The Word with God, was God
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John 1:1-18
John 1:1-18
Good morning! While others have put away their trees and started saying Happy New Year, we are continuing in the season of Christmas this morning. Since the beginning of Advent, really, we’ve looked at some of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth, and this morning we’re going to get a little different perspective on who that baby was. John is going to zoom out, WAY out, further than any human had gone before because we are getting a view of the beginning. THE beginning. Not Genesis, but John. You see, John starts with the same three words that Genesis starts with: “In the beginning.” But what we are seeing in John’s beginning is an earlier beginning than the beginning of Genesis 1. We’re looking before the acts of God in the world and seeing something no one had seen before. We’re seeing God being before he was doing anything in this world. Before he was creating, in the beginning, was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The eternal Word was with God in the beginning. And he was God. This sentence lays the foundation for our understanding of the Trinity. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was there at the beginning. He was with God. He was God. How can someone or something be with God and also be God? It sounds like a contradiction. Was the Word with God, or was the Word God? And let’s complicate things further. For the people who Jesus came to first, the Jews, we need to start with the foundational premise that there is only one God. Devout Jews would say the Shema every day. The Shema is that piece of Deut 6:4:
Deuteronomy 6:4 ESV
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
So if God is One. And the Word was with God in the beginning and the Word was God. It looks like John is violating a basic law of non-contradiction. There is only one God. But the Word was both with God, and was God. So unless you’re going to take back the part about there being only one God, you have to see God as one God, three persons, as Trinity. Or at this point, before the Holy Spirit is introduced, as at least a binity. John is not doing away with God’s one-ness. But John is telling us that the Word was beside God and also God. One God; at least two persons. When the Holy Spirit comes, we get the completed picture of one God, three persons. And John presents this reality simply and forcefully by telling us that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
In the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan’s atonement and resurrection at the stone table is based on the deeper magic. His enemy, the White Witch was operating with the idea that a transgressor, Edmund, belonged to her. But Aslan knew an even deeper reality. An ancient reality established before all time, that a sinner could be cleansed and redeemed by the death of the righteous one. She only knew that all sinners belonged to her. But Aslan knew the deeper magic of redemption and died to redeem Edmund so he could live without the claim of evil on his life. Aslan knew the deeper magic. He had access to knowledge before anyone else was around to know it. And John gives us access to some deeper magic, that knowledge more ancient than what we learn in Genesis. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. And now John moves into the territory of Genesis.
John 1:3 NRSV
3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
When Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, Jesus participated in that creative process. In fact it was through Jesus that all of heaven and earth were made. You might hear echoes of the Creed here: through him all things were made.
By the way, I’ve started doing something as I affirm the faith in the Words of the Nicene Creed and I invite you to do the same. We say the Creed after the sermon, and that’s not by accident. If whoever is preaching doesn’t feed you the Word, the Creed provides it, and it rebukes the preacher for giving a bogus sermon. Now, I can’t think of one bogus sermon I’ve heard here. And besides the call for orthodox preaching, the Creed lets us do something else. It helps us see the content of the sermon in terms of the Christian faith. It gives us a place to integrate what we’ve heard in the ministry of the word into our Christian faith. That sermon should hit on something in the Creed. So what I’ve been doing is finding what part of the Creed was reinforced by the sermon. Try it out sometime. Today, there are a few points of the Creed that apply. Here in verse 3, it’s “Through him, [that is through Jesus], all things were made. When we get to that point in the Creed. Remember what happened in the sermon today.
In our passage I want to skip ahead and come back. Because verse 14 really shows us why we celebrate Christmas for 12 whole days. And that is that the Word became flesh and dwelled among us. At Christmas, the person whose birth we celebrate is the Second Person of the Trinity come to visit his creation, to be with us.
The long procession from before the creation of the world through ages and ages of creation and development—from sin and law and justice growing and being diminished—the glorious accomplishments of humanity and the disappointments—were just a long procession to this moment where the Word became flesh and dwelled among us. The Word entered his world and made himself known, to keep all his promises to his chosen people, and to graft others into those promises. The Word entered his world. And we see a picture of this every Sunday when we process the Gospel into the midst of the congregation. We hear the Gospel which has come to us because the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.
So now John reflects on some of the significance of Jesus coming a few verses earlier, so let’s look back at verse 10:
John 1:10–13 NRSV
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
The birth of Jesus is the tangible moment where the Word enters his world in order to be seen and believed in so that he could take a people to himself, made up of those who believe in his name. When you know who that child really is, you know that his birth was truly a holy moment, a remarkable first in all of human history, never to be repeated.
And verse 18:
John 1:18 ESV
18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
This little baby is the Word made flesh, who knew the Father before the creation of the world, and he has come to make the Father known to us to show us the grace of God—where Moses showed us only the Law—and to give us himself to be known so that we may be changed in knowing him and be called God’s children. What a gracious entrance God made into his world in the baby Jesus, when it was his right to make an entrance full of wrath. That wrath is coming. But before it comes, God offers a way of escape in the coming of Jesus into the world. So look on him, believe in his name, and rest in him this Christmas season, with all the joy, awe, and wonder his birth deserves.