The Lamb of God

Jn 1:29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
    
There are some people who say we don’t need the Old Testament. They obviously don’t understand large portions of the New Testament because much of the New only makes sense when you see it in the light of the Old. This applies to our understanding of John the Baptist declaring, Look the Lamb of God.
   
The pictures of a lamb start right back in Genesis 4:4 “But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering” The firstborn would have been a lamb. The first acceptable offering (gift) to God was a lamb. It really takes on significance when we come to Exodus 12 when prior to the Exodus the Israelites were each told to take a lamb, one per family (12:3), year old males without defect (12:5), slaughter them and put some of the blood on the doorposts of the house (12:7). Then the Lord declared, “On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn–both men and animals–and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt . I am the LORD . The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.” Thus the blood of a lamb, the sign of the lamb’s life being taken, meant that family was saved. In every house in Egypt that night there was a dead body – either the firstborn son, or a lamb.
    
When it later came to the offerings of the sacrificial system (Lev 1-) although the offerings could be from herd or flock, it was most common for it to be a lamb, for cattle tended to be with wealthier families. Thus an offering of the flock was to be a lamb. It could be a burnt offering – simple description of most offerings (Lev 1:10), a fellowship offering – a sign of friendship and love (Lev 3:6), or a sin offering – to appease for their sin (Lev 4:32). In each case it was to be a lamb without defect. For the common (ordinary) person, the lamb was thus a link between them and God, the lamb enabled them to come into God’s presence. There is more about lambs but space forbids consideration of it.
  
So now Jesus appears and God’s prophet, John, sees him and identifies him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. How does he do that? He stands in our place and he gives his life as a sin offering, he stands in as the Passover Lamb so that we are spared judgment, because he takes it instead (Heb 9:26-28).
   
When John the Gospel writer received the Revelation, he saw the plight of the world and wept and was told, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” A Lion has triumphed! But then he saw standing before the throne in heaven, “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain” and as he took the scroll of the end time judgments, all those before the throne fell and worshipped him, singing, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.”
   
This is the picture of the Lamb of God who is Jesus, the Redeemer of the World, who stood in our place and took our sin upon himself (2 Cor 5:21), took our guilt and shame and our punishment, so that we could be set free. The Old Testament established the system that would portray what Jesus, in the New would do.   He has done it!
   

Regal Lord

Jn 1:27   He is the one who comes after me, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.
      
We live in an age when equality is all-important, but it is largely equality of opportunity, and when equality is being stressed it is because there is a recognition that, for whatever reason, there is an inequality to be redressed. We’re keen, in theory at least, to put everyone on a level playing field. But then in the United Kingdom we have one of the few surviving monarchies of the world and we do still have Lords and Earls and Dukes and so on – but we’re rather uncomfortable with them. There is a smack of privilege here and we feel, “Why should they have wealth and lands and so on, simply because of birth?”
   
And then we come to the kingdom of God where truly all men are equal (it’s only in worldly expressions of the church that we find status and position) and in Jesus’ words, the highest status is that of servant (Mt 20:26) and it is clear that Jesus sees himself as just such a servant. With that in mind, it is challenging therefore, to consider these words from John the Baptist about Jesus. John, you will remember, is a prophet, and prophets see things more clearly than most of us. In this sentence John paints a brief picture of the practice of the great having their servant undo their sandals when they came in, in preparation for their dusty feet to be washed. It was the most lowly servant in the household who would do the foot washing, and John now says that he’s not even worthy to be the lowest of servants for Jesus.
   
John was seen as a powerful, important spiritual figure. He was somewhat awesome, a prophet of the Old Testament sort, the last of that sort, slightly scary, and people looked up to him, yet he says the difference between he and Jesus is so great that he’s not even worthy enough to do the most menial of tasks for Jesus. Understand that this is not John putting himself down but him elevating Jesus. The crowd had been asking him if he were the Christ or the new Elijah or simply God’s Prophet, and he denies all these things and says, I simply baptize with water, an easy thing (implied). I’m a nobody in comparison to the one who is already here in your midst, he goes on.
   
