JOHN 1:1-3 - The Coming of the Light

Introduction

Well, once again we find ourselves coming around to the season where the world around us tries its best to celebrate a holiday that it doesn’t understand. We are drawn as a people to Christmas the way a cave explorer lost in pitch-black darkness is drawn to a distant light—we are starving for some kind of light and hope as we drown in the dark misery of our rebellion in this broken world, and even though we don’t want to acknowledge the fact of our sin and the repentance we know is required of us, we just cannot stay away from the bright hope that the coming of Christ at Christmas offers.

But before we are too hard on unbelievers who don’t understand the holiday they are celebrating, we need to take the time during another Advent season to remind ourselves of the glory of this season! “Advent” is the season when we consider the arrival (“advent”) of the eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present God the Son into this world in human flesh—and if we think we have come to a settled understanding and comprehension of what that means, we are fooling ourselves, aren’t we?

The arrival of Jesus Christ into the darkness of this world as a baby in Bethlehem is the single greatest event to ever happen in the entire history of creation. If we were to live through a thousand Advent seasons we would not get to the depths or height of this amazing event—fortunately, we have the promise of spending all of eternity in His presence to contemplate and delight in His mighty act of stooping down into mortal flesh to save us!

So we will spend the next four Sundays of Advent (leading up to our Christmas Eve service itself) meditating on the first eighteen verses of John Chapter 1—if we want to truly understand the glory of Christ’s coming in the flesh, we could hardly do worse than to consult John’s Gospel, especially as he told us that he wrote it specifically

John 20:31 LSB

...so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.

So my aim this morning as we begin studying John’s description of the coming of the Light into the world is to ground you in Who Jesus is as you celebrate His birth in the midst of a culture that does not understand Him, but desperately needs to. I want our time in these verses to equip you to celebrate Christmas like a Christian—I want to equip you to

Offer your CELEBRATION of Christmas as WORSHIP of Christ

In the midst of all of the hustle and bustle and visits and gifts and cards and plays and feasts and fudge (lots of fudge...) let all of it be grounded in your worship of the Light that dawned in Bethlehem in that manger that dark night.

John doesn’t actually refer to Bethlehem at all in his narrative of Christ’s arrival on earth—Luke records the night of Christ’s birth, Matthew writes about the Magi and the flight to Egypt (Mark doesn’t describe Christ’s birth at all—he’s in a hurry to get to Easter!). John is the only one of the three Gospel writers that write about Christ’s birth who treats it as a theological event. He refers to Jesus as “the Word”—a very significant concept (as we will see) to the predominantly Greco-Roman audience that he is writing to.

By the time John wrote his Gospel (the last of the four), there were some significant heresies about Jesus that were beginning to spread through false teachers influencing the church, and so as John picks up his pen to write he is going to specifically attack those errors as part of his narrative. He presents Jesus as the Word here in these verses, and he is going to make three assertions about Christ’s character and being as he does so.

The first truth John establishes in these verses is that

I. Jesus is the DIVINE Word

John 1:1 LSB

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Where Luke begins with Jesus in the manger and Matthew begins with Jesus before the Magi, John begins with Jesus at the beginning of time itself! John makes it very clear that

He is ETERNAL (cp. Gen. 1:1)

John is deliberately echoing the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning… God created the heavens and the earth.” “In the beginning… was the Word...” Here in this verse John is refuting the heresy that had begun in his day and would continue through the next few centuries until it became a controversy that threatened to split the Holy Roman Empire in half—Emperor Constantine called for a Council in the city of Nicea in 325 A.D. to answer the assertions of a priest named Arius who insisted that “there was a time when the Son was not”.

But John says here that “In the beginning”, before anything was ever made—before time itself even existed—the Word already was! In fact, it was this Word that created everything there is:

John 1:3 LSB

All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.

Eight times in the account of Creation in Genesis we see “And God said...” He spoke, and His Word accomplished it. John shows us that that Word God spoke was the Word Who came in flesh to Bethlehem!. It seems as though God was speaking to The Word when He said in Genesis 1:26:

Genesis 1:26 LSB

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness...

The Word created man in His image and likeness, and then came as man in the Incarnation. This brings us to the next thing that John says about this Eternal Word—

He is a PERSON

Another heresy that John was battling in his day (and one that still appears in our day) was the heresy that said that the Son and the Father and the Spirit were all the same God—in the second and third Centuries A.D. it became known as Sabellianism; today we hear it called “modalism” or “oneness Christology”.

The idea is that God appears in various ways to mankind depending on the nature of His work—at times He appears as a Father, at times as the Son, and at times as the Spirit. (Just as one man can be a father, a son, a husband and a brother, for instance, and still be one person.)

But John does not allow us to get away with this, either—he makes it clear that the Word (Christ) was with God in the beginning. (I can simultaneously be a husband and father, but I cannot be a husband with a father!!) Jesus Christ, God the Son, was (and is) distinct and separate from God, standing forth in His own personhood.

