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Well first I want to say thank you for coming out tonight.
I am excited to be starting Sunday night Bible studies here at Bethlehem.
From what I understand it has been a while since we have had regular Sunday night services.
But I am glad we can start this up again and my prayer is that our time together on Sunday nights will be more than profitable.
I first started speaking with Brother Paul about doing this study in the book of John back in November and he was all for the idea.
We had a hard time deciding whether or not to do it on Sunday or Wednesday or here or at Gamaliel, but I think it is good to do it here at our church and I am excited for it.
Some have asked me how long this study will take?
I was having a conversation last weekend with Brother Darrel Bartley from Marrowbone Baptist Church and we were talking about this study and specifically the Gospel of John.
He said to me, well, if you are going to do it right you need to spend three weeks in chapter one alone.
I told him that was good because I am probably spending four weeks in chapter one.
But in all seriousness, this is not something we want to rush.
We want to go thoroughly through this book.
There are 21 chapters so at minimum it will take 21 weeks, but as I said we will be spending multiple weeks in some chapters.
So, in short, I have no idea how long this will take.
We will go until we are done.
The Gospel of John is one of the most important books in all of Scripture.
Not that there are any unimportant books in Scripture.
But I have often said that the two books that will do you well for a lifetime of study are the Book of Romans and the Gospel of John.
These two books have some of the deepest and richest theology in all of Scripture.
When we think of the Gospel of John we think about Christ.
The whole book is about Christ.
It is about the person of Christ.
It is about his Deity.
It is about his power, his authority, and his majesty.
It is about his saving work on the cross, his redemption of our souls in the resurrection, it is about his glory in his final days on this earth.
The Gospel of John is about the disciples and how they follow Christ through good and bad.
It shows their ups and downs and how they were not always perfect.
It examines the other followers of Christ as well.
We think of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus in .
When we finally get to that chapter it will show us the humanity of Christ when we see Jesus weep and grieve with Mary and Martha over Lazarus’ death.
But then we see the glory and power of Christ when he raises Lazarus up.
The book of John has some major themes.
The overall theme is the Deity of Christ.
We see this theme played out in significant ways.
We will see the signs of Christ in John.
These are the various miracles that Christ performed to show his power and authority.
And we will see the “I Am” statements of Christ in John declaring that he is, in fact, God.
We will be taking this study straight through the Gospel.
We will start in chapter one and work methodically through the book all the way to chapter 21.
This will not be your normal Sunday sermon.
We will be looking at church history, we will be looking at Greek words, cultural concepts and I promise I will do my best to make it interesting.
The Gospel does not actually name its author.
So you may be wondering, why do we attribute it to the Apostle John?
There are a few reasons why we can have confidence that John wrote this book.
First, the early church testifies that John wrote this book.
Irenaeus who lived during the second century wrote in his work Against Heresies, that John was the author of the Gospel.
This is significant because Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who worked directly under the Apostle John.
So we are just one step removed from the Apostle saying that the Apostle wrote the book.
There are other examples of those in the early church attributing the Gospel to John but we will not get into them this evening.
Another evidence is the actual manuscript evidence.
No manuscript has ever been found attributing the book to anyone other than John.
But there is also internal evidence that John wrote the Gospel.
Need to add information about authorship.
It is important to note that John never calls himself by name in the Gospel even when he is part of the scene.
When you see the name John mentioned he is talking about John the Baptist.
He refers to himself only as a disciple or, more specifically, the disciple that Jesus loved.
I mentioned several themes in John, but the Gospel also has an overall purpose.
John actually states this in
John wants us to know that Jesus is the Christ, that He is God, and that we can have eternal life by believing in Him.
These are the overall themes.
You cannot miss these from the first verses of John to the last.
It is for these reasons that many people hand out the Gospel of John to unbelievers as their first exposure to the Bible.
But I think we have talked enough about the context and history of the book.
I think it is time we actually begin to look at the text.
We are in the first chapter of John’s Gospel tonight.
Specifically, we will be in .
So let’s read the text together.
The title of tonight’s message is the Word Became Flesh.
This is the single most glorious passage in all of Scripture in my opinion.
You might object and say, “What about the crucifixion and resurrection?
What about the birth of Christ in Luke?
What about ?” Yes, those are all wonderful sections of Scripture.
But the reason I single out this passage is this, none of those other passages would be possible without the truth that is contained in these 18 verses.
The truth and the hope of the Gospel rises and falls on the Deity of Christ.
The reason for this is that no man could take away our sin.
tells us:
There is not one righteous man.
Therefore, God had to become man to stand in our place.
The word became flesh.
This is one of the single most attacked doctrines of Scripture in the church today.
There are people who claim to be Christian all over the country today that adamantly deny the Deity of Christ.
In fact, in a 2016 survey taken by Lifeway Research and Ligonier Ministries only 68% of Evangelicals strongly affirmed the Deity of Christ.
That means over 30% either denied or were not sure of his status as Deity.
Yet, in this chapter, we see the Deity of Christ plainly stated.
So just to have some sort of outline or direction we are going in, we want to see the first point.
The Deity of the Word
The Deity of the Word.
Verse one states, “In the beginning, was the Word.”
The phrase, “In the beginning” is used ten times in the English Standard Version.
That is significant.
Of those ten times, four are in reference to the beginning of the reign of a king.
Two are in reference to the beginning of a work.
The other four refer to the beginning of creation.
Those are found in , Here in , and in .
Of course we all know , In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
states,
And then of course here in John we see the beginning had the Word.
But the next phrase is crucial.
The word was with God, and the word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
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