Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Jesus as the Word of God from John 1:1–18
We pray, Lord God, as we study your Word that we may begin to feel as the first witnesses felt when they wrote, “The Word became flesh. He lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.” Lord God, grant this evening we may see something of his glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe.
He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. 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. 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. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” ’ From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”
So reads the Word of God.
There is an often-repeated story of a young mother who watches her 4-year-old industriously drawing a picture. She asks, “Heather, what are you drawing?” Heather replies, “I’m drawing a picture of God,” with all the authority that only a 4-year-old can muster. The mother replies, “But Heather, nobody knows what God looks like.” “They will when I’m finished,” she says.
Of course, we laugh at the sheer naivety. Yet, in principle the question that is raised is a good one … How shall we think of God? What is called to mind when we say the word God? We cannot draw pictures. We do not know what he looks like, and in any case, the drawing of pictures is forbidden. So how shall we know him? Well, foundation to all biblical truth is the notion that we shall know him only if he chooses to reveal himself. The question then becomes how and where does he reveal himself? How do we learn about God?
In the first instance, the Bible does insist we know something of him from his creation. Thus the argument of Romans is that at least his existence and his power are to be inferred from the creation, but by itself that would not say a great deal about his character. One could look around at the creation, infer God’s existence and his power, but not necessarily his goodness, and that is what some do infer.
In any case, from the Bible standpoint, most of us are so alienated we have ways of suppressing that knowledge of God and creating in our minds theories to displace any need for God in this or any other condition. We don’t need God to explain the universe, we’re told. Yes, the second law of thermodynamics says the world is running down. The question then arises, “Who started it in the first place?” But there are very sophisticated forms of physics today that try to get around those sorts of problems, so we’ll just squeeze God out.
Well then, we shall know him in his mighty deeds: the extraordinary events in the past where God worked miracles, where he did something special. For example, we shall know him in judgment in the flood or we shall know him at the burning bush that is not consumed or we shall know him in the plagues and the Passover or we shall know him in the thunder and lightning of Mount Sinai and the giving of the Law.
But none of these events or deeds proved unequivocal or long lasting in their effect. The burning bush was a mere curiosity to Moses until God actually spoke. “I must turn aside and see this strange thing. I haven’t seen a bush that burns and doesn’t get burned up before.” The plagues and the terrible judgment? Yes, it served to harden Pharaoh’s heart. And the flood? Sodom and Gomorrah still follow. And the Ten Commandments? While Moses is receiving those we have a golden-calf orgy down below.
Events by themselves are impressive, but they are patient of many interpretations. Thus, even when God speaks in John chapter 12 some think, “Mmmm … Thunder. There were secular-minded folk in the first century, too.” Well then, we shall know God in his words, when he explains his actions, when he talks. It is important to remember from the Bible’s perspective God is a talking God.
He’s not simply the ground of all being or some other or we’re one with the universe and there is sort of an unnamed spirit out there. He is a God who talks in human languages. He’s a talking God. This is extraordinarily important, not only in the initial acts of revelation, tied to specific people and places and times, but the Bible also insists so much of God’s talk has been inscripturated (which simply means it has been written down) so there is a record of it.
We can read it and think about it today. We can learn to think God’s thoughts after him. But it has to be said that words, mere words, can be distant, impersonal, merely formal. Can they not? Supposing none of you had met my wife … Now in case you haven’t, she’s over there in the red. But supposing you hadn’t. You’d never met her (and some of you, I suppose, haven’t), and I attempted to describe her for you.
Well, depending on how well I knew you and how personal I was getting, I would choose my terms, but I might say something very neutral. I might say something purely objective: She’s five-foot-one. She has a very straight carriage. She’s very quick. She’s graying, but she’s married to me so bit is understandable. She likes nineteenth-century literature. She can do almost anything on a Bernina and an overlocker/serger.
Do you feel you are getting to know my wife? Now supposing you wrote to her and asked her for a whole lot of information about buttonholing on a Bernina sewing machine, and she wrote back with endless yards of words explaining it all so now you have some words about her and some words from her. Would you then feel you knew her? Well add in to that, now, that you have gotten to know her working with Pioneer Clubs or you have come and stayed with us for a month.
You have seen what we’re like when we get up in the morning and how we respond to the children, what kind of sense of humor we have or don’t have, how we interact as a family. Then if I were to describe her in exactly the same words or you were to get exactly the same letter from her about the Bernina, would not the words take on a whole new dimension of life even though the words were exactly the same?
In other words, personal knowledge of a person makes words about that person or by that person immeasurably richer than words without any personal knowledge at all. One of the reasons why the Bible seems like such a strange, enclosed book to so many people is they don’t know it’s ultimate Author. There is a sense in which the better you get to know God the more the Bible speaks, the more it’s words come together, they cohere. Together they form a picture. They call to mind someone you know.
What is needed is not only words but a genuine knowledge of God, not just knowledge about God. Under the old covenant, God disclosed himself by his Spirit in some very personal ways, did he not? Under the new covenant that is the whole claim. There is a kind of new birth. The Spirit comes to us so we know him in our experience. It is not merely a true-false test you pass to prove you are a Christian. Provided you have enough facts, you’re in. There is a knowledge of God that is personal.
But even there, it is hard sometimes to think through exactly what is meant by personal knowledge of transcendent God. Is it not? We speak of personally knowing Jesus and the like, but deep down we start recognizing that at some level our language is analogical, isn’t it? When we speak of personal knowledge, when I speak of knowledge of a person or personal friendship, then there are all kinds of things that are presupposed because I’m talking about one finite person with another finite person. There are questions and there are answers.
I ask you what you did, and you tell me. You ask me what I did, and I tell you. You tell me I’m wrong, and I say I don’t believe you; I think I’m right. Then we argue. Or we go out together, and we separate then we come back together again. So all of our presuppositions about personal knowledge (when we just hear the expression) have to do with personal knowledge of one finite person for another finite person, someone you can touch and see and handle.
Now suddenly you’re talking about personal knowledge of a God who, according to Scripture, is transcendent, he above space and time, and all the rest, yet who is also personal. He talks and interacts with us, and we’re not sure exactly what that looks like. How does that help us to think better about God? But even here God has done something to cut across the barrier.