John the Baptist, the prophet, realized something about Jesus that hardly anyone else yet realised. The Gospel writer, John, has already been describing Jesus in some very dramatic ways, but it’s taken him a lifetime to come to this realisation. Only slowly had he realised the significance of what the Baptist was saying. If this Jesus is so great that an ordinary servant was not worthy to wash his feet, he is on the level of royalty, he is a ruler of great nobility, we might say. John the Baptist caught the sense of this in his spirit, though possibly not fully in his understanding.
    
Psalm 2 catches something of this as God speaks of His anointed one (v.2), His king (v.6) that he has installed in Jerusalem, His begotten Son (v.7), and warns nations to pay him homage (v.12). Jesus, as we’ve seen in the recent meditations is great, really great, because of who he is. Even before he heals the multitudes, raises people from the dead, walks on water and so on, he is great because of who he is. He does all these things because of who he is. He doesn’t become great because he does these things; he already is great. John has caught a glimpse of this, and seeks to convey it so that we might believe, but this is a challenge to the pride in every one, that doesn’t like to submit to others. He is Lord, so bow before him, this servant King!
    

Grace & Truth

Jn 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
    
Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, something in you goes, “Oh no!” There are the people who are completely self-centred and all they can talk about is themselves. They tend to be loud, brash, harsh, even offensive. Then there are those who are a charade. They are putting on a front, Billy Liar personified. You never really get to know the real them because they are putting on such a show. What is sad about both sorts of people is that they are so far from what they were designed to be, because they don’t know who they are.
      
What is it these two groups of people lack? Grace and truth! Jesus was full of it. He didn’t just have a bit of it; everything about him was full of grace and truth. So what are these two characteristics?
      
Grace we sometimes describe as a divinely supernatural ability to cope, to be, to achieve. It is God’s ability for you and me to be the people He wants us to be. It is His enabling, Him providing something of Himself, it is His favour or ‘handed-out-goodness’. This grace that comes from God is a combination of His character and His ability. Thus when we receive His grace we receive something of His nature and an ability to be and to do as He wants us to be and do. And Jesus was full of this.
     
Why? Because of what goes before it: he was and is the Son of God, the one and only Son of God who has been formed out of the Father. He has the nature and being of the Father. In the same way that my daughter, say, has flesh because I have flesh, Jesus is Spirit because the Father is Spirit. But there the comparison stops, because my daughter may have a number of similar traits to me, but there is much of her that is unique to her. When we see Jesus, we see the Father, but limited in the flesh on earth and distinct in heaven. No I don’t understand it either! We only will when we get to heaven.
    
Truth is what is, what really is. There is nothing false, pretend, fake, or artificial in truth. It is real, genuine, actual. To use a modern phrase, what you see is what you get. In each one of us human beings there is something of falseness. We do not express perfectly or exactly what we are. We pretend, we’re not sure who we are or what we ought to be, and so we act as we think people expect us to act, or as we think we should act, but God is not like that. God is utterly true to Himself. He doesn’t have to put on a show – when you are The Supreme Being there is no one to impress! He is just Himself.
   
Jesus similarly, because he is of the essence of the Father, is just himself. He never said or did things because of others’ expectations. He did them because it was right to do them. Jesus, who knew all things, knew what was exactly right to say and do. That is why you can never fault anything he said or did – he was sinless (Heb 4:15). We may not understand it and may therefore wonder, but the error is never or his side; it’s always our misunderstanding. No, everything about Jesus is truth. If you realise that, it makes him a bit scary. Living with someone who is utterly real, utterly true – because we are not – is a bit scary. He shows us up. He showed up the religious leaders of his day and that’s why they had him killed.
    
Jesus arrived on earth and, as he pondered this many years later, John realised that his master was truly FULL of grace and truth, the essence of the Father.
    

The Only Begotten

Jn 1:14   The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
    
Language use changes through the years and I remember many years ago listening to a preacher using the old King James Version of the Bible who spent most of the time explaining the meaning of the old words. I sat there then and thought, “Wouldn’t it be easier to use a modern translation so then you won’t have to waste most of your time translating it here in front of us?” However there are sometimes, words that have gone out of use that convey more than other modern words do. In the NIV version above we have omitted a ‘note letter’ immediately after “the One and Only” which points us to a note saying “or the Only Begotten”. It is this word ‘begotten’ which is alien to most of us today, even though many of us will sing it at least once a year at Christmas in “O Come all ye Faithful”, the second verse of which finishes with “Son of the Father, begotten, not created”. So what does begotten mean?
    
