John 1:19-34

¹⁹And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” ²¹And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” ²²So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” ²³He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” ²⁴(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) ²⁵They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” ²⁶John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, ²⁷even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” ²⁸These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. ²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! ³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

Do we have the right to think about God however we would like?  Do we have the right to envision His person and character along whatever lines we desire?  Some people think so.

For instance, I recently read the words of a pastor who proudly and openly embraces the titles of “liberal” and “progressive.”  This pastor says we should think of God however we happen to envision God.  Listen to this:

“Every person, no matter their age, sexual preference, gender, or nationality, has the right to have access to the divine, however they see the divinity made manifest.”[1]

Now, this is a very modern-American thing to say, is it not?  It has, for instance, the two great hallmarks of popular culture today.  First of all, it has a good dose of entitlement:  “Every person, no matter their age, sexual preference, gender, or nationality, has the right to have access to the divine…”  Access to God, then, is now a fundamental right regardless of one’s life or lifestyle.

And, secondly, according to this idea, human beings have “the right to have access to the divine, however they see the divinity made manifest.”  So not only are we entitled to God, we are entitled to whatever version of God we happen to prefer.

Again, this is straight out of the rule book for the way we modern Americans think:  (1) unquestioned, individual entitlement and (2) the sovereignty of personal preference.

But that is pretty dangerous, is it not?  After all, if people are simply free to think of God “however they see the divinity made manifest,” does that not open the door for a person with a really crazy idea of God to be able to say that their idea of God is as legitimate as a biblical view of God?

No, somehow we know, deep down, that our view of God must have substance and that substance must arise from some place other than our own preferences, assumptions, or wants.

John thought that we should think about God.  John thought that we should think accurately about God.  John thought that God could be known and understood.  John said that Jesus was the key to understanding who God is and what He is like.  Jesus reveals God.

Let me take a moment and point out, by the way, what a great gift revelation is.  Do you realize that if God had not chosen to reveal Himself in Christ and through His Word to us, we would never know who God is?  “We love him,” John wrote in 1 John 4:19, “because He first loved us.”  Had God not revealed Himself, we never would have known Him.

I like how R.C. Sproul put this in his amazing book, The Holiness of God:

“There is a special kind of phobia from which we all suffer.  It is called xenophobia.  Xenophobia is a fear (and sometimes a hatred) of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.  God is the ultimate object of our xenophobia.  He is the ultimate stranger.  He is the ultimate foreigner.  He is holy, and we are not.”[2]

That is true enough!  In our sins, we have a deep phobia of God.  We do not know Him, so we fear Him.  We do not want to know Him, so we hate Him.  But when the light of Christ shines on us, and when we come to know Him as Savior and Lord, we both know Him and love Him.

Because of Jesus, we are now able to think about God.  We are now able to want to think about God.  We are now able to think about God correctly.

In the first eighteen verses of John 1, we have already seen two fascinating images of the person of Christ.  We have seen Christ the Word and Christ the light.  But there is more.  In verse 19, John records the words of another John, John the Baptist, and his words about the coming of Christ.

John the Baptist casts further light on the person of Christ, and the light he sheds is mind-boggling to say the least.

Christ, the Lord

The first occasion for John’s testimony about who Jesus is was a question put to him concerning who he, John the Baptist, was.

¹⁹And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” ²¹And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” ²²So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” ²³He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

It is an interesting scene.  The priests and Levites, sent, we will find out in a bit, by the Pharisees, are interested in the identity of John the Baptist.  But John the Baptist is interested only in the identity of Jesus.

In answering this question from the priests and Levites, John quotes a passage from Isaiah with shocking implications for who Jesus is.  In verse 23, John alludes to Isaiah 40.  Here is the wider context of that passage

¹ Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.

³ A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
⁴ Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
⁵ And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

John the Baptist sought to draw attention away from himself and focus it rather on Christ.  He claimed to be the “voice” mentioned in Isaiah 40:3.  That is interesting, but what is really interesting is what the voice in Isaiah 40 is doing.  Clearly, the voice is preparing the people for the coming of the Lord.