You see, all these steps of revelation, I want to say, are real steps, but we are so perverse we manage to twist them. God has disclosed himself in creation, but we’re so blind we don’t see it. God has disclosed himself in great events, but we can always find other interpretations. God has disclosed himself in words, but to some of us they’re dead. God has disclosed himself to us in Spirit, but we may run from him. God has disclosed himself to us, also, in human form. “The Word was with God. The Word was God. The Word became flesh.”
So if we find it inadequate to think through what God is like apart from this ultimate self-disclosure, here’s the best one of all. That, in part, is what the prologue is about. “The Word was with God. The Word was God. The Word became flesh.” There is a sense in which John is saying, if you want to think about God, study Jesus. That’s what we’ll be doing as we begin to pursue this course in John.
Now the passage begins with words that would have been well known to anybody who had the smallest modicum of biblical language and biblical understanding in the first century. “In the beginning …” What would anybody think of who knew that Bible at all? Well, they would think of Genesis 1, wouldn’t they? That’s the way the Bible starts. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
There is still a word that is being spoken here. “In the beginning was the Word …” And it still goes on to talk about creation, but it moves quickly from creation to what Paul calls new creation. John writes, “In the beginning was the Word …” What does that mean? We’ve become so familiar with these expressions we sometimes don’t pause to think what these expressions mean.
In Greek the word here rendered word can basically mean one of two things: It can refer to inner thought or science or logic. That gives us all of our –logy words in English. Geology is the logy, the science, of the ge, which is the ancient word for earth or land. So geology is the study of land and land forms. Do you see? Theology is the logy of theos, which is the word for God. So it’s the science, the logic, if you like, of God.
Psychology is the science, the logy, of psuchÈ, which is the ancient word for soul or mind. But more commonly, I think, the word refers not so much to inner thought as to outward expression. Speech, if you like. Message. For reasons I shan’t go into now, I think that is what is at stake here. Thus for example in John 8:31 Jesus says, “If you hold to my word …” The NIV has teaching. It’s exactly the same word as here. “If you hold to my teaching …” To the expression of my instruction. “… then you are truly my disciples.”
Or remember the passage in 1 Corinthians 1:18. “The word of the cross is to those who perish, foolishness.” That doesn’t mean the word cross is foolishness, but the message of the cross, the word of the cross. So also here. “In the beginning was the Word …” It’s the outward expression of God, if you like. “In the beginning was the message. In the beginning was the self-expression, and this self-expression was with God, and this self-expression was God.”
Some have paraphrased it, “In the beginning God expressed himself, and God’s self-expression was with God, and God’s self-expression was God.” Now why does John say this, ultimately, of Jesus? Why? One of the reasons is this: In the rest of John’s gospel there are all kinds of titles given to Jesus. Son of Man. Son of God. Rabbi. King of Israel. Some of them we’ll come to in due course. For example, when we get to John 5 we’ll spend a fair bit of time on what we mean by saying Jesus is the Son of God.
But in the prologue, which serves as a kind of introduction to the whole, one of the reasons why he doesn’t take any one of these titles is he wants a title that’s going to sum up the whole thing. If he uses the controlling title here, let’s say, Son of God, then you’d be inclined to read the whole gospel as if that is the controlling title for Jesus, all through. Instead he has a whole lot of titles all through. Then he uses a summarizing one right at the beginning, and it is this one: Word or Word of God.
What would that call up to people who are biblically literate in the first century? Well in the Old Testament, God’s word or the word of the Lord is connected primarily to three things, the first of which is creation. Thus, not only in Genesis 1 God spoke and worlds came into being, but it’s summarized in Psalm 33 this way, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made.” So God made things by his word. Now that’s not personified. It just means God spoke, but it’s a way of referring to what God did.
God spoke, and his powerful word was enough to bring everything into being. He has the power just to speak and things happen. So it’s connected with creation. Still not referring to Jesus, but it’s connected with creation. Then, it’s connected with revelation. Again and again and again the prophets say, “The word of the Lord came to me …” or “The word of the Lord came to the prophet Isaiah saying …” or “In the year that King Uzziah died the word came to him saying …” or something like that. Do you see?
Then it’s connected also with deliverance or salvation. Thus for example, when some of the people are ill in Psalm 107, God sent forth his word and healed them. He delivered them. Or, “My word will not return to me empty but will accomplish what I desire. If I promise to bring the people back from exile, that’s what happens. I send forth my word, and they are brought back.”
In short, in the Old Testament, God’s word is God’s powerful self-expression in creation, in revelation, and deliverance. So when John looks around for a title he can apply to Jesus, he lands on that one. It’s not, he’s saying, all these individual passages refer to Jesus, because they don’t, in the first instance. He just finds it the very best way of summarizing who Jesus is. Jesus is the one who is God’s agent in creation. Jesus is the one who does disclose God. He reveals him. Jesus is the one who does bring salvation.
He can’t think of a better summarizing term than this one to summarize everything he’s going to say in the whole book. In fact, when this was being written it was well understood that the main prophets of Old Testament times … They had been silent for hundreds of years, since about 400 BC There were other lesser charismatic figures who were sometimes called prophets, but a first-century historian like Josephus can always distinguish between the people who call themselves prophets in his day and the great prophets whose writings are down in Holy Writ.
It was expected the next time a prophet spoke it would be none less than the Messiah. Now John says God may have been silent, but the next word he spoke, as it were, was Jesus. Exactly the same thought is found in the opening verses of another book of the New Testament. It is the epistle to the Hebrews. Listen to these words: “In the past, God spoke to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways …” See this emphasis on revelation? In spoken word, in different ways, over a period of time.
“In the past, God spoke to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us …” Then the NIV has “by his Son,” which makes it sound almost as if the Son is just one more prophet. But that’s not what the text says. “He has spoken unto us …” Literally. “… in Son.” The expression means the ultimate speech is the Son. He has spoken unto us in the Son revelation. Before he spoke unto us in words through the prophets. Now he has spoken unto us in his Son, which is another way of saying the Son is the ultimate word.
The Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he made the universe. The Son is the irradiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of his being, and so forth. Do you see? But the notion of God’s ultimate self-disclosure in these last days, that is at the end of time … That is the way the New Testament regularly sees the entire period from Christ’s first coming to the end of history. “… in these last days he has spoken unto us by his Son …” He has done so, ultimately, through Jesus Christ.
