance.

I even had one time that a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was trying to convince me they got this right. We were both shift managers at a Pizza Hut and would debate the merits of our beliefs during the slow times at work. At one point, he decided that he was going to bring his interlinear Bible to show me how they got the translation right. We opened his Bible that had two columns- one column showed the JW translation and the other had a line in Greek with the English translation of each word below. Of course, their translation was worded “a God” but when we looked at the Greek and English together, the “a” wasn’t there. Even his own Bible demonstrated their error.

John refutes this error by structuring this chapter as something known as a literary chiasm. The Greek letter chi is what we call X and if one was to create an outline using chiasm, it would look like idea A B C then reverse and continue as C B A. So the paragraph we just read declares the identity of the Word- God, Creator, Light. After mentioning that John the Baptist is a witness to the Word, the structure continues by describing the appearance of the Word- Light, Creator, Man.