John quoted only the first part of verse 3:  “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD.’”  But in doing so he was appealing to the whole passage, the second part of which would have been known by these priests and Levites:  “make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

What an utterly amazing thing to say!  John said that his purpose was to preach the coming of the Lord, of God Himself, in the desert.  Clearly John the Baptist meant by this nothing less than that Jesus was God Himself.

Some of you may be of the opinion this morning that it does not matter what we think about Jesus.  You may think it is ok that Christianity speaks of Jesus as God but other religions speak of him as a good man, or a great prophet, or an angel, or nothing at all.  You may be tempted to say that these questions do not really matter.  You may say that so long as we obey Jesus, or try to be like Jesus, or ask the question, “What would Jesus do?”, that that is all that matters.  But may I point out that John, the writer of the fourth gospel, and John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, were overwhelmingly concerned first of all with the fact that we understand that Jesus is God Himself among us.

In other words, the first question is not, “What would Jesus do?”  The first question is, “Who is Jesus?”

It matters.  It matters deeply.  Who you think Jesus is will ultimately shape how you live your life.  Fortunately, these two Johns we are looking at are completely clear on the answer:  Jesus is Lord!  This is the earliest confession of the church.  It is the summary of our faith, the hope of our salvation.  Jesus is Lord!  In Greek, that looks like this:  Kyrios Iesus!  Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is God.  Jesus is God come near!

Christ, the Lamb

That John the Baptist called Jesus Lord and God was unsettling enough to the world then and now.  But what he did next was utterly confounding:

²⁴(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) ²⁵They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” ²⁶John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, ²⁷even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” ²⁸These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. ²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

When John spots Jesus coming, he shouts, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  In saying so, he was doing two things.  For one thing, he was once again speaking in harmony with the prophecy of Isaiah 40 that we have just seen, for verse 2 of that chapter begins: “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned…”

So it was consistent with Isaiah 40, the passage he is quoting, for John to say that the coming Lord would forgive sins, even as it was shocking for him to say that Jesus was that coming Lord.  But in calling Jesus “the Lamb of God” John was saying even more:  he was saying that Jesus is not only the Lord who forgives sin, He is the Lord who forgives sin by becoming Himself the sacrifice for our sins, the lamb of God.

How must John’s original audience have heard and understood such a strange idea, that God could be the forgiver and the sacrifice?  How do you hear it today?

John called Jesus Lord, which was earth-shaking in its implications.  He called Him lamb, which threatened to redefine everything the Jews thought they knew about God.

John is saying that Jesus is Lord and lamb.  He is the One to whom all sacrifices are due, and He is simultaneously the sacrifice that is due.  He is both shepherd and sheep.  John is saying something, in other words, that would have been very difficult for people then (and now) to grasp:  that the Lord is the lamb.

Imagine it, if you can:  He is the One to whom our lives should be given, but He gives His life for us.  He is the just God whose standard demands a sacrifice, and He is the sacrifice sent to meet the standards of a just God.  He is the holy God before whom sin cannot stand, and He is the sacrifice that bears our unholy sins.

Seriously, I ask you:  can you believe it?

Throughout the ages artists have attempted to depict this image of Christ as the lamb of God.  One of the most famous images is that of Francisco de Zubaran, a Spanish painter who painted in the 17^th century.  The image has always moved me.  It is a lamb, lain on an altar, its feet bound by cords, its body lifeless, dead.  This is the Christ who saves.

Zubaran apparently added horns to the image as a symbol of strength.  After all, Christ did not have to lay down His life.  “No one takes [my life] from me,” Jesus said in John 10:18, “but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

Jesus is strong, it is true,  but Jesus laid His life down.  He is the lion of Judah, but He is the lamb of God.  In Christ Himself, the lion lays down with the lamb.  He was the sacrificial lamb.  Jesus is the God who puts Himself on His own altar.  He is the shepherd who takes the sin of the flock upon Himself.