Then the text says, “This Word was with God …” God’s own fellow. “… and this Word was God …” God’s own self. In other words, there is both distinction and identity. Now a little further on in John we’ll come to some of these categories, because they’re difficult to think about. They are very important, for they are the foundation of the whole doctrine of the Trinity, ultimately.
We start saying Jesus is the Word, the Word is God, but yet we don’t mean by that, any of us, that the Word is so exhaustively God there is no God left, because then who was Jesus praying to? But yet we don’t want to say Jesus is a second-class god or some inferior god or some local deity or some subordinate god, do we? The language won’t allow it. These are monotheistic Jews, monotheistic Christians, and ultimately the great confession of this book at the high point after Jesus’ resurrection is to Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”
No. Christians have always insisted the Word made flesh was both God’s own fellow, and thus distinguishable from him in some ways, and God’s own self, identifiable with him in some ways. Now what some of those ways are we’ll probe a little more when we come to John, chapter 5. So the Word is introduced right at the very beginning, and than John says five things about this Word in the next 18 verses.
1. The Word creates us.
Verses 1–3. The logic of the passage is that the middle clause of verse 1, “The Word was with God,” is repeated in verse 2 to prepare the way for verse 3. That’s the logic. It’s picked out of verse 1 and repeated, “He was with God in the beginning,” in order to prepare the way for verse 3. He was with God in the beginning and, thus, became God’s agent in creation. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
The Word, the pre-incarnate Christ, made all things. I thought about that one and thought about that one and hurt my head trying to do so and for years didn’t come up with any satisfactory answer. I could see it’s a biblical theme. For example, in one of Paul’s letters, Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15 to 20, the text says, “… all things were made by him and for him. By him all things consist.” Hebrews, likewise, says something similar.
It’s not an uncommon theme in the New Testament, that all things were made by the pre-incarnate, that is the pre-enfleshed Christ, the Word, when he was with the Father before the world began. It’s a common enough theme, but why include it here? It doesn’t seem to fit somehow. But as our world in the West has become more and more and more (for a variety of reasons we’ll explore in the next weeks) like the first-century world, this doctrine becomes more important.
The doctrine of creation in the Bible is not primarily something to fight over. It is primarily something to ground our responsibility in. Have you ever talked to someone about your faith and their response is, “You know I’m really happy for you. I’m really pleased for you. But you know, that’s your truth; it’s not my truth. Frankly, I just wish you’d let go on it. You’re going to jeopardize a friendship if you push me too far on this one.”
Well, in a Sunday school class we were looking at this from the point of view of the book of Revelation, and there the doctrine of creation and its function at the end of chapter 4 is made very clear indeed. It grounds responsibility. You have to say, sooner or later (in the most loving terms, but you still have to say it), “Listen. I can’t just let it go, because from the Bible’s perspective you’re responsible to him because he made you. You owe your existence to him.
If you say, ‘This is just for you and I want to follow my own way, and what do I owe him for, in any case,’ all you’re doing is showing how anarchic you are, how much you fail to come to terms with the realities that are: that he has made you, he demands an accounting from you, and at the end of time he will get it. So I can’t just ignore it and say it’s all subjective and it all depends on your point of view.”
The doctrine of creation grounds human accountability. It grounds responsibility. We are responsible before God because, in the first instance, he made us. Now we’re going to see through this prologue a whole lot of basic Christian doctrines that are set out. This is the first, and I think the reason why John puts this here is although he is writing (in my view) to evangelized Greeks and proselytes in the Diaspora in the Greco-Roman world who have some biblical knowledge …
Nevertheless, they’re influenced by their day, as well, and their day in the Roman Empire was full of pluralism just like today, full of notions about god in which god and all of us and animal life and the stones and the trees and the rocks are all part of one great, happy, New Age deity. They could speak of one god in one sense. Oh, they had many gods, but they could speak of one god, in one sense, in that he’s sort of the god behind all the gods, this sort of ectoplasmic god, this sort of unmoved mover-god way back there somewhere whom you can neither see nor know.
John wants to make it very sure the ground of everything else that comes in his gospel is first based on this little moment of review: the doctrine of creation. We have been made by God. We’ve been made for God. In fact, we’ve been made by the very person who made himself flesh, and we’re responsible to him. That fact comes out very clearly in the next few verses, as we’ll see.
2. The Word gives us light and life.
Verse 4: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.”
Now suppose for argument’s sake you had never read John’s gospel before. You’ve never heard it, never read it. You’re picking it up for the first time, and you’ve carefully read, very thoughtfully, this strange book that begins for the first three verses about this Word from God, creation. You’ve read the first three verses; you understand something of that. Then you read verses 4 and 5. Nothing else. Just 4 and 5 now.
How would you read it? What would this be referring to? Wouldn’t you read that still in terms of creation? Wouldn’t you? You’ve been introduced to this Word made flesh, then you’ve been introduced to the fact he is God’s agent in creation, and then you read, “In him was life. That life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”
In fact, you’d say, “Well, ‘In him was life …’ He had the life he could give so the rest of us could live. ‘… that life was the light of men … ‘That is, because he gives us light, any kind of moral perceptions or alignment we have comes from the light he himself has given us. ‘… the light shines in the darkness …’ Well, the darkness, a bleak nothingness before anything existed. Before anything existed, he shines in the darkness. And the darkness …”
In fact, in Greek there’s a pun. If you take a look at the footnote of the NIV, the text has “has not understood it,” the footnote has, “has not overcome it.” In fact, there is a pun in the original. The closest I could think of, in English, is has not mastered it. So that you could master by overpowering or you could master, as in mastering chess or mastering advanced calculus or something. Mastering a subject, learning it.
So if you say, “has not mastered it,” the darkness couldn’t stop this Word from speaking. The Word spoke and worlds leapt into being. So out of the darkness and blackness of nothingness creation could not be stopped. He spoke, and there was light. He spoke, and there was life! So powerful was he. Isn’t that the way you’d naturally read verses 4 and 5 if you hadn’t read any of the rest of the book?
A lot of you do more flying than I do. I’m sure some of you have laptop computers and you sit there working on the plane and then shut them off just before landing. But every once in a while, you’re all up to date on your accounts and you stop at the airport terminal and pick up a whodunit. You have three and a half to four hours to LA, so you sit down and read to find out whodunit.
