The Word Became Flesh
Advent 2020: The Light Breaks Through • Sermon • Submitted
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Introduction
Introduction
<<PRAY>> <<READ John 1:14-18>>
Last week, in vv9-13, the true light coming into the world. The promised one, the Messiah of the Old Testament
The champion who came to destroy the darkness. He knew the depth of our darkness, but He came anyway.
The GIFT He came to give is salvation, what Jesus calls being born again.
Verses 14-18 - the climax of John 1. Two words take center stage - glory and grace. Unlike some theological words, glory and grace are common in everyday English. But the Bible uses these words in a very specific way.
Now, Christmas is this week - did you know that? And Christmas can help us understand glory and grace as we find them in the Scriptures.
Glory refers to God’s worth. He is radiant, shining in the darkness, and worthy of praise.
Grace refers to His undeserved favor. When we say God is gracious, we mean that He pours out salvation as a gift.
Think of a Christmas tree, shining with lights and sparkling ornaments - it is radiant. And underneath we find gift upon gift.
So if you come across these words in the Bible and forget what they mean, just remember the lights and gifts of a Christmas tree - God’s glory is His shining worth; God’s grace is His undeserved favor.
In John 1:14-18,
Q. How should we respond to the glory and grace of Christmas?
I. The GLORY of Christmas: the Word made flesh (vv14-15)
I. The GLORY of Christmas: the Word made flesh (vv14-15)
EXPLAIN
Verse 14 sums Christmas up in four words: “The Word became flesh.”
This is what Christians celebrate on December 25th. The Word became flesh.
The eternal Word who was with God and was God became flesh
The One Who Is - The Great I AM - became.
Throughout verses 1-18, the Gospel writer uses a specific word to refer to the Word’s eternal nature, and another to refer to things that have been made. Six times, he uses the word, starting in verse 3 with “through him all things were made.” Every act of creation was the act of God the Word. That same word occurs a seventh time here in verse 14 - we could paraphrase it: “The Word, through whom all things were made, made himself flesh.” The climax of the prologue and the climax of Creation is contained in those four words - The Word became flesh.
The Eternal One entered time; the One who was with God was now with us; the One who was God was now one of us, yet without sin.
It’s not only the climax of the prologue, but also the most shocking and glorious surprise in all of history. There are moments in movies and TV shows that the filmmakers save for just exactly the right moment, so that the audience responds with wonder and joy. In the best moments, the audience looks back at all the hints that the storyteller dropped and they wonder how they were still surprised.
When all seems lost, the army of the dark is marching on the heroes’ location, and then you see the champion step into the frame and single-handedly turn the tide.
This is the true glory of Christmas - that the Word became flesh. God the Son took on true human nature. All our frailties, but without sin.
The Light shines in the darkness, the true light was coming into the world, He came to His own, the Word became flesh.
E.W. Klink says,
He is in intimate communion with the Father and is, when received, the one through whom the right to become “children of God” is possible. All of this is because Jesus, God himself, came to us, the world. Jesus is God dwelling with us. God walked out of the stone temple, the holy of holies, and has put on “flesh.” He is us (“flesh”) before God the Father and he is God “among us.”
“The Word became flesh” means that the Son who was fully God made Himself fully man in the womb of Mary the virgin. The Word didn’t replace His Divine nature with humanity; He did not divide Himself into half-human and half-God. He took everything that makes humanity human to Himself, and yet remained fully and truly God. He entered the world He made without leaving His divinity behind.
The verse continues and says, <<READ v14 ‘and dwelt...’>>
The Word dwelt among us - literally, it says that the Word tabernacled among us. The tabernacle was the tent that God commanded the Israelites to build in Exodus 25 after He delivered them from Egypt. As Israel wandered in the wilderness, living in tents, so God told them that they should build the tabernacle as His dwelling place. He told Israel that He would meet with them there. It was at the tabernacle, and later the Temple that replaced it when Israel settled in the Land of Promise, it was there that Israel was reconciled to God through the sacrifices that atoned for their sins.
Verse 14 shows us that Jesus Christ, the Word Made Flesh, is the true tabernacle. He is God come to meet with us, and He is God come to reconcile the world to Himself through the atoning sacrifice of His own flesh.
This is the wonder of Christmas. This is the glory of the Word made flesh - that He is God with us, Immanuel.
John writes in verse 14 that we have seen his glory.
Glory refers to something’s worth, its value, its weightiness. The glory of God is His shining, perfect, righteous, holy character.
John says in chapter 2:11 that they saw Jesus’s glory in the signs that revealed who He was. One of those signs was the raising of Lazarus in John 11.
4 But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
And when Jesus stood before the tomb and told them to remove the stone,
40 Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
John and the other apostles saw His glory in each of His miracles, and supremely in His crucifixion and resurrection.
And note what he says about the glory that they saw: It was glory "as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The glory of Jesus - the shining worth of the Word - is the glory He has always had with the Father, His glory as the unique Son. Just as the Father is full of grace and truth, so the Son is absolutely and perfectly full of grace and truth.
In Exodus 33, after the LORD gave the Law to Moses, and commanded him to take Israel from Sinai to go to the Promised Land, Moses pleads with the LORD, saying, “Please show me your glory.”
The LORD says, “I will make all my goodness pass before you… but you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”
And when the glory of the LORD passes before Moses, in chapter 34:6, He proclaims His own name: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”
Abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness - full of grace and truth. The glory of Christmas is that in Jesus Christ, the LORD who abounds in grace and truth has come to dwell with us.