He is the One who says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin” (Hebrews 9:22), and then He sheds His blood.  He is the scapegoat of guilty Israel.  He is the ram caught in a thicket for Isaac.  He is the raised, bronze serpent on whom dying, wilderness-wandering Israel must look in order to be saved.  He is the one who demands payment at the same time that He is the one who pays what is demanded.

The world had never heard anything like it.  The world has never heard anything like it since.

The vision of Jesus as the lamb of God, the “Agnus Dei,” is a vision that has inspired Christians over the years.  For instance, I learned this week that each year during the feast of Epiphany, in the subways of Bucharest, Romania, Christian children lead lambs through the subway stations and trains in order to remember and to remind others that Jesus is the lamb of God.[3]

The Lord is the lamb, and the lamb is Lord.  “Behold the lamb of God!”

Christ, the Life

Yet the coming Lord that John the Baptist spoke of does not merely forgive sins.  He also comes to give a new way of living life.  Christ is the Lord.  Christ is the lamb.  Christ is the life.

³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

Notice that Jesus came not only to lay down His life, He came to create a new way of living life through the laying down of His life.  So He is not only the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, He is also “he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” (v.33)  This happened to the early band of believers gathered at Pentecost, and this happens today every time a person bows his or her heart and mind to Jesus.

To know the lamb, then, is to follow the lamb because He has baptized you in the Holy Spirit.  Not only that, the lamb now lives in you.  Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola put this nicely in their Jesus Manifesto when they wrote:

The mystery of God is this…this glorious, limitless, amazing, incredible, expansive, incomparable, marvelous, stunning, staggering, majestic, mighty, matchless, spectacular, outstanding, tremendous, immense, infinite, vast, grand, triumphant, victorious, precious, radiant, peerless, wonderful, magnificent Christ has chosen to place all of His fullness where?  Inside of you![4]

It is true!  The Lord who is lamb baptizes you in the Spirit when you come to Him and, in so doing, empowers you to also live this kind of life!

This means that we go into the world as the army of the lamb of God in order to reveal a new way of living life.  For instance, in Kenya, Africa, in the 1950’s, there was a war in which the Kenyans fought against the British colonialists for independence.  In the midst of that war,

a number of Christians sought to intervene between the black Kenyans and the white colonialists.  These Christians refused to fight and, instead, they called the conflicting sides to lay down their arms.  Because of this, they were nicknamed, “people of the Lamb.”[5]

What are we known as?  Do our lives reflect Christ, Lord and lamb?  Have we come to Him only in the hope of salvation, or have we come to Him for life?  To know Christ as the lamb of God is to approach life from a totally different vantage point than the one you previously held.  How you envision God determines how you live life.  How can it not change our lives to think of Jesus as Lord and as lamb?

On the official seal of the Moravian Church are the words, “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.”

This, I believe, sums the matter up quite nicely: “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.”  The lamb conquers through His cross and resurrection, and now we have the privilege of following Him.

Central Baptist Church:  “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him!”

John 1:3-18

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. ¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

When I was in college, I became aware of something in my own life that really began to bother me.  I had noticed even in high school that, during the winter months of the year, I became very sad and melancholy.  Not overly so or dangerously so, but evidently so, to me, anyway.  In college during the grey months of fall and winter (which, ironically, I otherwise loved), I would find myself increasingly brooding.  Strangely enough, there were times when I would be alone and I felt like crying.  I felt like I was walking around with a lump in my throat all the time.  But in the spring and summer, it would leave me.  Again, I do not want to overplay this:  I was never dangerously depressed or self-destructive.  Had you talked with me likely you would not have even noticed that anything was wrong.  But I noticed, and it bothered me.

After graduating from college, Roni and I were married and we moved to Ft. Worth, Texas, to attend Southwestern Seminary.  I carried this kind of seasonal sadness with me.  In fact, since we moved to Ft. Worth in the winter, I was very aware of it.