By the time you land at LA you have found out whodunit, so you leave the book in the pocket of the seat in front of you or you throw it into the trashcan as you leave the plane. It’s not a book you’re going to put in your library. But there are other books you read (and they might even be whodunits) that are so good you want to keep them.
You might read them the first time to get the plotline, and then you read them again because they describe the part of the country you were brought up in, and the evocations are so good you like to read it. Or you read it because the manner of characterizing the people is so rich you enjoy it. Now maybe some of you aren’t readers and you don’t have any of these queer delights. But those of you who are readers, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you can imagine it.
Well the question, then, is this … Does John intend for his book to read more than once? We live in a throwaway society so we don’t usually think in terms like that, but I think there are all kinds of signals in John’s book (we’ll stumble across some of them in the next few weeks) where John intends us to be introduced to something which he then explains a little later.
We saw that in our brief survey of some chapters in the Apocalypse in the same way. Those of you who were in that course, do you remember the second beast? Then the second beast is expounded further in chapter 17, although he’s introduced in chapter 13. John is constantly doing that sort of thing. You introduce something, you tease in out a little bit, and then you read on a bit more, and then you get a whole lot more on that same thing, and you say, “Aha!”
Then you go back and read the first bit again, and it makes sense. Do you see? Those are literary techniques, to have you reread and reread and reread and reread. A good author will do that kind of thing. A good author won’t explain it all the first time something is introduced. He teases it out a little bit. Do you see? That’s also part of what gets you to go back and read it again, because you then see layers of things that were there in the text if you’d only known a little bit more, but you have to read on a bit further ‘til you get them out.
So also here. If you read verses 4 and 5 solely in the light of verses 1, 2, and 3, you will think of creation, will you not? But if you read through the rest of the book and find out how light and life were used and then go back and read verses 4 and 5, you have another whole view. For as you read through the rest of the book you’re told, for example, that Jesus says in John chapter 8, verse 12, “I am the light of the world.” He’s not talking about creation. He’s talking about what he is as he comes into the world; he’s talking about incarnation.
Or think about John chapter 3, verses 19 and following: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” Now at this point, you’re not talking about creation light versus the darkness of nothingness. You’re talking about moral light versus the blackness of sin versus the decay of corruption, aren’t you? It’s come into the world. The world is already there! “Light has come into the world …”
Everyone who does evil hates the light. Well, you can’t say that about creation light. There’s no evil yet that’s performed. There’s no performer to perform it. “… but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” We’ll come to that passage in due course. So when you now read verses 4 and 5, having read through the whole rest of the gospel of John, in which John presents Jesus as the Light of the world and presents him as giving eternal life, now read verses 4 and 5 and you see them another way.
“In him was life …” Indeed, eternal life. “… and that life was the light of men.” Unless we have his eternal life, we do not have a guide in this morally corrupt and dark world. We please ourselves. We need his life, eternal life, in order to orientate our whole beings toward what is true and good and godly and right and clean. “The light shines in the darkness …” Now not the darkness of nothingness before anything was, but now you start wondering, “Is this talking about when Jesus came into the word?”
“The light shines in the darkness …” He comes into the world and is such a beacon of God’s self-disclosure in a dark world. “… but the darkness has not …” Then you have your pun. Then you realize why John has used the pun. It’s not merely not overcome it, but hasn’t even understood it. It hasn’t mastered it, which is a setup for what is going to come in verse 10, as we’ll see in a moment.
“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” Do you see? That is why you have the little section in there, verses 6 to 9. That is why you have it. It’s very important. John the Baptist is introduced. Now he may have been introduced, in part, so people at this time would not be seduced into thinking John’s followers (some of whom were still around) were actually following the Messiah.
Some of John’s followers later tried to make John the Baptist the Messiah, and John the Evangelist is saying, “No, no. You have that wrong. John the Baptist was not the Messiah. He came only as a witness to bear witness to the One who really was the light.” Do you see? That’s part of what he’s doing. But in part, he is also making this advent of the light a witnessable event. John the Baptist was not there to witness the light at creation. So now you have your first clue, in verses 6 to 9, that verses 4 and 5 can’t be read just with verses 1 to 3.
Verses 1 to 3 introduce creation; verses 4 and 5 you can read, then, in the light of creation. But then suddenly you have verses 6 through 9. “There was a man who came from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.”
So now you have a witnessable event. Do you see? That suddenly shows you that this coming of the light into the world is bound up not only with creation (because that connection is still there) but now with the shining of the light into the world in something more, in a person, in an event, to which John the Evangelist bears witness. The Word gives us light and life. We still use that sort of thing today, do we not, in revival hymns such as this one by Graham Kendrick:
Lord, the light of your love is shining
In the midst of the darkness, shining.
Jesus, Light of the world, shine upon us
Set us free by the truth you now bring us
Shine on me, shine on me
Shine, Jesus, shine
Fill this land with the Father’s glory
Blaze, Spirit, blaze
Set our hearts on fire
Flow, river, flow
Flood the nations with grace and mercy
Send forth your word
Lord, and let there be light
It’s built on such imagery as this, isn’t it? The Word gives us light and life.
3. The Word confronts us and divides us.
Verses 10 through 13: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” What is the world? Well, we can ask another question. “What is worldliness?” When I was a boy worldliness was a hot topic in Christian circles. It’s not longer a hot topic. Some of you grinned, so I know what vintage you are. In those days, there was all kind of talk about the dangers of worldliness and the wisdom of separation from the world.
We had various ways of remembering what worldliness was. I used to hear, “Never drink, smoke, swear, or chew [chew tobacco], and never go out with girls who do.” This was not necessarily the sum of all worldliness, but it wasn’t far off. It was pointed out, on occasion, that the Greek word world is from kosmos. Kosmos is cognate (part of the same word group) as kosmeÛ, to adorn, from which we get our English word cosmetics. Thus, worldliness is connected with cosmetics.
Do you believe me? I wasn’t convinced at the time. Since then, I’ve probably learned a few more things about word studies. In any case you just can’t handle words like that. Nevertheless world is a loaded word in John. It occurs 70-odd times, and in only two or three of them is the word neutral. In the last two verses of this book, the word world is neutral. It’s a potentially big library. You didn’t know that was in the gospel of John, did you? But it’s there. Look them up.