But here again—John does not let us get away with thinking that because the Word was separate from God in His own person that He was less than God—

John 1:1 LSB

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He is eternal, He is personal, and

He is DEITY

Because this is such a clear and unambiguous statement that Jesus Christ is God Himself, this verse has long come under attack from the modern descendents of Arius, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They typically try to appeal to a grammatical feature of this verse (saying that because the definite article in Greek doesn’t appear in the phrase “and the Word was God”, it should be translated “and the Word was a god.. or godlike...”) But regardless of the Greek grammar of the sentence, they miss the fact that there was a perfectly good Greek word, “theois”, that John could have used to say that Jesus was “godlike”. But he didn’t write that—he wrote that Jesus Christ is God.

As you ground your Christmas celebrations in the worship of Christ, hold to Him as the Divine Word—He is God Himself, the Creator of all things, the eternal God come in human flesh—celebrate Christmas like a Christian!

John shows us that Jesus is the divine Word, and he shows us here in these verses that

II. Jesus is the SAVING Word

As we observed earlier, when John describes Jesus as “The Word” (translated from the Greek word logos), he is deliberately tapping into one of the foundation stones of Greek philosophy. About six hundred years before the birth of Christ (around the time that Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians), a Greek philosopher named Heraclitus grappled with two undeniable realities in the world around us.

First, everything is always changing—he famously illustrated this by saying that “You can never step twice into the same river”. Water flows, banks erode, fish swim—it is never the same twice. Everything in the world around you is always changing. The stars are never in the same place night after night, the sun and moon constantly change positions in the sky, we ourselves grow, learn, age, weaken and die. Everything is always changing.

At the same time, he noted, everything has order in its changing. The stars are always changing their position, the seasons are always changing, but they change in predictable ways. The river keeps changing, but it is always identifiable as a river. There are unseen laws that govern all the change we see around us (and in us)—this is what Heraclitus called Logos—the order and reason of the divine reality.

Now you can see, can’t you, that when John writes here about Christ as the Logos, he is saying to his Greek readers, “Here is the Word you have been searching for! In Jesus Christ is found all of the order and logic of the cosmos!” John brilliantly unites the Old Testament Hebrew worldview (Jesus is God because He was in the beginning) with the Greek worldview (Jesus is the Divine Order and Reason that holds the cosmos together!)

If you are a Christian, you know this is true, don’t you? Life only begins to make sense when you know Christ as your Savior! John unpacks this truth of Jesus as the saving Word throughout his Gospel—he demonstrates in John 6:68, for instance, that Jesus is the Word that

Saves us from DESPAIR (John 6:68-69)

John 6:68 LSB

Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.

Peter and the rest of the disciples were bewildered and anxious over the opposition that Jesus’ teaching about Himself was generating—the crowds that had been following Him were beginning to melt away. When Peter pointed this out, Jesus said, “Do you also want to go?” (v. 67). But Peter (and the other disciples) realized that there was nowhere else to go! There was no other rabbi or teacher or philosopher that could give meaning that went beyond the life they were living and taught them eternal truth for eternal life.

Christian, you know this to be true, don’t you? You have believed and come to know that Jesus is the Word that saves you from despair; you have seen it in your own life. And beloved, there are so many people desperately groping for that same light in the meaninglessness and hopelessness of their lives. Christmas is the time to say “Here is the Light you have been searching for! Jesus’ birth is not just a fairy tale or folklore—He is the One Who will give meaning to your life.

He is the light that saves us from despair, and more importantly, Jesus is the Light that

Saves us from DEATH (John 11:25-26; 8:51)

Look around you in the world we live in and you will see that we are a people who live in a constant battle with death. Death is the great, inevitable enemy of every one of us. People will go to all kinds of desperate extremes to prolong their lives or delay the coming of death. But no matter how hard we fight, we all know that it is a losing battle.

Death always wins. Death always claims its prize. No matter how many vitamins or supplements you take, no matter how hard you exercise or how many surgeries you have or how much chemo or radiation or gene therapy you suffer through.

UNLESS YOU KNOW JESUS CHRIST!

When death struck one of Jesus’ closest friends—Lazarus—John records the way He comforted Mary, Lazarus’ sister:

John 11:25–26 LSB

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die—ever...”

And He says the same thing to the unbelieving Jews who accused Him of being a demon-possessed Samaritan in John 8:

John 8:51 LSB

“Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death—ever.”

When death finally opens its jaws to take you, Christian—you will never even see it! All you will see at that moment is Christ Himself receiving you into life!

He is the Word that saves us from despair, He is the Word that saves us from death, and He is the Word that

Saves us from WRATH (John 3:16; 1 John 2:2)

One of the first Bible verses any child learns—arguably the most well-known verse in all Scripture—is a declaration that Jesus came to save us from the wrath of God:

John 3:16 LSB

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

The word “perish”—that seems so quiet and unassuming in that verse—that word perish contains all of the horror and dread of suffering the eternal wrath of God for our sin. We are every one of us hopelessly guilty under God’s righteous judgment. In our own strength and by our own means we could never get out from under the death-penalty that our sin against God had earned for us. The judgment that God spoke against us— “Guilty!” was a word that we could not contradict.