As it turns out, part of being enrolled in seminary is having a mandatory visit with the campus psychologist.  All students had to do this, and, though I was not particularly keen on it, and though I even tried to get out of doing it, I visited with him as well.  He was a wonderfully insightful and helpful man, and I appreciated our visit.

Shortly after meeting with him I began to feel this sadness again, this creeping seasonal melancholy, and, having enjoyed my earlier meeting with him, I thought, “Why not?” and scheduled a meeting with him.

When I laid out my situation and explained my sadness, he told me that there was actually a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder (acronym – SAD, of course), in which some people found the decreased amount of sunlight in the days of fall and winter to be particularly oppressive and mood altering.

Then he gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten.  This is what he told me to do:  “In the fall and winter months, you need to find those brief moments in each day when the sun is shining and get yourself in the light.”

I have never forgotten that, and I’ve tried to obey it:  “Find where the light is shining, and get in it.”

It is not bad advice for those who find the darkness oppressive, is it?

This morning many of you have come into this sanctuary and are deeply affected by SAD – Spiritual Affective Disorder.  The darkness seems too present and the light seems to dim.

Some of you are overwhelmed by the darkness of the world order.  You are inundated by news of local and foreign chaos, crime, and disorder.  You feel that you are sinking in darkness.

Some of you are overwhelmed by a darkness of your own making.  You have fallen into or actively embraced some sin or rebellion against God.  Maybe it is some act from the past that even now casts its long and oppressive shadow over you.

Some of you feel that you live in darkness.  Darkness has overtaken your marriage, your relationships with your children, your relationship with your friends.  You do not know how it got there, but you cannot deny it is there, and you despair of finding a way out.

If you find yourself in this position, you will likely be thrilled to know that John calls Jesus “the light.”  Jesus is light.  He is the light of the world.

The first eighteen verses of John 1 are known as “the prologue” to John, for they lay the foundation for the rest of the entire book by expressing in beautiful and power ways the riches and depths of the person of Jesus Christ.  That prologue is dominated by two fascinating images for Jesus:  the Word and the light.

We have seen that Jesus is the eternal logos, or Word, who was in the beginning, who was with God, and who was God.  But this morning we see that Jesus is not only the logos, He is the light.

Christ, the Light That Reveals.

The fundamental and essential property of light is revelation.  It reveals that which was previously obscured or hidden.  So when John calls Jesus light, He is speaking of Christ as the revealing light of God.

We would do well to remember that before “revelation” was a book, it was, and is, a person.  Christ is revelation.  He is revealing light.

Consider John 1:3-9:

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

You will remember, I trust, that John’s gospel begins by applying the words of Genesis 1 to Jesus.  “In the beginning, God…” Genesis 1 tells us.  “In the beginning was the Word…” John 1 tells us.  This, of course, was an intentional and provocative declaration of the person and nature of Jesus Christ.  He is none other than Yahweh, Creator God.

But John 4 carries this even further.  Remember the first act of creation from Genesis 1:

¹ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  ³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Imagine with me:  the Spirit of God is hovering over primordial blackness and nothingness.  There is nothing there.  God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.  And then, into and over and under and around the dark void, the utter nothingness, the voice of God Almighty speaks:  “Let there be light!”  I love the sound of the Latin here:  Fiat lux!

And then, whoosh!, a brilliant, incomprehensible, immeasurable, uncontainable explosion of blinding iridescent light blasts through the black void.  Nothing is no more, for light has been spoken into the darkness.  The inky black absence of anything has been made alive with light, for the light of God means life!  It is a staggering thought.  It would have been an amazing thing to behold, except for the fact that we would have been instantaneously incinerated in the beholding of it.

In Genesis, God speaks light into darkness, and creation is born.  With that in mind, consider again the amazing implications of John 1: “In the beginning was the Word…In Him was light, and the life was the light of men.”

John is appealing again to Genesis and depicting once more Christ as not only Creator, but also as the agent of creation, as the life-giving light without which creation cannot be sustained.