The last two verses in the gospel of John use the word world as a potentially big library. The text says, “There are many other things that Jesus did. So many, in fact, if they were all written down, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” Thus world is just a big place for holding a lot of books. There’s nothing morally good about it or morally bad about it. It’s just a big potential library. I like that usage.
But usually in John, world is associated with the created order, especially human beings in rebellion against God or else a setup for that. That’s what’s at stake here. “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” Even when we read John 3:16, “God so loved the world …” We’re not to think God’s love is so wonderful because the world is so big but God’s love is so wonderful because the world is so bad. That’s what we’re to think.
So, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” That, thus, teaches creation. And, “He’s come into the world,” which teaches incarnation. And, “The world doesn’t recognize him.” This teaches sin, fall, failure. “He came to that which was his own …” The idiom might almost be: “He came to his own people, to his own culture,” if you like. “He came to his own home.” “… but his own people did not receive him.” That’s what is meant. Not because the Jews were worse than the rest of us, but because they were paradigms of all of us.
They weren’t worse! They just did first what the rest of us do. We were made by him, but the world doesn’t own him. We sometimes sing about those things, too, perhaps better than we say them in other ways. This hymn is a hymn that was written three and a half centuries ago, so some of the language is a bit old, but it’s quite moving. It’s not sung here, but it is worth thinking about. It was written by a pastor, Samuel Crossman, in the mid-seventeenth century, 1650 or thereabouts.
My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shone,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh and die?
He came from his blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend,
My Friend indeed
Who at my need
His life did spend.
Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sang;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
Is all their breath,
And for his death
They thirst and cry.
They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful he
To suff’ring goes,
That He His foes
From thence might free.
In life no house, no home,
My Lord on earth did have;
In death no friendly tomb,
But what a stranger gave.
What may I say?
Heav’n was his home;
But mine the tomb
Wherein you lay.
Here might I stay and sing
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Could gladly spend.
In other words, what John does here is stress the entailment of the doctrine of the fall. So we have had creation and fall. Now it’s very important for us to stop just for a moment and think about that. There was a time in Western culture (and it still exists in some part of this country in places that are a little more conservative or where the decay has not stepped in quite so fast for some reason or another) where most people, even if they weren’t Christians, bought into a Judeo-Christian worldview.
Thus they held there was one God, that God ultimately had made us, that God holds us to account at the end, that we’re sinful, and that we’re in rebellion against God. Now where you go from that, there are a lot of options. Some people thought by trying hard you could make it. You know? “God’s a nice guy, grades on a curve. I’m not as bad as some people I know. I’ll be all right in the end.” Others thought, “Well, you know. God’s a God of love. We’ll all make it unless we’re terrible, like Hitler.”
Others thought, “Well, I made a profession of faith when I was 5 in Sunday school somewhere. Once in, you’re always in. You’re all right.” So there are different kinds of theologies and theories, but they all were parasitic on this one sort of Judeo-Christian heritage. There is a God. He made us. Yes, we’re in trouble and in some measure lost. He judges us at the end, and his salvation has something to do with Jesus somewhere. He was at least a very nice guy.
There was some kind of Judeo-Christian framework, and a great deal of gospel preaching in that kind of framework was trying to establish who Jesus really is, what his cross work is all about, the significance of his death on our behalf, the need for faith to trust him. But all such talk is itself dependent upon already adopting this Judeo-Christian heritage. Is it not?
If instead, God means something else, if you have some sort of New Age god and if you understand your problem to be not finally anarchy against this living God, but instead loneliness or bad genes or being abused as a child or a tough break in life or whatever, then at the end of the day, even if you say, “Yes, well. Yes, of course, I have done some bad things. I’m a bit ashamed of them, but you know, we’ve all done bad things. At heart, I’m not a bad guy,” then suddenly we don’t see our offense, either, in terms of rebellion against the living God.
Then if you try to present Christianity in this kind of framework, so you’re no longer over there in the Judeo-Christian heritage, but you’re over here in another kind of heritage, and you start talking about how Jesus dies for you and how he really loves you and how important it is to have faith in him, the people on the street who have bought into some kind of New Age theory are hearing you quite differently from what you’re trying to say.
They’re hearing you to say something like this: “If you want to live a fulfilled life, take a sort of running-leap jump into this Jesus stuff. It might help. Do you want to save your marriage? Do you want to have peace? Do you want to be fulfilled? Do you want to be disciplined? Do you want to live a good life?” Do you see? And we can, in fact, unwittingly support that distortion by quoting our texts so we think we are winning people when we’re not!
For example, we quote John, chapter 10, verse 10: “I have come that they might have life and might have it abundantly.” So Jesus has come to give us all the abundant life, right? But now you’re no longer a Judeo-Christian heritage over here, you’re in a New Age, self-seeking, self-fulfilling, me-first, individualistic, neo-platonic worldview, and within this framework you say, “I have come that they might have abundant life.” What do you mean by abundant life? I’m satisfied. I’m fulfilled. I’m enjoying myself. Things are going quite nicely. Things are working out. Isn’t that what it said?
What this means, then, if we are to preach the gospel properly to people without any Judeo-Christian worldview, is you have to start farther back. That’s what it means. One of the reasons why, still, the greatest number of converts who come into our churches and who stick, who demonstrate their conversion is real because they do endure … The reason the greatest percentage of them come from people with some kind of churchy background is that they still have bought into a Judeo-Christian worldview. The gospel we articulate still makes some kind of sense.
But there is a huge crowd out there (and it is getting bigger) of people who don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They don’t know anything. They don’t know what a gospel is. God is a good word, somehow. Sin is a snicker word. When you hear it, you snicker. It doesn’t make anybody embarrassed. You know, everybody is sinning on TV all the time. It’s only a question of what you can get away with. Besides, sin is different for different people, isn’t it? Within this kind of framework, notion of fall? It doesn’t make sense.
Why wouldn’t God like me? I like me. And if I don’t like me, then I go to a psychiatrist and spend thousands of dollars for him to tell me what a lovely guy I am, because after all, if you don’t love yourself you can’t love others, can you? Have you heard that one before? How does that line up with Jesus? “Unless you deny yourself, you can’t find yourself.” We get all these things gradually twisted around until we have another whole framework and then we say, “Jesus is come to give you the abundant life. Trust him.” What are they hearing?
