JOHN: HEARING IS BELIEVING
This begins a series of studies in the Gospel of John. I’m not going to cover every verse or even every chapter. Mostly it will be about various encounters Jesus had with people, personal experiences and John’s messages from the Spirit to us. I pray we will hear these messages for ourselves.
Here’s a word for you
Gospel of John, Chapter 1
God has something to say. To the world. To me. To you.
The first statement that John makes (John 1:1-18) is all about “the Word.” At first we think about verbal speech – perhaps a command or declaration, a law or doctrine. But that is not what this “Word” means. The pronoun is “he” instead of “it.” “He” indicates a person. Then we think it must mean the “man sent from God” in verse six, the man named John (referring to John the Baptist instead of John the author of this Gospel). But no, John was a witness (verse 7) who said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me” (verse 15). This Word tops John the Baptist. In fact he apparently tops anyone since he is the “true light” and he gives “the right to become children of God” and “out of his fullness we have all received grace.” This is someone absolutely unique.
John says so much about the Word before he says who the Word is, but finally he does declare: “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (verse 17). Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, is the Word which God says to us.
Now God had spoken other words before. He had spoken with the design and creation of the material universe (see Psalm 19:1-4). He had spoken through men like Moses and Samuel and David and Isaiah and Daniel, prophets of Israel whose messages were written down and collected in the Old Testament. But those words were not the Word. They were words about the Word. They serve as the introduction to the Word. Those messages are like the subject line in an email – they tell something about what is coming but they are not the complete communication. The New Testament is greater than the Old Testament; it is a clearer and more complete message from God. But even the New Testament is not “the Word.” Jesus is the Word. He is greater than the New Testament. He is the message. He is the communication. He is what God has to say to you and me. When the Lord sent the ultimate message for humanity to know him and receive life from him, he used one Word – one person – Jesus the Messiah.
John reveals that “the Word” is “the one and only Son” (verse 14). He started talking about this in verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Calling him the Son does not mean he is less than the Father. It does not mean he is younger than the Father. The Son was not created. He is and he always has been. The Son and the Father exist on the same level, relating face to face so to speak. Everything that is true about God is true about the Word. The Son is no less Deity than the Father. Everything owes its existence to the Word. God created the universe through the Son. Life itself comes from the Son. The Word is the eternal, all-powerful, holy Creator and Lord of the universe.
Some who believe that God is not real claim that atheism is the default setting for human understanding and worldview. The idea is that we ought to start with Nothing then research for enough material evidence to unearth the presence of a Deity. Do you see any problem with that? How can you unearth something – Someone – that already was when the earth began? How can you use physical, material methods, senses, and instruments to discover something – Someone – who is not physical and material but who is spirit (John 4:24)? No, atheism is not the default setting. God is the default setting. I did not say religion is the default setting. Nor did I say faith is the default setting. God. God is the starting point. Understanding the world and ourselves begins with God. Specifically, Triune God – Father/Son/Spirit.
Seeing is believing. But is seeing the only believing? Some things cannot be seen and can be believed, right? Well, “no one has ever seen God,” John says (verse 18). Efforts – indeed, demands – to see God with scientific evidence will fall short.1 And efforts to insist – to prove – by way of scientific evidence that there is no God to be seen will not succeed. Sorry about that. It’s not because God just refuses to be known scientifically. It is because it just cannot be. It is not a thing. Physical, materialistic, scientific methods only go so far. They do not go far enough to find or prove God. They are not capable of taking us to the default setting. Dismantling and rebuilding an airplane do not enable you to know Orville and Wilbur Wright. Examining and utilizing features and properties of creation do not enable you to actually know the Creator.
I have stopped thinking about God as a “supreme being.” Supreme indicates the best of a category of things. I could have a supreme car, but it would be in the same category as a wreck in a salvage yard; it would be a car that is better than other cars, but it would still be in the category “cars.” It is important to realize that God is not in a category with anything or anyone else. He is not a bigger, better, superlative human. God is absolutely unique. He is not a supreme being – a being that is better than other beings – but being itself, so he is the source of being – maybe that is kind of what John was talking about when he wrote, “In him was life” (verse 4); I think he was saying that and a lot more. Anyway, everything that we experience – everything we know and sense and interact with – is finite. Everything we experience, from the nucleolus of a cell to the entire universe, has limits – limits in size or duration or capacities. God is infinite (even our concept of “infinite” is finite). No limits in anything. He is not in the same category that we are. He transcends everything that we are and that we know. We cannot discover or prove (or disprove) God by what we can know or do with our finite understanding and methodology.
