Text Driven Tuesday: Dismount the High Horses, John 1:14-18

John has introduced the Word, who was with God and was God in the beginning. I believe this is the word through whom God spoke creation into being. I believe it is the Voice of God that was walking in the Garden in Genesis 3. I believe it is the Word the prophets heard when they recorded the decree of God and Moses heard in the burning bush. I believe this Word, is Jesus. In John 1, we get to the pinnacle of history when this ancient Word became flesh.

There are a few ways something can become something else. It can be changed entirely, like water becomes ice, an egg becomes a chicken, or a seed becomes a tree. Nothing of what now is resembles what was. If the Word, Jesus, became flesh in this way, Jesus completely became human flesh without any trace of His divinity. If you are reading the Bible and get to Matthew 17, we see the transfiguration of Jesus. His deity, being unveiled, was not lost in His incarnation. When the Word became flesh, He did not lose what He was in the beginning—when He was God and was with God. What He was remained, and He assumed human flesh along with His divinity—a hypostatic union. I got married to a beautiful woman, Kati, in 2012. We prayed for a son during our first five years of marriage. In 2017, God blessed us with an answer to our prayers. Elijah was born, and I became a father. I did not stop being a husband. I retained that identity. But, I assumed the identity of a father. I did not assume a new nature like Jesus did, so this illustration falls short of capturing the glory of Christ. Still, I think it helps our understanding. Jesus assumed human flesh without setting aside His divine nature.

John even claims, here, that Jesus dwelt among them—the Apostles. They saw His glory. They could only see His glory if He did not set it aside—glory as of the only begotten from the father, full of grace and truth. These are the characteristics of Jesus in His incarnation. There was something different about Him. He was no ordinary person. He had innate glory, the kind that can only come from someone born of God. Most people were born from other people. All people were born from other people. Jesus, He was in the beginning with God and was God. He was no ordinary person. He was divinity in the flesh and had glory about Him. He was also full of grace and truth. Out of everything else John could have said about Jesus’s character, His love, mercy, desire to accept people, or His desire to bring justice, John settles for two characteristics—the ones He believes are most important.

(1) Jesus was full of grace. He extended a lot of gratuity to people and was good to people even when they did not deserve it. (2) Jesus was full of truth. He did not lie to people, even when it would have been nice. He asked difficult questions and said difficult things. When we think about Jesus, we tend to major on other things that most fit our sensibilities, but John begins with grace and truth. I wonder if we value grace and truth as much as Jesus does.

John the gospel writer now lists three evidences showing that we saw Jesus’s glory as the Word and Son of God.

1. John the Baptizer testifies that Jesus outranks Him because Jesus is the Word and existed before John. This was according to Malachi’s prophecy (cf. Malachi 3:1-5).

2. Then, John the gospel writer states that we have all received His fullness, and grace upon grace.

Typically, when we talk about receiving the fullness of Christ, we are talking about salvation. Here, John claims we have all received Christ’s fullness. John is writing to a broad audience. He is writing so that people…

…will believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, [they] may have life in His name (John 20:31).

John explicitly connects having life to belief in Jesus as the Son of God. If he is writing to persuade people about Jesus as the Son of God, not everyone believes. Yet, they had all received Jesus’s fullness, and grace upon grace. I don’t think John is referring to receiving the fullness of Christ like we talk about it in the Twenty-First Century. I think John is simply referring to the fact that if Jesus was God and with God in the beginning, having assumed human flesh, Jesus Himself was the fulness of the revelation of God to people. We, the world, received Him fully. We could see Him face to face in His glory. Because God pulled back the curtain and revealed Himself fully to us, everyone has received grace upon grace. God showed Himself so we could see Him clearly. Particularly the Apostles saw His glory explicitly and testified about it to the whole world—including us through what they wrote down for us.

Biblical Christianity is the only worldview that gives us this. Everyone else’s God is either hidden and unknowable or not a supposed god at all. I hope to encourage you in this. Christianity alone provides a way for God to be known, and I’ll unpack that in a moment.

3. He says “the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.” The Law testifies about our need for a Messiah and promises a Messiah. The very grace and truth promised in the Law through a Messiah are realized though Jesus. The Old Testament contains more than 300 messianic prophecies and descriptions all fulfilled by Jesus alone.