To beget means to procreate which is a word that is more familiar but is still unwieldy. “One and Only” indicates something of Jesus’ uniqueness and “came from the Father” could be taken to mean simply that the Father sent him, but when we consider the word ‘begotten’ we see something different; he is the one and only one because he has come out of the Father and is God in essence. That is why he was described as glorious and full of grace and truth, characteristics of God Himself.
  
The Greek word in the original is fascinating. It is monogenes – only born, one with the genes of the Father, because he’s come from the Father. It was only when heresies started creeping in that the Church started formulating the truth. The early ‘Apostles Creed’ (orig. AD140) speaks of “Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit”. Later the ‘Nicene Creed’ (AD325) stated, “Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” It took the ‘Athanasian Creed’ (?670AD) to declare, “The Son is of the Father alone, not made nor created but begotten…. We believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man. He is God of the substance of the Father begotten before the worlds.”
    
Here is the truth declared, whatever substance (spirit?) God is, Jesus is the same because he came out of the Father and was not some separate creation made from dust (material) as man was (Gen 2:7). Nowhere else in all of history is there such a claim as this, established by the Gospel and epistle writers, and confirmed by the Early Church – that this man walking on the earth IS God. Yes, it goes beyond our understanding but that’s what the record clearly says.
   
John repeats this doctrine again and again: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (begotten), who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” (1:18) and “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only (begotten) Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (3:16) and so on. John had come to realize something that earlier they had not appreciated: the one who had walked among them was in essence God as well as man. When New-Agers say, “We are all gods” they’re not even speaking the same language!
     

Jesus Bringer of Glory

Jn 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
   
We move back to John’s Gospel now to consider another aspect of the light that comes from Christ. In this verse there are a number of things to be examined as we’ll see in the next few meditations. For now we simply ponder over this idea of ‘glory’. There is another word with which we are perhaps more familiar. We might say, “Wow, what a glorious sunset!” Something about its brightness, its wonder, its staggering beauty, touches our hearts. Isn’t it glorious! Of course if we are Bible students we will know of another use of ‘glory’ from the Old Testament – the glory of the Lord! Oh yes we know what that means because descriptions were given: “While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the LORD appearing in the cloud.” (Ex 16:10 ). There was a great brightness shining in the clouds. Or “Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle.” (Ex 40:34). Again a cloud of immense brightness. In the New Testament Luke records, “Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him” (Lk 9:32) as Jesus and Moses and Elijah shone with a great brightness. Glory thus refers to a great brightness from the very presence of God Himself. Where He is, there is His glory.
  
But glory was also used to mean a less tangible brightness: “But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD” (Ex 14:4). Because of what I am about to do, the Lord was saying, peoples will realize my wonder and power and might and majesty and they will know that truly I am ‘the I AM’. Glory here is great esteem, acknowledgement of great excellence.
   
So now we come to John’s description of Jesus: we have seen his glory. Now apart from the time on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus did not ‘glow’, so what John is saying is we have seen his wonder and excellence that reflects the wonder and excellence of God the Father. The glory of the One and Only? Yes, the unique wonder and magnificence of God Himself, shining through His Son.
   
What was John saying? Jesus stood out among mankind as a unique figure, a glorious figure. Put any great person you can think of in history next to Jesus and they pale into insignificance. Jesus stands out! He is unique! He is amazing! He is wonderful! He is incredible! He is glorious!
   
In the book of Revelation, John had the privilege of a heavenly vision in which he saw Jesus standing in the centre of the throne (Rev 5:6) and all around him the creatures applaud him with a song that includes: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” (Rev 5:12). They saw him as he was and acknowledged the wonder of who he is in this sevenfold anthem of praise.
    

There’s something we’ve missed: We have seen!  It’s so easy to take it for granted. The Word had been in heaven and now he was in the flesh on earth so that John and the others could SEE him. In his first letter John said, “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it” (1 Jn 1:2). The glory that was in heaven was put aside (“being in very nature God….made himself nothing….being found in appearance as a man” – Phil 2:6-8) but the human form still revealed the glory and wonder of God to those who had eyes to see. This was a glory that only open hearts saw. Have you seen it?
     