Hearing is believing. Hearing the Word. “The one and only Son…has made him known” (verse 18). The Word describes God, reveals God. In fact, the Word introduces God – the literal meaning of the Greek word translated “made him known” is “leads out to you.” The Word – the Son, the Messiah – brings God to you so you can know him yourself. Well, you can if you are hearing, listening, paying attention, receiving. “Yet to all who did receive him…he gave the right to become children of God” (verse 12). If you will put in the time and concentration to hear the Word, you will become something that you were not. If you will listen to the Messiah, you will become something different. If you will receive the Son, you will become God’s own child. You will know God. We discover the infinite God when he reveals himself to us through his Son.
John explains how the Son made God known. He says, “the Word became flesh” (verse 14). The Word became physical. The Son of God became a real human being. This is not a human becoming a god or godlike. It is not a man attaining transcendent enlightenment. This is the Son of God (who was in the beginning and who was the agent of everything being made) becoming a real human. He had a body with brain and muscles and skin and hair and guts. He had human thoughts and human emotions. He was not a facade or fake. He was a real human with a real physical body like you and me. He is the supreme human being.
The Son “became” a human. He began to be a human. He came into existence as a human. John, writing in the everyday Greek language of his time, uses the same word in this statement as he used in verse 3 to describe how the universe and everything in it began to be – “all things were made” – all things began to be. The Word began to be flesh. This is something brand new. God had never been in the flesh before. He had made features of himself visible to a few people (see Exodus 24:9-10 for example), but he had never been a human before this. The human “Jesus” did not exist before this. The Son of God existed before this – he is eternal. But he was not a human. By becoming flesh he became something he had never been before. When the Holy Spirit caused Mary to be pregnant with the Son (Luke 1:35), he became the God/Man. He was the Creator incarnated, in-the-flesh, like one of the creatures. Maybe you sing about this during the Christmas season with the second verse of Charles Wesley’s carol Hark! the Herald Angels Sing: “Late in time behold Him come, Off-spring of the Virgin’s womb: Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity, Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.”
John says the Word “made his dwelling among us.” He came to where we are. He moved into our neighborhood. Pitched his tent in our campground. Parked his car in our driveway. John’s phrasing echoes the arrival of God in the tabernacle which Moses and the Hebrews built after they left Egypt (see Exodus 25:8-9 and Exodus 40:34-38). The Word becoming flesh was the glory of the Creator and the God of Israel coming to be with his people. The Son of God has lived in our world at a specific time in history in a specific place on Earth. He could have exploded onto the scene with power and splendor. Instead, he was compressed and packed into the womb of a virgin girl and quietly birthed in a stable.
Infinite God chose to be bound by limits. (I wonder if it felt something like a 350 pound man getting stuffed into a suitcase.) The Word who was eternal squeezed into time and space. The Son who was with God in the beginning came to be with people. The Light who gave life became dependent on a mother and father. He grew and lived among the people of Israel approximately 2,000 years ago.
Even before he was executed on a cross, the Son of God made this tremendous sacrifice. He became flesh and lived on Earth. Apparently, he still has that physical body (see Luke 24:39 and Acts 1:9-11).
This is the essential message of Christianity, the unique announcement of Christianity. We might want to say the primary teaching of Christianity is something like God loves you, or love your neighbor (even love your enemy), or live with high moral and ethical standards, or make the world a better place… All of these are components of Christianity, to be sure, but they are not the peculiar truth that Christianity proclaims. The essential message is this: the one God, the Creator of all, has come into our world in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the tune we dance to. This is the foundation we build on. This is the programming of our operating system. How could it not be? If it is true, it takes priority over everything else that we believe and teach and practice and value. There is no Christian faith apart from the reality of the Son of God becoming a human and living in our world.
TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes – 1 I understand and accept that there are evidences in nature which point us to the reality of God’s existence. For an example, see Antony Flew, “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”, HarperCollins, 2007. My point is we cannot actually know God with only those evidences.