It is a flabbergasting thought.  But what is even more flabbergasting is the fact that Christ is the revealing light not only on the grand cosmic scale of creation, but also on the smaller scale of your own life.  He shined in the darkness at the beginning of all things, and He shines even now in your own life.

Christ is light, and, as light, Christ reveals.  He reveals many things.  He reveals the nature of God.  Did you notice verse 18?  “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”  Christ makes God known.  He reveals the person and nature of God.  He reveals what God is like.  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

He reveals the truth.  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)  Christ is truth and Christ reveals, in His person, the truth.

But that is not all.  He also reveals the truth about us, and this can be painful to see.

Christ, the Light That Convicts.

Christ is not only the light that reveals, He is the light that convicts.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “an unflattering light?”  That phrase is used to describe light that is too revealing.  Some light shows more than we want it to show, does it not?  This is why men take women on romantic dates to candlelit restaurants and not to places where you sit under fluorescent lights.  When you are dating, you do not want the person to get too good a look at you!

In all seriousness, though, some light flatters while other light does not.  We prefer the dim light that keeps us from utter darkness but that, on the other hand, does not reveal too much.  But Jesus is the light that reveals everything about who we are:

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

One of the reasons the world rejected Jesus was that He revealed too much.  He stills reveals too much as far as our carnal natures are concerned.

He revealed not only the love and grace of a holy God.  He also revealed the deep depravity of our own sinfulness and selfishness.  For the light that reveals, reveals everything.

This is why many of us prefer the night-light Jesus to the full-fledged, burning-bright, revealing, convicting Jesus.  We want just enough of Him to know that He is there keeping the darkness from overwhelming us, but not enough of Him to reveal all that we really are.

But you cannot have it both ways.  You cannot have “a little bit” of Jesus.  Light has no fellowship with darkness.  If light is to do its job, it must be allowed to shine.

Have you ever seen an operating room in a hospital?  Hovering over the operating table is a massive, intrusive, powerful light.  It looks like one of those old science fiction UFOs hovering up there.  No surgeon worth his salt would say, “Ah, it’s time for open heart surgery. Somebody light a candle and put on some Yanni.”  No!  If he is to do what he must do to save us, the light must shine.

Our sins envelope us in darkness, and they demand the intrusive properties of the light of Jesus Christ to be seen, uprooted, and abolished.

I once pastored a church in which there was an elderly couple who would ask me on occasion to drive them on day trips here and there.  They were unable to drive themselves, so my wife and, at the time, our very young daughter, would drive them to various places, usually the mountains of western Tennessee.

They once asked me to drive them to a place where we toured a deep underground cavern.  We paid the entry fee and then were guided through a tour deep into this underground tavern.  Dim lights were placed along the path to keep us from going awry.  I was less than encouraged when the guide revealed to us that it would actually be quite dangerous to go off the path as the cavern contained deep and seemingly bottomless pits into which you could fall.  Once such cavern, he revealed, contained the skeleton of a long-dead sabertooth tiger at the bottom!

At the bottom of one descent our little group gathered together in the middle of a large chamber.  The tour guide asked us if we wanted to experience true darkness.  I suppose enough people agreed to warrant the demonstration. So we all came in close together and, at the count of three, he cut off all the lights.

To this day, I have never seen (for lack of a better word) such absolute darkness.  I literally could see nothing.  I saw less than nothing.  It was an utter absence of any light.

This is what our sin is like, and this is our condition outside of Christ.  Thus, John contrasts the light of Christ with the darkness of the world:  ^“The light shines in the darkness…”(v.5)

The darkness is the world order that is hostile to the grace of God.  We all prefer the darkness and hate the light by nature. We are, by nature, children of wrath.  How else can we understand the chilling words of verse 11:  “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

How about you?  Have you received Christ the light?  Or do you prefer the darkness?

Have you submitted yourself to the searching, revealing, probing, uncovering light of the gospel of Christ?

The light does indeed shine in the darkness.  But that is not at all.  It must be understood that “the darkness has not overcome it.”