APPLY:
There’s an appropriate response to beholding the glory of God. As the LORD told Moses, no one can see His face and live. When Isaiah saw the LORD seated on His throne in Isaiah 6, he immediately
5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
To behold the glory of God is to come face-to-face with the Holy One. This is why, when Jesus revealed His glory in Peter’s boat, Peter fell down at Jesus’s feet and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”
It is impossible to behold God’s glory and think you’re doing fine. Either you drop and start confessing your sin, or you deceive yourself and prove you’re a sinner. The Wise Men brought their gifts and worshiped Him; Herod sent soldiers to kill Him.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us because we were hopelessly lost. So the question for us is this: Do we respond to the glory of the only Son from the Father like Isaiah, like Peter, like Job, like the Wise Men, like Zaccheus, with hand over mouth in awe-filled, repentant worship of the Holy One who chose to come dwell with sinners?
II. The GRACE of Christmas: God made known (vv16-18)
II. The GRACE of Christmas: God made known (vv16-18)
Look at verses 16-18 with me: <<READ 16-18>>
EXPLAIN:
I don’t know if you remember, but before we began our series in John 1, I encouraged you all to read the Gospel in its entirety, and to write in the margins - every time John told us something about Jesus, I said to put a star in the margin; every time the Gospel said something about humanity, I said to write the word “us” in the margin. Verse 16 should have both - YOU and I and everyone else has received grace upon grace from the fullness of the Word. From His bounty.
GRACE is God’s undeserved favor, His unmerited love and kindness. Grace can never be earned; it is a gift by its very nature. The Old Testament Law was a gift of grace, given by the Son through Moses; but through Jesus, we have an even better gift. The Law revealed God’s righteousness and our sin; but through Jesus, we receive God’s righteousness as a gift - His own grace and truth.
He pours out His very self for us.
Grace upon grace.
The Old Testament Law is good, but Jesus is better. As Paul says in Galatians 3,
24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
And in verse 18, the GRACE of Christmas is declared in its fullness. No one has ever seen God, John says.
The LORD told Moses that no man could see His face and live.
And this is actually the greatest problem in all of human experience. Every element of human suffering can be boiled down to this one problem: Alienation from our Creator by our own sin. And, in fact, we cannot see Him or know Him unless He chooses to make Himself known.
I said last week that the baby in the manger is our Champion who came to redeem the world. In spite of our sin, He came anyway, to destroy the darkness.
Because of our sin, we cannot see Him unless He destroys the darkness in us and makes Himself known to us. The King of kings did not come merely to ring the doorbell and hope someone answers. He came to make blind men see.
No one has ever seen God, it says. “The only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”
There is some serious theology in these verses - it’s the deepest truth about God, revealed to us, here. Notice how John ties it all back to what he’s already told us in verse 1.
In the beginning was the Word - He is eternal and there was never a time when He was not - and in the fullness of time, He became flesh.
The Word was with God - and He dwelt with us.
The Word was God - and He has made God known.
The GRACE of Christmas - the gift of the Word made flesh - is that He made God known to us.
There is no other way to know Him except through the Son. And perhaps shockingly, that’s the way it has always been.
The Word walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve. The Word spoke to Abraham under the tree and told him that Sarah would have a son. The Word wrestled with Jacob, and when Jacob asked his name, He said, “Why do you ask my name, since it is wonderful?”
The Word led Israel out of Egypt in a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.
The Word who was full of grace and truth passed before Moses and declared His Name, “THE LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”
The Word met with Israel in the tabernacle and the Temple.
The Word was seated on the throne when Isaiah fell on his face in terror.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and made the Father known to us.
The all-surpassing grace of Christmas is that in the manger, God was making Himself known. He was revealing His holiness to us. His righteousness. His steadfast love. His shining worth - His glory.
APPLY:
And there is one appropriate way to respond to the GRACE of God’s self-revelation in the Word made flesh. It’s the response we see from John the Baptist in verse 15: <<READ v15>>
John the Baptist recognized that this man, Jesus, conceived after him and born after him, was actually before him. He looked and saw that this was God’s own lamb, sent to take away the sins of the world.
John the son of Zebedee, the author of this Gospel, recognized that this man, Jesus, was the true light, the Messiah coming into the world to redeem it.
Peter recognized Him, too. Jesus said to him, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” In John 6, he said to Jesus, “You have the words of eternal life.”
Even the apostle Thomas, famous for doubting the resurrection, when he came face-to-face with Jesus,
27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
And John the Gospel writer immediately follows these words of Jesus with the purpose of his Gospel:
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
The appropriate response to GRACE of Christmas - the GIFT of God making Himself known is to believe.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Do you recognize your Maker in the manger? Do you see His glory and grace in the Word Made Flesh?
If you do, then like Peter, like Isaiah, like the Wise Men, bow before Him as LORD. Like Peter and Isaiah and Job, recognize that if your sin is not taken away, then you are undone.
But this is the grace of Christmas and the good news for sinners, just as we heard in the Christmas play this morning:
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”
Behold the Son by faith, and you will know the Father, and He will call you His child.
What is our God like? We find out when we look at Jesus Christ, the only God who is at the Father’s side, who has made Him known. As Paul says in Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Our God redeems sinners. Our God rescues the hopeless.
And this is why His name is Jesus. That name - the name that is above every name - means “The LORD is salvation.”
The glory and grace of Christmas is that the LIGHT Breaks Through to make YOU new.
1 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. 2 For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. 3 And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.