No, I am persuaded, I am profoundly persuaded, when we start evangelizing now people who are really way out there, people, the growing number of Americans and others in this country, who really don’t have any idea at all, then you have to start thinking your way through a passage like Acts, chapter 17, where Paul is preaching in an entirely pagan framework … not in a synagogue now, but in an entirely pagan framework … where they don’t know anything. What does he start off by doing? He starts talking about God, his aseity.
That’s a word theologians used to use; they don’t use it anymore. But what it means is his independence. He says he doesn’t need us. He’s not made happier by us, as if God, the poor chap, is all huddled in the corner, curled up because we don’t love him enough. The God of aseity, the God of creation. He’s independent. The Sovereign God who runs things. He disposes of nations as he wills. He calls people to repentance. There’s a final judgment at the end, toward which we’re moving. That’s the framework he has before he even mentions Jesus.
A friend of mine, 20 years ago, went to India as a missionary where he was supposed to be doing church planting work. He learned Hindi pretty well. He had two or three terms out there, three and a half years each. He saw hundreds and hundreds and hundred of people make professions of faith. Not one of them stuck, or if they stuck they stuck in a nice syncretistic sort of way.
There was no church planted at the end of it. At least they believed in Jesus now, and they also believed in Hindu and anything else that came through, the various Hindu gods, thousands of them. Jesus was a nice one to add on. He was terribly troubled. People had talked with him. Missionaries had worked with him, with this other missionary, but he didn’t see his way out of things at all.
He came home for a furlough and then went back again, and this time he determined he would take two steps. First, instead of going around to lots and lots of villages, he concentrated on just two. Secondly, he started in Genesis. He built up the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the fall, the doctrine of teleology in history, of history moving somewhere toward an end where God calls us all to account. Because in most pagan religions, the world just goes ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.
That’s the basis of a reincarnation view. You just go around and around and around and around. Individuals climb higher up, but the history itself is not going anywhere. So what he was doing was establishing a framework. In the framework, then, he introduced Jesus as the supreme revelation, the one who bears sin and guilt, and so on. By the end of that tour, he had seen a number of conversions and had planted two churches.
Now I think in the West, we’re moving in that kind of situation. We can keep on playing our in-house games if we’re Southern Baptists because they’re in a culture now where all of that stuff is still being circulated, although it’s dying. In our own circles we can still keep on talking to ourselves if we just talk to other people who are church-ified … maybe not Christians but at least exposed somewhere, “done,” when they were young.
But as we talk increasingly to people who just don’t have any connections anywhere, even the shape of our evangelism, I think, has to shift a bit. You have to start farther back. When I have done the odd university mission or the like over the last few years, that’s where I have tried to begin. I would start with some such talk as The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels, and talk about the doctrine of creation and fall or The God Who Writes His Own Agreements and talk about the Abrahamic covenant.
You don’t call it the Abrahamic covenant in a university mission, but that’s what you’re doing. In each one you have to make your connections to Jesus, that’s true, but you have to lay the pillars of the biblical account. There’s a whole worldview that is at stake before the introduction of Jesus is even sensible, before it makes sense as a Christian set of truths. Otherwise, people don’t hear what you’re really calling them to. Now of course, that can be done in five minutes. It can be done in 20 hours or 40 hours.
It depends a bit on how ready people are to listen. I am persuaded, though, that in our evangelism, one way or the other, there are some basics now you have to start nailing down as part of witness. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why some of these basics are being nailed down here. John, in introducing Jesus to people who are biblically literate (we’ll see that’s the case) but in the midst of a very pagan, very pluralistic, culture wants to nail down the basics for us, and the us here is a fallen world.
This doesn’t mean there’s no hope for anybody. After all, verses 11 through 13: “To those who did receive 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.” Now these people are variously described as having received him, having believed in his name, having become children of God, and generated by God. That’s the way they’re talked about. He wants to make sure there is no possibility of understanding this generation as natural.
They are not born of natural descent, not children of God in that sense. The Jews were children of God in some sense. Do you see? They belong to him, but these are not born of “… natural descent, nor of human decision …” It’s not just up to me. God has to have his sovereign play in this. “… or a husband’s will …” In a time when most sexual encounters were understood to be initiated by the male. “… but born of God.” This was something quite different from ordinary generation. This is not generation; this is regeneration.
Now one of the things the prologue does is introduce all kinds of themes that are then picked up later in the book. Here the theme of the new birth, or regeneration, is then picked up, as you know, in the encounter with Nicodemus in John, chapter 3. We’ll pick that account up in due course.
But it doesn’t mean these people were intrinsically better. We all belong to the world, and only some are regenerated. That begins to build the anticipation of what makes the difference. This brings us, now, to the fourth point. Before John starts talking about the difference, he wants to say more about the Word.
4. The Word incarnates God for us.
Verses 14 and 15. Now incarnate is not a commonplace word anymore. We might say the Word enfleshes God for us. That’s all it means. The Word enfleshes God for us. Now no one can doubt what “coming of the light” John has been talking about. The text reads, “The Word …” This Word that was with God, and this Word that was God. “… became flesh …”
Now it doesn’t say this Word assumed a human body or just sort of pretended or took on an aura or was wearing a flesh-like garment, but became human flesh. This Word that was with God and was God also now is human! In other words this is not a pretend human being. This is a real human being. He becomes human. He becomes what he once was not. The Word always was God. The Word was not always human. The Word now becomes human.
So much so, we are told, he “… made his dwelling among us.” Literally, he tented among us. “We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Now one of the things John is constantly doing in the gospel of John, but even more so in the Apocalypse, is dropping in words and expressions and figures of speech that anybody who is biblically literate picks up right away. You know how a 4-year-old or a 5-year-old does it.
They’ve been hearing Bible stories or something, family devotions or Sunday school, and then you’re sitting there in church and the pastor gets up and he starts to quote something and your 4-year-old or your 6-year-old turns to you, “I know that one!” The reason why, of course, is they’ve been exposed to it and they’re hearing it. So someone, then, who is steeped in the Old Testament, beginning to read the gospel of John, starts saying, “I know that bit!” or “I know where that bit comes from!” Do you see?
In part you get the additional layers of richness of the gospel of John the better you know the Old Testament. Now here in verses 14 and 15, there is no doubt what passages this is referring to. There are six or seven allusion in the space of just about six or seven lines to one sustained passage in the Old Testament. It’s found in Exodus 32, 33, and 34. It’s what happens right after the golden calf incident. In the golden calf incident, if you recall, the Ten Commandments are being given by God to Moses by on Mount Sinai.