But the wonder of Christmas is that that very Word came to earth to take on flesh and die in our place!

1 John 2:2 LSB

and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.

The eternal Word made flesh died to propitiate God’s wrath—to take away God’s wrath against us! Because the Word died on the Cross, you and I will live. Because the sinless Son of God was punished for sin, we sinners are counted as righteous before God!

Celebrate Christmas like a Christian—let your celebration of this holiday be your worship of Christ the Word. He is the Divine Word, He is the Saving Word, and here in our text John assures us that

III. Jesus is GOD’S word for us

John tells us further down in Chapter 1 that

John 1:14 LSB

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us...

Consider for a moment how each one of us reveals ourselves by our words. The words we speak, the way we choose to speak them, who we speak to, when we speak and when we remain silent—everything about who we are and what we are like is revealed by our words.

In the same way, God revealed Himself by His Word to us—the Word that was made flesh and dwelt with us. Jesus is God’s Word to us—

Through Him we can KNOW GOD (cp. John 14:9; Heb. 1:1-3)

Jesus Himself says it plainly in John 14:9:

John 14:9 LSB

“...He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

The writer of Hebrews uses very similar language to describe how we have come to know God through Christ, saying that God:

Hebrews 1:1–3 LSB

spoke to us in His Son… who is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature...

Do you want to know God? Then look at Jesus Christ revealed here in the Scriptures—God’s holiness, His compassion, His care, His sovereignty, His wisdom, His might, His judgment, His power, His authority—and most of all, His love! You will only know God truly as you know Him through Jesus Christ. See Jesus here in the Scriptures, and you have seen God the Father!

Don’t pass by this lightly, beloved—because if this is true; if the eternal, transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God, the Almighty Ancient of Days has really revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, then

His ARRIVAL is the most important EVENT in the world

As one commentator on this passage writes:

In worldly terms, Jesus accomplished nothing. But God’s Son did not come to build a financial or military empire, or to leave a record in the fading pages of worldly glory. Instead, he came to show the way to God that he himself would open for us by his death on the cross for our sins. Since he is God, and since he came to save lost sinners, what he did demands our fervent attention and heartfelt faith. (Doriani, D. M., Ryken, P. G., & Phillips, R. D. (2008). The Incarnation in the Gospels (D. M. Doriani, P. G. Ryken, & R. D. Phillips, Eds.; p. 147). P&R Publishing.)

If the arrival of Jesus Christ—God in the flesh—is the most important event in the world, then you can see how

KNOWING Him is the most important RELATIONSHIP in the world

God is knowable because Christ came in the flesh. You can be confident that when you see Jesus revealed here in the Scriptures that this really is what God is like! In a world where people want to insist that if there is a God, we cannot know what He is like because He goes beyond our ability to comprehend, we can say with certainty that we know Him because we have seen Jesus Christ!

But to say that we “know” God through Christ means much more than just knowing about Him. There are a lot of people who will tell you they know all about Jesus Christ—they know the things He said, they know that He “died on the Cross to save us from our sins”. They may even believe that it is true—that Jesus lived and died just the way the Gospels tell—but they do not think that it has anything to do with them.

You may acknowledge that Jesus really existed and did the things the New Testament tells you He did. But that is not enough.

You may admire the things Jesus said and did—you may be convinced that He taught a superior moral philosophy, or you may admire Him as a champion of the poor or the ultimate example of selfless love. But that is not enough.

You may have grown up in church, memorizing Bible verses about Christ, being baptized and joining a church, giving tithes and taking part in the Lord’s Supper and acknowledging that you are a Christian—but that is not enough.

Because Jesus did not come to earth to be a perfect example of selfless love, or to establish a dominant moral philosophy. He did not appear so that He could make you feel better about yourself or become a better person. John did not write these verses so that you could see Jesus as a great revolutionary or clever philosopher. “These things are written”, John says, “so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in His Name.” (John 20:31)

Believing in Jesus means believing what He said. It means believing that what He says about what He was sent to do:

John 3:16 LSB

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Believing that Jesus is the Christ means that you believe that He is your only hope to escape the penalty for your sin. Had the eternal Son of God not come in the flesh at Christmas, you would perish under the wrath of God. Unless you understand this—unless you get this—you cannot celebrate Christmas rightly.

You have no other hope of making sense of this world apart from Jesus. You have no other hope of escaping the guilt and shame that clings to you. There is no other way to cheat the grave that is coming for you. There is no other way to live a moral and honorable life. There is no other way to know God, no other way to know yourself, no other hope for eternity in Heaven apart from Him. Celebrate Christmas like a Christian: Come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 LSB

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________