The Word

Intro: Everybody loves an origin story

We as people love a good origin story. We love to hear where the people that we admire come from.

X-Men Origins, Iron Man, Monsters University

This is the origin of Jesus

John 1:1-18

The Word with God

John 1:1-2 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

John starts out strong!

In the beginning, the Word was there.

This is very similar to Genesis, but it says that it wasn’t just God the Father there in the beginning, the Word was as well.

The Word was not only there at the beginning, He was with God at the beginning, and in fact He was God at the beginning.

Calling Jesus the Word of God is actually the same as calling Jesus God.

When we think of “word” it’s something that goes out from us, but for God, when He speaks it means action. He never says something that He doesn’t do, so calling Jesus the Word isn’t saying that Jesus is a word, but rather that He is God in action. He’s part of God in so many different ways.

The Word who Creates:

John 1:3-8 “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.”

Jesus is the creative force of God. (John 1:3)

Through Jesus, all of creation was made.

I can’t begin to explain all of what that means, but it certainly means that God, in Jesus, created everything,

That means that Jesus wasn’t created!

You can’t create everything if you were already created, so Jesus was before anything else was.

He’s not some guy, He’s not just a powerful creature; before anything else existed (because nothing else was created), there was God. And in that Godhead, there was Three in One. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus must therefore be the light of the world!

He’s God in the flesh, so that whatever Jesus did or said was God doing or saying. He’s life itself, He’s the hope of the world!

And, that light entered into the darkness of the world.

We tend to think of Christmas as this sweet little ceremony, but it was so much more than that! It was God going behind enemy lines and declaring that He was going to win everything. The world was so dark, and it still is, and yet God entered in to destroy that darkness!

Then, we get a random break to talk about this guy John the baptist.

This is a different John than the guy who wrote the Book of John, this was actually Jesus’ cousin. He was a prophet that talked about Jesus before Jesus came onto the scene.

People have wondered why John would mention this other guy, but what it seems like it does is it connects the spiritual side of the story of Jesus with the physical story of Jesus. It’s His origin story, so we’re getting two storylines that will come together soon.

The whole point of John the Baptist, however, was to point to Jesus.

The Word and Creation

John 1:9-13 “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The Light that we all needed, the Word of God, the thing that John’s whole point of existing, entered into the world.

Because of the darkness of the world, the world couldn’t contain the light.

When Jesus entered into the world, it’s not like everyone was totally on board with it, nor is that the case today. People are still hostile towards God, and most of the time, people don’t want to hear the message of Jesus.

Even the people that were waiting for Him (the Jews) when confronted with what it would mean to follow this God, rejected Him and eventually killed Him.

However, people do follow Him.

There were, and are, people who, even through the difficulty of believing, even through the fact that the world doesn’t like the message, follow Christ.

And those that did/do, are then adopted by God as His child and are fundamentally defined by jesus instead of themselves.

The Word in Creation.

John 1:14-18 “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. (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.’ ”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

This Word, the God who was before anything else was, decided to enter into creation. He didn’t just appear to be human (like the Greeks claimed their God’s did), nor was He just part human (like a demigod). He’s God in the flesh.

Not only that, but He showed us the glory of God in flesh.

THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN!

There were a few times when the glory of God would show up in the Old Testament, but everyone needed to be terrified of it because it was so powerful that it would consume people.

He’s different from anything that we could have known before Him.

He provides a different way than even the Jews before Him, Jesus gives us grace.

God doesn’t show up physically in the Old Testament, but in jesus, we are given a way of looking at God that is better from anything we could have ever hoped for.

Questions

What’s your favorite type of cookie?

What is one thing in this passage that you didn’t know about God?

Read V. 3. What do you think it means that, “all creation was made through Him?”

How does this view of God change your relationship to Him?