In essence, we can be confident that Jesus is the Word of God in the flesh because:

1. John the Baptizer testified about Him.
2. People, particularly the Apostles, saw His glory.
3. The Old Testament told us about Jesus and His work.

Look at John’s final statement.

No one has seen God at any time…

Have you seen God? No. I haven’t either. God transcends everything else. There is a group of people that claim there is no observable evidence in favor of God’s existence. God can’t be seen, so they won’t believe. Do you understand the problem we create for ourselves if we say we need to see something in order to believe it? We can’t see love. We can’t see thought or reason. We can’t see compassion. We can’t see black holes, gravity, time, space, and I read somewhere that the same materialists who won’t believe in God because they can’t see Him claim that 95% of the physical universe is beyond human perception—yet they believe in so many things from dark matter and energy to the existence of quarks and strings. If God transcends the physical universe, He is not measurable like the physical universe. If He can be seen more clearly than most of the physical universe, He does not transcend it—meaning He is not God. If there is truly a transcendent God, we can only conclude that He is invisible. No one can experience God because He is wholly other. He transcends our finite observation. He is holy. No one has ever seen God.

Doesn’t this leave us in a hopeless place? First, it humbles me as a preacher. Here I am talking and writing about something I cannot see and am unable to understand in the slightest. This truth should humble us all and knock us off of our spiritual high-horses. No wonder there are so many religious points of view filled with people trying to figure out how to know God. We should understand that and not pretend we are better than others who are also searching.

I want to tell you the truth. God cannot be found. Islam cannot get you to God. Hinduism can’t endow you with knowledge about the transcendent creator. Common Christianity will never deliver you to the heavens where you can see God clearly. No preacher or teacher is profound enough to bring you any real enlightenment about the One who created everything we can observe. This is what it means to realize God is holy. Ultimately, we cannot trust any prophet, preacher, or zealous religious leader to paint an accurate picture of God because no one can see God. God is holy. Our only hope is for God to pull back the curtains and show Himself. How does God do that and still retain His identity as God, transcendent and holy?

He assumes human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s the only way God can be known. The only begotten, Jesus, has explained God to us. He is the fullness of the revelation of God.

Our religion can’t get us there. We have people praying five times a day because they think it is how they find and hear God. There are people attending church buildings, paying their tithes, and observing the feasts because they think their little works can help them find and be in good standing with God. Worse, there are people waging war because they believe it is how they get to God. I wish we, as humanity, would stop, step back, and think about what we are doing. Nothing we can do, no words we can say, nowhere we can look, will give us any glimpse of a holy God. We will just get wrapped up in our religion and think highly of ourselves because we did something. To recognize God is to be completely humiliated in our silly attempts at religion. The only way to see God is to look at Jesus, sit at His feet, and learn from Him—not some lesser man standing on a stage or in a pulpit.

God showed us this through national Israel. The Law was given through Moses. No manner of trying to keep the ritual, civil, or moral law ever caused anyone to see God or be saved. The Law was incapable of getting people to God. Only God could do that. Grace and truth were realized through Jesus. 

Have you been trusting in your religion to get you to God? Have you been trusting in your position? Have you been trusting in your own works, knowledge, ability to understand, or your good intentions to provide you a good standing before the Most High? Be humbled as you read this. None of us have the ability to see God at anytime. It doesn’t matter if we are good pastors, deacons, committee members, preachers, evangelists, apologists, or religious people of any type or caliber by human standards. We haven’t seen God. We must step down off our soap boxes, dismount our high horses, and realize that we are not the main characters in God’s story. Jesus is. If we want to know God at all, we must go to Jesus. That’s the only way. Today is the day to repent and believe the gospel, to rededicate our service in whatever capacity we serve to Jesus, and to once again approach the throne of grace with reverence, awe, and a great sense of how unimportant we really are.

Jesus saves, not us. We are His servants. He is not our servant. The church belongs to Him, not us. We plead with God, trusting in His grace and truth. Today, set aside your worthless human religion and rest in the grace and truth of Jesus.

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