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The True Light
Intro
As we opened up the gospel of John last week we looked at his thesis statement.
That is the reason that he is penning his gospel message.
We saw in John 20:30-31 “30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.
31 But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
John is motivated to convince people about who Jesus is.
And if they believe that Jesus is the messiah, the son of God, then they may have life in his name.
John wants us to know and believe in Jesus b/c he is concerned with our eternal life.
He is concerned with our salvation.
He is concerned with our right believing about who Jesus is.
We can’t make up, form, or shape Jesus into someone made in our own image we have to believe on him based on who he is.
How he has revealed himself.
Then we switched gears and looked at the opening lines of John 1.
This is called the prologue in vs.1-18.
And what John is doing in these crucial verses is teasing out what he is going to prove throughout the rest of the gospel.
He is foreshadowing and giving us a glimpse of what it to come in the rest of the gospel.
In those opening lines of the prologue John wants to reassure us that Jesus preexisted creation.
That he existed before the world began.
And that he is God.
And for the rest of the prologue John is going to tease this idea out even further.
Why is this important?
Why is it so important that we understand Jesus’ true identity.
Because if you change who Jesus is you no longer have the truth.
You no longer have Christianity.
You no longer have salvation.
You no longer have God.
At the fundamental level, who Jesus was/is is way more important than what he did and what he taught.
His teachings and miracles served to prove who he is.
So we can’t go around and minimize Jesus to just the golden rule.
Or just to love our neighbor as our self.
Or just to the sermon on the mount.
We can’t minimize Jesus to just his teaching b/c if we do we are attempting to strip away his real authority.
We are attempting to strip away his lordship.
And we will weaken our faith, if we have any to begin with, if Jesus is simply a teacher, prophet, or moral authority.
It is only when we realize that these teachings come from God that we can trust that they hold any actual weight.
Authority.
and even relevance.
B/c if Jesus isn’t who he said he is, that is God in flesh, then we can’t trust anything he taught anyway.
But if he is who he said he is, then we have to believe what he said, what he revealed, and what he taught or else we are living in rebellion against God.
So this morning we are going to look at vs. 3-13, in these verses we are going to see Jesus as creator, John as a witness, and responses to the truth.
Let’s pray
Creator
We touched on this last week a little bit, but I think it’s important for us to understand that Jesus is not part of creation, rather he is the creator.
There is not one thing that exists that wasn’t created by him.
I want you to notice how John states it.
He states Jesus’ creating in both a positive and negative way
Jn 1:3 “3 All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.”
Everything in all of creation owes it’s creating to Jesus.
I saw this post on FB earlier this week were they were talking about the size of our universe.
The post began by showing the size of our solar system.
It compared the size of the planets to each other and then to the sun.
Then it zoomed out and showed our sun next the closest start to us, and it looked tiny.
Eventually, the author of the post showed a picture that the Hubble telescope took.
The telescope pointed at the same part of the darkness we can see for four months.
To the human eye it was simply a speck in space.
But after four months of capturing all the light it could from this little speck in the sky, Hubble found that hidden there out of our view were galaxies.
Some 13 billion light years away, there are galaxies that we didn’t know existed until 2003.
And in these galaxies are planets, stars, and solar systems.
This was just a small slice of what is out there.
Now some people will say that discoveries like this should put us in our place.
That we should look out to the skies and the stars above and know that our lives are insignificant.
That we just happen to live on this pale blue dot in the universe.
In comparison with the universe our lives are insignificant.
How could our lives ever matter?
But instead I want to cry out with the biblical authors that Ps 19:1 “1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands.”
and
Psalm 147:4 “4 He counts the number of the stars; he gives names to all of them.”
The creation of God should drive us toward him.
There are 125 billion galaxies that we know of.
And on average 100 million stars in each galaxy.
Meaning that there are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.
That is 200 with 21 zeros after it.
And the God who created all that, also created you.
You are not insignificant.
You are made in God’s image.
You matter to God.
His creation matters so much that he decided to enter into it.
All things created owe their creation to him.
1 Cor 8:6 “6 yet for us there is one God, the Father.
All things are from him, and we exist for him.
And there is one Lord, Jesus Christ.
All things are through him, and we exist through him.”
Can you see how arrogant it is to think that they can live without God.
And yet many do.
God has been gracious to us.
He has shown us his beauty, creativity, and provision in the works of his hand.
His fingerprints are all over creation.
Did you know that there is yet to be a civilization found that doesn’t believe in a higher power.
Do they necessarily believe in the true God of creation?
No. but they do look out at our world and attribute all they see, experience, touch, and do to someone or something outside themselves.
Why is that?
Because the design of the universe.
The design of our bodies.
The design of our ecosystems
Tells us that there has to be something outside of us that made it all.
While I was thinking about this aspect of God creating everything I came across a field of study called Bio-mimicry.
Bio-mimicry is the "new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems".
So we look at nature and it’s design and think, huh, I bet we can use that to make our lives better and/or easier.
Here are just a few examples.
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