Jesus the Light

Jn 1:4,9 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it… The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world
   
A world without light would be a terrible place. If we did not have the sun we would not see the moon and the only light we would have would be the stars shining twenty four hours a day. Hardly anything would live. At the beginning of the Bible, God created the earth and it was dark (Gen 1:1,2) and so the very next thing God created was light (1:3). Light is essential to life. Life and light go together.
   
Modern science says something interesting about light – it is energy. In the previous meditation we thought about the life that is God, the energy that He brings to us to make us living beings. The life, the energy that Jesus brings, acts as a light for men. Imagine a completely dark world. Imagine someone coming who glows and each person he touches also glows as he conveys his energy to them. There is something of that with Jesus, the one who comes bringing real life as against the form of life that is so often acted out in the world around us.
    
In John’s Gospel, light is mentioned twenty four times. Later on we’ll look at Jesus’ declaration “I am the light of the world” but for the moment we’ll simply consider some introductory things about light. John spoke about Jesus shining in darkness, implying that the world was in darkness. In philosophy there have always been distinctions between light and darkness, good and evil. Darkness and evil have always gone together. Later John was to write, “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (Jn 3:19-21)
       
There two pictures or uses of light are given. As we just said, darkness is equated with evil. Sinful man, says John, preferred evil to the light who came among them and (he has in mind) they excluded him or put him to death. But running in parallel to this is the idea that light reveals. In a dark room when you turn on the light you suddenly see everything. When Jesus arrived, suddenly everyone’s actions were revealed for what they were. His utter goodness (light) showed up the falseness and pretence at goodness in the religious people; that was why they killed him. His ‘life’ showed up everything else for what it was, a sham. His life was like a light that showed everything as it really was.
     
But there is more to this. John also described him as the true light that gives light to every man. The truth is that every person who hears about Jesus has his light shone on them. His goodness radiates from him to them. This doesn’t mean to say that they accept it, for many reject him as their own darkness is shown up. It is the writer’s belief that at some time in every person’s lifetime (and perhaps many times) God shines the light of truth and goodness into every person. There will be none who, on Judgment Day, will be able to say, “I never knew.” Even if it is for a fleeting moment, they know. They choose to reject the light and continue in their darkness. Yet, for whoever will, if they open themselves to The Light, then they will find he fills them with his light so that he can then say to them, “You are the light of the world” (Mt 5:14) Glow! Shine!
   

Jesus bringer of Life

Jn 1:4   In him was life, and that life was the light of men
   
Life is a mystery, not the whole existence of a person, but the very force or energy that keeps them going. Materialistic scientists have to say it is just the interaction of chemicals that make a body move, react, respond, and interact with everything around it. It is most clearly realized when it is absent, i.e. when death occurs. To see a dead body immediately after death is to realize that ‘something’ has gone from it and so all that is left is flesh which will decay leaving just a skeleton. Something within the flesh gave up and no longer energises the body into action. For most of us, the thought of simply chemical interaction is grossly inadequate. We sense, we feel, that we are something far more that just chemicals, for chemicals have no beauty, no meaning, no ‘purpose’ and things like love and creativity are also meaningless to a pile of heaving molecules!
   
From a materialistic point of view we know that a human body needs a pumping heart and an active brain and when either shuts down, the body shuts down and dies. We explain the brain activity as minute electrical charges flowing between cells causing stimulation that brings ‘life’, but as we’ve just said, most of us almost demand that it is more than this. Whenever men rationalise and reduce humanity to mere matter, very soon after we find abuses of man by man. History is littered with such abuses. It is only when we see man as something more than merely molecular activity does man rise up to greatness. Then we start talking about the ‘quality of life’ and in all this we are struggling to put meaning to this word, ‘life’.
  
John says “in him was life” as if that was something different from anyone else. The inference is that in everyone else life is imparted, given to them at conception, passed on by their parents, but in Jesus this ‘life’ existed independently of any other human being. The inference is that this life, this energy that we struggle to understand, exists in God alone and everything else has it because God imparts it.
    
The word ‘life’ occurs 50 times in John’s Gospel, often in the context of eternal life, a life force or energy that goes on without end. When the Bible speaks of our spirit, is that the part of us that is the mysterious holder of this life energy which, when a person becomes a Christian, is energised by the Holy Spirit? Who or what is the Holy Spirit except the life that is God – energy that is personal.
    