The people are having an orgy down below and creating gods for themselves and worshipping this golden calf and saying, “This is what brought us out of Egypt,” and so on. Moses comes down the mountain. He’s so enraged and disappointed and hurt that he takes the tablets of stone and smashes them, and God says, “Get out of the way, Moses. I’m going to wipe out this people.”
Moses intercedes for the people and, finally, God has mercy upon them instead of wiping them out. In fact, thousands are destroyed as the gold is ground up to dust and powder and thrown into the water and the people are made to drink it, and so on. It’s all over. It’s just bleakness and darkness everywhere. In that framework God says, “I can no longer allow my Tent of Meeting, my tabernacle, in the midst of you.”
Because originally it had been right in the middle of the camp. Then you had three tribes north, three south, three east, and three west. It was always right in the middle of the camp. The shekinah glory came down on the tabernacle, right in the middle of the camp. But God says, “There’s no way. I would just break out in wrath against them.” It becomes a whole symbol of God’s frustration and anger with his people. The tent is put way outside the camp.
Now within that framework, then, we now pick up the account. The Lord is still replying to Moses at the end of 32, “ ‘Go, lead this people to the place I spoke of to you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them.’ And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf.” Then, beginning in chapter 33, verse 7: “Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the “tent of meeting.” That may have been the tabernacle, but it’s not quite certain.
“Anyone inquiring of the Lord would go to the tent of meeting outside the camp. And whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people rose and stood at the entrances to their tents, watching Moses until he entered the tent. As Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stay at the entrance, while the Lord spoke with Moses.
Whenever the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, they all stood and worshipped, each at the entrance to his tent. The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aid Joshua the son of Nun, did not leave the tent.” Now that’s the way it was working, all outside the camp.
Then you get this particular prayer of Moses. What does Moses talk to God about during these days? What is he praying over? What is he saying? You get one of the most passionate passages in the book of Exodus. Chapter 33, verses 12 and following: “Moses said to the Lord, ‘You’ve been telling me, “Lead these people,” but you’ve not said to me whom you will send with me.’ ” Moses was always asking for help, wasn’t he? That’s how he got Aaron in the first place. Do you remember?
He’s feeling very isolated and lonely now. Aaron has just gone belly-up. He’s the one who built the golden calf. “ ‘You have said, “I know you by name and you have found favor with me.” If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so that I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.’ ” Moses, after all, is reading all that’s going on now as God’s rejection of his people.
“The Lord replies, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’ ” Now that’s what God says, but God has just finished saying, “I’m taking my presence and my tent outside.” So Moses replies, “ ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?’ ”
“The only thing that marks us out as being different is that we are the place where the living God himself discloses himself, and now you say, ‘Take the tabernacle outside?’ ” “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.’ ” If I read the account rightly, the tabernacle is brought inside the camp again, because it’s there from now on.
“Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ ” “I want to see you as you really are.” Do ever feel like that with God? As if you could face almost anything, but “Show me your glory.” I don’t want church to be unreal. I don’t want life to be unreal. “Show me your glory, and I can endure almost anything.” That’s what Moses is feeling at this point. Now listen carefully.
“Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ ” Now keep your finger in there for a moment. We’ll come back to it.
Go back and look at John 1:14. “We have seen his glory.” Or verse 18: “No one has ever seen God.” Isn’t that what God just says there to Moses? “No one can see my face and live.” That’s what John says. “No one has ever seen God at any time.” And, in fact, in John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and [literally] tabernacled for a while among us.” The tabernacle, the tent was where God manifested himself with his people.
Now John is saying about Jesus, this Word tabernacled with us. That’s where the ultimate disclosure of God was. Not in a tent or a tabernacle. “He tabernacled with us for a while. We saw him. We saw his glory.” So it’s these themes, you see, are being drawn right out of Exodus, but there’s one more theme you have to see here. So the Lord says, “Go and hide in a rock.” You know the account at the end of chapter 33, the beginning of chapter 34.
“Go aside and hide in the cleft in the rock, and I will go by and sort of cover up the face of it, as it were. As I go by I will intone the name of the Lord. Then after I’ve gone by you may peep out and catch a glimpse of the trailing edge of the glory of God, but you can’t look at my face and live.” So that’s what takes place. In chapter 34 Moses is back on Mount Sinai. Moses chisels out the new stones for Lord’s commandments.
Then, chapter 34, verse 5: “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin,” and so forth.
Now then, Moses had asked to see the Lord’s glory. The Lord had promised to show him his goodness, and as he goes by he intones in front of him, “ ‘The Lord, the Lord, abounding in love and faithfulness …’ ” Love and faithfulness. That Hebrew expression, checed ‘emeth, comes up hundreds of times in the Old Testament. Love and faithfulness. It’s translated in various ways. Love is God’s free covenantal favor, his grace, if you like. You could easily render it grace, and in some translations, that’s what they have.
His faithfulness, his reliability. What he says is true. What he promises works out. It is his truth, his truthfulness, his reliability, his faithfulness. John has picked up that same expression and translated it “grace and truth.” John 1:14: “The Lord became flesh and tented among us. We have seen his glory …” His glory? But where is God’s glory shown in John’s gospel? Where is the glory of Jesus manifest?
In John’s gospel, you see, the glory of God is ultimately manifest on the cross. Not in some radiant shining face, not in some spectacular vision of light and sparkling dynamics. You know? Not a light and sound production of dazzling array. No, no, no. The Son is glorified by being lifted up on the cross and returning to the glory he had with the Father before the world began.
Thus in John, chapter 12, when he receives a signal from his Father that the cross is the next item on the agenda, he says, “Now is the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified.” He could equally have said, “So where then do you read and see the ultimate display of God’s glory, God’s goodness? On the cross.” We always want to see glory. God sees his glory in his goodness. And the ultimate place to see God’s goodness is not in the incarnation but in the incarnate one’s crucifixion and ascension to glory.
Thus, we have not seen his glory simply in his human person, although you see something of the great condescension and goodness of God there. You ultimately see it in the cross. That’s where this theme is running in the book. Now you don’t see all that already in John 1. You see, if you’re this for the first time in the first century, you say, “Boy, I’d like to see more of this glory. Let’s see how the event plays out!” You see? Then as you read on, and you read on, John is doing it again.