Christ, the Light That Saves.

There is no darkness of sin, death, and hell that the light cannot penetrate and destroy.  Christ is the light that saves:

¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

It is not necessary to resign yourself to the darkness that kills.  You may come to the light that gives life.  It is true that the revealing light of Christ burns us as it searches us, but it burns us only to heal us.  It searches us, painfully at times, only so that Christ may reveal to us that which is destroying us.

The light is not meant for our pain, it is meant for our salvation.  In fact, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (v.12)

There is a two-fold need here:  the need to believe and the need to receive.

Many try to believe without receiving.  “Yes,” they say, “I believe that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But they do not receive Him. They do not say, “I believe He is my Christ, my Savior, my Lord, and I give Him everything.”

There is a legal note sounded here in this proclamation of salvation as well:  “he gave the right to become children of God.”

We speak today of “forensic justification,” or the idea that when you are justified through the blood of Christ there is an affected legal change of status.  You were dead, but now you live.  You were blind, but now you see.  You were lost, but now you are found.  You were guilty, but now you are righteous.  You were in darkness, but now you live in the light of the grace of God.

“And from his fullness,” John writes in verse 16, “we have all received, grace upon grace.”  To which we can only respond, “Hallelujah!  Hallelujah to the lamb that was slain!”

Christ is the light who reveals, who convicts, and who saves.

Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book, used to sit as a little boy with his nose pressed to his bedroom window, watching the man walk down the dark street lighting the street lamps.  This enthralled the young boy.  It so enthralled him that he once cried out to his mother, “Momma!  Come watch this man punching holes in the darkness.”

This is what Jesus came to do.  He came to punch holes in the darkness.  But He came to do even more.  He came to overwhelm and abolish and drive out the darkness.  Just as He did in the act of creation, so He does even today.

Step into the light.  Step into Christ.

The light is shining in the darkness.

John 1:1-2

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God.

A few years ago the Associated Press reported that a Manhattan civil court judge had granted a 42-year-old man named Jose Luis Espinal the right to change his name.  This, of course, is not particularly newsworthy in and of itself.  What makes it interesting was that Espinal wanted to change his name to Jesus Christ.

Judge Diane Lebedeff granted Espinal’s request, much, I should point out, to his delight.

His reason for wanting to do so?  I’ll let you hear his words:  “I am the person that is that name,” Espinal said.  “This was not done for any reason other than I am that person. You’re dealing with the real deal.”[1]

Mr. Espinal will simply have to forgive us if (1) we prefer the use of his given name and (2) we are more than skeptical of his claim to be “the real deal.”

When it comes to Jesus, there’s only one “real deal,” and He did not have to petition a judge for the name.  He was given it by God, and He reigns on high forevermore.

In truth, I think we can fairly summarize John’s purpose in writing his gospel as a desire to present “the real deal” to the church.  We’ll look at why John wished to do so in a moment, but, first, let me take a moment and explain why this issue is so very important.

The fact of the matter is that the church rises and falls on its view of Christ.  The question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15) is the most crucial question the church must answer.  If we get that wrong, we get everything else wrong.  If we answer it well, we do so to the strengthening, edification, and growth of the church.

We may allow ourselves to be unsure of many things, but we dare not be unsure of the identity of Jesus.  John understood this point well, and so he wrote an entire gospel to show how and why Jesus was the real deal.

John’s Purpose

John is not ambiguous in his gospel about why he wrote it.  He spells out why clearly in the last two verses of the next-to-the-last chapter in the book:

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 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.” (John 20:30-31)

We see, then, that John’s purpose was two-fold:  (1) to lead the readers of this gospel to belief in Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God,” and (2) to lead the readers of the gospel to salvation and a new way of living life as through believing on Christ.

John’s purpose, then, is not mere biography.  In truth, none of the gospels are mere biography.  Yet it has been universally recognized that John’s gospel is unique from the first three gospels (the so-called “synoptic gospels”).