To catch something of the significance of this we need to see the effect of the Holy Spirit coming ‘upon’ men in the Old Testament and New. In Ex 31:3,4 He gave new creative abilities. In Num 11:25 He gave new ability to prophesy. In Judges 3:10 He gave ability to lead as in 6:34. In every case of the Holy Spirit coming upon men He gave them new abilities. It was like all their natural abilities were heightened. A parallel picture to try to explain it would be to say it was like a man with only black and white sight being given the ability to see in colours. With the arrival of God in power, there is a flow of ‘life’ that brings a transformation in man that is as dramatic as the change that takes place when the sun comes out on a cloudy day. Prior to Jesus coming, we were like human bodies that were living out a form or copy of life. Then we encountered him and real life, real God-energy, flowed into us and we were transformed. We became what we were designed to be. We started seeing differently, thinking differently, and acting differently. This ‘life’ in Jesus came into us and we were transformed!
     

Jesus the Creator

Jn 1:3   Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
  
We now move away from the narratives and go to John’s Gospel for a number of meditations to consider some of the concepts that he shares with us that shed light on just who Jesus Christ was and is. Atheistic scientists declare the world was made by a big bang and all living creatures are the result of unplanned evolution. Well they can’t say anything else, can they? If you pretend there is no God, then everything has to be pure chance and everything has got to come about from a single cell evolving into the incredible multi-cell creatures that we are today. There’s no other way to explain it if you pretend there is no God, and all you’re left with is a purposeless, meaningless world. How sad!
   
Then we come to the Bible which unashamedly declares from the first words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). God created. It wasn’t a purposeless accident, it was a pure act of God, however He did it. Now John, starting out his Gospel with a description of the expression of God which became flesh, tells is that the Word was with God and was God and, in case you still hadn’t got the message, that this Word was the agent through which God made everything. This Word was the Creator and there was absolutely nothing in existence that didn’t come into being because of him.

Now the writer to the Hebrews expressed the same thing: “but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…. through whom he made the universe.” (Heb 1:2). The apostle Paul said the same thing: “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” There are silly and ignorant people who say that Jesus’ divinity wasn’t declared until three centuries later. They clearly have never read these verses! Three different writers ascribe the creation of existence to Jesus! This puts him fairly and squarely in the description of ‘divinity’!

The Old Testament also has an echo of this. Solomon in the early part of Proverbs personifies wisdom and has ‘him’ speaking, “I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.” (Prov 8:27-31). What an amazing passage; a figure alongside the Father totally involved in bringing everything into being.

In John’s day there were those who believed that spirit and matter were opposed and never could come together. God was spirit, and there was matter that was not good. John’s words address these confused philosophers. God is Spirit but God brought matter into being. How can matter come from nothing? We don’t know, it is beyond our finite minds, but John knows that God has no problem with matter for He made it. More than that His Son was part of the creation process and then His Son entered the material realm and Spirit lived in flesh on a material world. Oh no, there is no distinction of good and bad over spirit and matter with God. He has made everything and, in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ, He has lived in this material world. He made it and lived in it. There can be no feeling here that God made something inferior when He created the material world. He proved His approval by sending His Son to live in it. Enjoy God’s creation!

Introducing John

Jn 20:30,31    Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written 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’s Gospel is very different from the other three, that we call the ‘Synoptic’ (from the same point of view) Gospels. Down through history many scholars have made many suggestions as to why John’s Gospel is so different to the other three. The reason, we believe, that stands out above all others is the suggestion that John wrote many years later than the others when he was in old age. Once we accept this, various other things fall into place.      For instance, if the Synoptic Gospels had been around in the church for a number of years, accepted as reliable sources of what had happened, there would be little reason to produce a further Gospel covering the same things.       
 
If John had reached old age, it is likely he would have had those many more years experience of the Lord and time to dwell on the things he had experienced. They do say that elderly people find their memories functioning best for things in the far past rather than the recent past. It would be quite natural for God to take this natural process in John to take him back to those most vivid days of his life and to rerun various things that had happened, and to see them in the light of all the wisdom and experience that he has accumulated over the years. John now realizes Jesus is far more than they had originally thought. He recalls phrases and things happening that the others had not picked up on in those earlier years. As he ponders on those things he realizes, with a new sense of significance, that Jesus was seeking to convey so much more to those who had ears to hear and who would reflect on what he was saying.       
  