He’s sucked you in, and you’re going to see the themes work out in a different way. You read through this book two or three times, and you go back to this verse and you say, “Aha! Now I see it. We see his glory when the Son of Man is glorified. When there is nothing but shame. When there are no angel choruses. When he’s rejected by God and man both. When hell seems to win and God is triumphant in goodness.” The author writes, “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son [the unique one] who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Word enfleshes God for us. Finally, above all …
5. The Word supremely reveals God to us.
Verse 16 is hard to translate. I don’t know how many translations we have in this room, but as many translations as we have we have different renderings of this verse. It is a tough one to translate. Literally it is something like, “From his fullness we have all received grace after grace,” or something life that. The NIV has, “From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.” That’s just not what it means.
What it means is something like this. “From his fullness, from all that is in Jesus, we have received one grace replacing another grace.” The particular preposition there is used for substituting for something, replacing something. Then the next verse explains it. Verse 17: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth …” There’s that expression again. “… came through Jesus Christ.”
In other words, “The law was given by Moses …” We’ve had doctrine of creation, doctrine of God, doctrine of fall, now doctrine of law. “The law was given through Moses …” The Jews knew about the law. “… and this was a gracious gift.” It was a good gift from God, but now grace and truth par excellence, the fullness of God’s goodness and glory, has come and replaced it.
It’s been that to which it points. It has been a whole new economy that has been introduced. “… full of grace and truth.” Grace and truth par excellence. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Then, verse 18: “No one has ever seen God …” We all agree with that. The text says so in the Old Testament. What’s the closest you can get? “… but the one and only Son …” That’s referring to the Word. “… who is himself God … has made him known.”
There are a whole lot of parallels between verse 18 and verse 1. “The one and only Son, who is himself God …” “The Word was God …” The last clause of verse 1. “… who is in closest relationship with the Father …” That’s like the middle clause of verse 1. “He was with God in the beginning.” Who’s still differentiable from God. He’s at the Father’s side. “… has made him known.” That is, he’s the Word. He is God’s self-expression. He discloses God. He has narrated God. In other words, the Word supremely reveals God to us.
Have I told you the story about Mohammed Yusuf? I don’t want to repeat my stories, and I don’t always remember what I’ve said. Well, Mohammed Yusuf Guraya was a Pakistani whom I knew 30 years ago when I was an undergraduate reading chemistry and mathematics at McGill University. Guraya was twice my age, and he was doing a PhD at McGill in Islamic studies.
McGill has a really fine Islamic school. So he was like a PhD in theology at TEDS, only it was in Islamic studies. I was an undergraduate doing chemistry. So theologically I was outclassed at the level of debate. But he was lonely. He had left his wife and two children behind in Pakistan, and he was in my wing in the dorms. I befriended him, and he came to church with me two or three times.
He had never been to a Christian church. He didn’t have a clue what was going on. I could tell you some of our debates at the time. They were interesting, difficult for me, some of them funny. It was the first time he had seen snow, the first time he’d seen a church, the first time he’d seen so many things, you see. His observations on these things were very interesting to me, a late teenager and still sorting out which way was up.
But at Christmas I brought him home to my parents place. They lived at the time near Ottawa. It so happened my dad had heart problems that Christmas, and my mother and I were spending all that time going back and forth to the hospital. Dear ol’ Guraya largely got left. Well, just the month before I had given him a New Testament. He’d never had a Bible. It took me a while to figure out I was supposed to give these people Bibles. I wasn’t real swift in evangelism, you understand.
But eventually I gave him a New Testament, and he said, “Where do I start?” I said, “Well, why not start with the gospel of John?” So he spent a lot of the time that Christmas reading the gospel of John and reading parts of the New Testament. Taught in an Islamic world, he didn’t sort of skim read the way we do. He read and thought, read, thought, slowly, read, thought, review, read again. Finally, toward the end of the holiday I said to my mother, “You know, Dad’s all right.” It turned out to be a false alarm. I’m going to take Guraya in the car and do Ottawa.”
So we did Ottawa. Ottawa’s a wonderful city, not very big, and very pleasant. But we ended up at the Parliament buildings, which in those days were more open than they are now. There were fewer fears of bombs and things like that. So there were tour guides constantly. We parked the car and went in. We got on a tour of about 30 people, and the guide brought us through the rotunda at the back where part of the political library is, the Senate chambers, the House of Commons.
The whole structure is sort-of early nineteenth-century pseudo-gothic. It’s quite interesting. We came down in the central foyer, right at the beginning. There are some columns there, and the top of each of these columns in a fluted arch with a little figure. The guide was still going on explaining these things, and he said, “In each fluted arch is a figure representing some great concept. There is Aristotle, for government must be based on wisdom. There is Moses, for government must be based on law.” And he goes all the way around.
At the end of the tour he says, “Any questions?” Guraya pipes up, “Where is Jesus Christ?” I didn’t know where he was coming from. I was looking for a crack to fall into. The guide didn’t know where he was coming from, and so he said, “I beg your pardon?” Guraya, like most foreigners who hear “I beg your pardon,” thought he hadn’t been understood because of his accent so he said it more slowly and more loudly. “Where is Jesus Christ?!” he asks. So now there are three groups, 90 or so, in the rotunda, all hearing this Muslim Pakistani ask where Jesus is.
The guide is fumbling for words. “Why should Jesus be here?” Guraya’s jaw fell open. He just looked shocked. “I do not understand,” he says. “I read in the Christian Bible that the law was given through Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Where is Jesus Christ?” I though, “Preach it, brother!” But you see, he came from a system that knew something of law. Islam does teach you something of the sovereignty of law. It teaches you of God’s demands. It teaches you of right and wrong.
But at the end of the day, it veers then toward fatalism. But he read in the Christian Bible of the Jesus by whom came grace and truth. The law was given through Moses. He could agree with that. But grace and truth came through Jesus. So what do we have, then, right at the beginning of this wonderful book? We have a prologue that sets out the doctrine of God, the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of fall, the doctrine of law, the doctrine of redemptive history, the doctrine of the incarnation, and the doctrine of atonement, by which came grace and truth. It is that that enables us to sing:
Thou art the everlasting Word,
The Father’s only Son;
God manifestly seen and heard,
And Heav’n’s beloved one:
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.