John’s gospel, including how he arranged and presented it, has as its goal nothing less than the presentation of “the real deal” to all who will listen and see.  He is not concerned with information for information’s sake.  Instead, he is concerned with life-changing good news that, when embraced, forever changes the life the one who believes.

Why should John’s gospel be studied today?  There are many reasons, but two in particular are noteworthy:

1. John was writing in a religious culture that was very similar to our own.

The late New Testament scholar E. Earle Ellis wrote that, “In many ways John probably would feel more at home in our century than in any since his own day.”[2]  While Ellis wrote this sentiment in 1965, it is nothing but more true today.

John’s world was one of great societal, political, and religious upheaval.  Religiously, the church was in a very similar situation at the end of the first century to the situation in which she finds herself today at the beginning of the twenty-first.

The basic doctrines of the church, particularly the person and nature of Jesus, were being redefined by heretical groups from within the church in the first century.  Particularly, John’s culture had to deal with the threat of two heresies:  Gnosticism and Docetism.  Both of these movements sought to say that Jesus had been misunderstood, that he was really, for instance, a teacher of secret, hidden knowledge, or, in the case of Docetism, that he was not really human, flesh and blood.

The church was also in a great time of conflict with those outside of the faith.  In particular, John’s gospel reveals a growing conflict between the early Chrstians and the Jews.  This is a time when the Christians are being expelled from the synagogues, and tension is rife.

It was also a time when the church was threatened from outside by pagan Greek philosophies and secular ideas.  The gospel was foolishness to the Greeks, and they relished in lampooning the faith.

So it was a time of great uncertainty and of great spiritual danger.  When John wrote, nothing less than the very definition of Christianity and the very identity of Christ was at stake.

And so it is in our world:  the threat of radical Islam and it’s redefinition of Christ, the rise of a new kind of militant atheism that is aggressively telling young Christians that there is no God and that claims the church has spoken a lie about Jesus, the undermining of the reliability of the Bible…all of these realities and more have caused a feeling of unease in the church, a quiet sense among otherwise faithful people that we cannot know who Jesus was and what He meant.

It is to these questions that John directs this gospel.  The gospel of John is a clear trumpet blast of truth in the midst of a time of great uncertainty.

2.We should also study John because John understood the vital connection between right belief and right living.

Right belief is the basis or foundation of right living.  To embrace Jesus and His radical person is to embrace the radical implications of Jesus in one’s life.

This is what is so very frustrating about those who say, “It does not matter what you believe about Jesus so long as you follow Him.”

But it does matter a great deal to me because the identity of the one I am following will dictate how I follow and to what extent I follow.

If, for instance, I think that Jesus is merely good but not divine, I will trust Him up until the point that He asks me to do something that makes no sense to me.  I will, in other words, listen to the sound advice of a man I think is good, but I would not lay down my life for him if I thought he was merely good.

It matters who you think Jesus is, and, to this end, John writes his amazing gospel under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus the Word

At the outset of John’s gospel, he does something most surprising.  He applies a title to Jesus that no other writer applies.  He calls Jesus, “the Word.”  The Greek word for this is “logos.”  Jesus is, “the Logos!”

In doing this, John could not have chosen a more loaded word.  The word “word” had various meanings to different groups at the time in which John wrote.

For instance, the Stoic philosophers believed that the world was governed and held together by a kind of universal spirit or soul, a rational principle that gave meaning and direction to all things.  They called this universal spirit “the word” or “the logos.”

Others see a connection between this word “word” and the Jewish use of the word “wisdom.” For instance, wisdom is personified in Proverbs 1:20-33 as a woman crying aloud.  Furthermore, consider the similarities between John’s description of “the Word” in John 1 and Proverbs’ depiction of the voice of wisdom in Proverbs 8:

²² “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
²³Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
²⁴When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
²⁵Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
²⁶before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
²⁷When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
²⁸when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
²⁹when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
³⁰then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
³¹ rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.