Thus we find John picking up on things the others hadn’t covered or putting fresh emphasis on some of the things that they had observed. John realized that the healings and the miracles weren’t simply just good acts in themselves; they were ‘signs’ for whoever would see them and think about them, and come to realize the wonder of who Jesus was.      But John was writing in a world that had moved on – culture never stays the same – and John himself has a much wider world view now than his fellow disciples had had years before. John is writing for the whole world, not just for the Jewish people as Matthew had been, for the world that had a greater Greek flavour to it. He’s also writing in an age when heresies are starting to flourish as fewer and fewer of the original apostles are left alive. So, with his wider world view, his understanding of Greek culture and thinking, and countering the heresies that were growing, we find that John comes with a very much more philosophical Gospel to the other three.     
   
It’s a Gospel full of ideas and concepts, with such words as light, life, love, grace and truth, and concepts such as Son of God, Son of Man, King of Israel, the gate, the good shepherd. There is no doubt that John ‘saw’ Jesus more clearly and understood who he was more clearly than the earlier writers. They sought to simply recount the things that had happened. John wants you to realise WHO Jesus was and as you realise so you will believe in him and receive his life. He’s quite blatant about his reason for writing!    

Jesus – the Word

Jn 1:1,14  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  

We used to have a film-strip for children called The Green Bear, a delightful story of a bear who wanted a friend. At one point there is another creature who hires himself out to be a friend for short periods of time. The Green Bear didn’t really feel this was enough and the other animal turns to him with irritable words that became indelibly printed on the minds of our family, “Well, I’m talking to you aren’t I!” Talking wasn’t enough. It is a start, but it’s not enough; we want something more.  

What is a word? It is a building block of communication; it is an expression of speech, the means we humans use to convey our thoughts to one another. The Greeks, two thousand years ago, used the word in respect of all of creation to mean the rational principle that governs all things, the Logos. In daily life it meant both the thought and the speech expressing the thought. Thus John when he was writing wrote not only to the Jews but to the wider world, for whom the main international language was Greek.  

He says that in the beginning of all things – because as human beings we have difficulty imagining eternity with no beginning – there was this Word, this expression of God, this something behind everything that holds everything together, and this something, this expression of God was God, just as we might say my speech is me perhaps.  But there is something different here, because words are separate sounds that disappear, and are no longer heard, except in the memory. This Word, this expression of God, remains as an entity, an ongoing expression that is part of God. In heaven, as this Gospel tells us later, there was God the Father and His expression, the Son, the Word. But again, unlike us and speech, the Father and the Word can communicate backwards and forwards between each other, there is a living, loving relationship between them that is real.  

We struggle with these concepts because we’re told God is Spirit and we can’t really grasp what God and His Son, the Word are, what being Spirit that had always existed, really means. These days I think of ‘spirit’ as ‘living personal energy’, or ‘energy with personality’ if you like. So God is the Supreme Being who is living, personal energy who thinks, acts and moves. 

But then the Word became flesh. How? I haven’t a clue! How can Spirit turn into flesh? I don’t know. All I know is that when God made man He breathed spirit (breath) into him (Gen 2:7), so part of us is spirit anyway. How they interact is a mystery which we struggle to explain. But the Word who is God becomes flesh. He does it to communicate with us in the fullest way possible. The writer to the Hebrews wrote: “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1:1,2)  

This is the staggering truth, that God has spoken to the human race, not just by words into our minds (which I think He does all the time), not just through Hebrew prophets (who were incredible in themselves as to their openness to ‘hear’ God), not just with a one-off call from heaven, but by coming and living in human form on the earth for some thirty three years.

Communication, it seems, is an essential part of personality and God is a Being with personality and so He communicates. He communicates with Himself (we talk to ourselves, think thoughts to ourselves) but that is not enough. He expresses Himself outwards by creating living creatures who are capable of communicating, and having done that He communicates with them. That’s what the Old Testament record is.  And then He communicates in the fullest way possible – He comes in human form! Wow!