³²“And now, O sons, listen to me:
blessed are those who keep my ways.
³³ Hear instruction and be wise,
and do not neglect it.
³⁴ Blessed is the one who listens to me,
watching daily at my gates,
waiting beside my doors.
³⁵For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favor from the LORD,
³⁶but he who fails to find me injures himself;
all who hate me love death.”

But that is not all.  Others have pointed out that the word “word” was used as a title for God Himself in the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament called “the Targums.”  John Roning has recently argued this case in his The Jewish Targums and John’s Logos Theology:

“This book depends entirely on, and argues for, the view that John’s decision to call Jesus ‘the Word,’ the Logos…was influenced by the Targums, the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, many or most of which were prepared for recitation in the synagogue after the reading of the Hebrew text.  In hundreds of cases in these Targums, where the MT refers to God, the corresponding Targum passage refers to the divine Word.  Considered against this background, calling Jesus ‘the Word’ is a way of identifying him with the God of Israel.”[3]

Clearly the word “word” (logos) meant many things to many people.

This makes verse one all the more significant:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

What was John trying to do?  Which understanding of “word” was he trying to redefine in applying the title to Christ?

Likely, he was thinking of all of these understandings.  In other words, John appears to be aware that the word has many meanings and he seems to be making a general statement about how Christ is the fulfillment of every previous attempt to understand and describe God.

What the Stoics envisioned as the cosmic soul of the universe was nothing less than Christ Himself, for “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)

What the Old Testament calls the wisdom of God is nothing less than Christ Himself.

When the Targums spoke of God as “the Word” they were really, if unknowingly, speaking of Christ Himself.

Jesus, then, is the fulfillment of all attempts to envision who God is.  He is the fruition and culmination of all titles.  He is “the Word” of God!

In this sense, what John is doing may not be terribly different from what Paul did when he addressed the Athenians in Acts 17:22-23:

“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

John, likewise, is going to explain the God to whom others were reaching without full knowledge.  John, like Paul, was doing nothing less than showing the world “the real deal.”

Jesus, the God-Man

As staggering as this is, there are even more reasons for awe at the person of Christ.

Imagine with me for a moment that you are a Jewish man or woman or boy or girl.  You have been raised in a faithful Jewish home.  You are familiar with the Hebrew scriptures.  Their words and phrases are ingrained in your thinking.

Were somebody to approach you and say, “In the beginning…”, you would instinctively finish the sentence, “God created the Heavens and the earth.”

These words are as familiar to you, a faithful Jew, as the air you breathe.  You know the language.  You know the order of things.

“In the beginning…God.”

It is the foundational statement of your faith.  It is the very essence of your understanding of reality.

“In the beginning…God.”

Then imagine with me that you come upon a friend of yours who is reading a scroll.  You ask what he is reading.  “Something unusual,” he says.  “Something troubling.”

“Well,” you say, “let me hear it.”

“Ok, listen to this,” your friend replies.  Then he begins to read:  “In the beginning…”

Ah!  But you know these words.  You do not remember a time when you did not know them!  You finish the sentence out loud for your friend:  “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth.”

“That is not unusual,” you say to your friend with a smile.

“No,” he responds.  “Listen to how this reads:  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“In the beginning was the Word?” you ask.  “Well, I have heard some of the rabbis speak of God as the Word.  That is not the usual way of putting it, but I understand.”

“No, no, no,” your friend continues.  “Listen to this:  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”

Imagine how you, a devout Jew, would receive this startling statement.  “The word became…flesh?!”

Do you see what John has done here?  It is quite scandalous on the face of it.  He is applying the Genesis language of creation to Christ Himself.  He is saying that this Jesus is none other than He who created the Heavens and the earth.

He is saying that this Word, this Jesus, is God Himself among us.

The assertion is no less amazing to us today than it would have been to a first-century Jew.  It is a bold assertion of the deity and divinity of Jesus.  It is an assertion that has shaken the world for over two-millennia now.

But, most importantly, it is an assertion that has the potential, if grasped and believed, to change your life utterly and profoundly.  For the Word has not only been spoken, He has been spoken to you and for you.