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Our passage is from John chapter 1, and we will be reading from verses 14 through 18. My original plan was to exhort from all four verses, but it’s just going to be from verse 14 tonight. We’ll go through verses 15 through 18 next week, but we’re still going to read all of verses 14 through 18. Hear now the word of the Lord, John chapter one, verses 14 through 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.

Let’s pray. Oh Lord, we thank you that you have not only given us your written word, but you have given us the word that you have, the second person of the Trinity has come down from heaven and that you have become incarnate, that you have become man so that we can have a perfect sacrifice, so that his righteousness can be imputed to us and so that our sin can be imputed to him, so that we can have eternal life in Jesus Christ. We thank you, O Lord, that we can trust your word. And I pray, O Lord, that your word would be faithfully expounded this evening, and that through your spirit, the hearts of those who are listening would be encouraged, that we would draw closer to the word, that we would love the word more, and that we would love you more. And I pray, O Lord, that through these words, we would also come to love one another more. And I pray all this in your Son’s name, amen. Please be seated.

Thomas Paine, who as many of you may know, one of the most famous deists of history, a deist is someone who believes as my dad likes to say, that there is at least one God. They believe that God exists, but that he is completely distant from creation, that he does not communicate with us through revelation. And Thomas Paine, who was a deist, wrote this. Creation is the Bible of the deist. In creation, the deist reads the handwriting of the creator himself.

The certainty of his existence and the immutability of his power and all the other Bibles and Testaments, meaning the Christian Bible, are to him forgeries. In other words, according to the deists, the only revelation that God has given us regarding himself is a created order. and the created order we observe with our senses and we understand through our reason. So the only thing that God has given us is what we can see around us. Through that, we are left to reason to who God is and what he wants from us. Now the specifics of what the deists believe, not very many people believe anymore.

However, there are still many in our world that believe that the creator, if he does exist, has never directly spoken to creation and to his creatures. Many people, for example, that I’ve spoken to in Japan about the scriptures, scoff at the notion that God would speak to his creatures. Many in our culture would say, after the Enlightenment, that even if a creator had spoken, there would be no way for us to know that it was truly the creator that was speaking. And besides deism, there are other religions, like Islam, for example, that wholeheartedly agree with us that God can and has revealed himself to man through prophets and through written word.

But Islam, like modern Judaism, vigorously rejects any notion that God can condescend and enter into his creation. Such a notion of what theologians, Christian theologians, call the incarnation is blasphemous to their ears because it brings God down to the position of his creatures. According to them, it’s impossible because God is so far beyond his creation. that he cannot come and take a human body. So in a sense, like the deists, the Muslims believe that God is so far above creation that incarnation is impossible. And that there are another kind of religion, such as Mormonism, which does the opposite. Mormonism believes that man is not so different from God.

In fact, Jesus, when he became man, was just that, a man. Jesus then later became God through his obedience to the Father. And their God, the Father, was at one point, according to some of them, merely a man. Like deism, Islam, like deism and, sorry, one day, sorry, the humans, like us, can become like God, according to Mormonism. So many religions, like Deism and Islam, place God so far outside of creation that incarnation is impossible, while others, like Mormonism, drag God down so far that the incarnation is nothing unique. In fact, we can become like Jesus, according to Mormons, and obtain a divine nature.

The scriptures, particularly in John chapter one, verses one through 18, reject both of these notions. According to John chapter one, God is separate and he is above his creation. And yet at the same time, he is not so different that he cannot become incarnate and assume a human nature. On the other hand, the scriptures do not bring God down to the level of his creatures. It does not suggest in any way that man can become divine or that there was ever any change in God’s nature. So then John affirms both the true transcendence of God, that he is above creation, while also affirming that God truly can become incarnate.

The eternal word without collapsing the distinction between creature and creator can become a man. Our passage this evening in verses 14 through 18 is the pinnacle of the prologue of John which we have been studying. All that John has been beautifully laying out for us in the prologue comes to this point in verse 14. The eternal transcendent creator who has always existed and through whom all exists, who is prior and distinct from all things. That one who pre-exists all that exists and is not part of creation has entered into his creation by taking on human flesh. we might say, in more difficult terminology, the transcendent has become imminent.

John is emphasizing two truths in our passage this evening in verse 14. First, the incarnation of the word, and secondly, the fullness of the revelation of God. Or more simply, the incarnation we will look at from the first half of verse 14, and the word tabernacling, the word dwelling with us in the last half of verse 14. Let’s turn now to the first half of verse 14, the incarnation of the word.

John writes in verse 14, 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. These are perhaps some of the most powerful and consequential words that have ever been written in human history. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. We might take this one step further back and also say that if the word did not become flesh and dwell among us, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

All of history hinges on this event. If we look back at the history of redemption, Beginning at the beginning, God made man. God covenanted with Adam and offered him life on the condition of perfect obedience to the covenant of works. Yet Adam, as the representative head of all mankind, violated this covenant and sinned. And thus all mankind in Adam sinned with him. And since that time, man has been living and suffering in this sinful world of sin and misery.

The psalmist in Psalm 14 puts it this way. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds, and there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside. Together they have all become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one. This is to say that after the fall, when God looked down on the earth, there were none who were righteous, and all of his creatures had fallen away from their creator.

Man hated one another, man abused one another, man robbed one another, man murdered one another, and none did good. The age-old question of why bad things happen to good people, the Bible emphatically says, besides to Jesus, no such thing has ever occurred. Man rejected not only fellow man, but they rejected their creator. There was no one who sought their creator, according to the psalmist.

And we see this brought out throughout the Old Testament. As soon as Adam and Eve sin, man devolves into the worst sins imaginable. We see pride, we see murder, we see lust, we see greed, we see hatred, and all manner of twisted sin. And yet, in the midst of this sin, we see that God did not leave man in darkness. As we saw from John 1, verses one through five, the light shined in that darkness.

God still revealed himself to man and he covenanted with him. We see this once again throughout the Old Testament. God covenanted with Noah. He covenanted with Abraham, with Moses, and with David. The pattern then is clear. Man sins, man loves his sins, and he hates God. Yet God did not leave man in their sin, but drew near and made covenant with him. And he set aside a people to be holy, to worship him.

From the beginning of the fall of man, God made a promise that he, through the seed of the woman, he would crush the head of the serpent. As we read in the Old Testament, we see that God, little by little, reveals more and more about this plan of salvation.

We learn that the Messiah will crush the head of the serpent. He will save his people from their sins. He will reign as a righteous king forever. And most importantly, we see that the Messiah will be divine. The Messiah will be God himself in passages like Isaiah chapter nine.

And this brings us then to our passage this evening in verse 14. The word became flesh and he dwelt among us and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the father. This is once again the culmination of all of the prophetic verses of the Old Testament.

The eternal word has taken to himself a human body. For the first time since verse one, John returns to using this word, logos, or the word. And in doing so, he draws our eyes back to the first few verses of our chapter. John returns to the word. And so he brings us back to the immediate topic at hand, which is the word. The eternal son of God entering his creation and taking on human flesh. John writes that the Word became flesh.

Now this may seem odd at first because if the Word is God, how can he become a man? Is John saying that God somehow changed, that at one point, God was God, and the next point, God was then man? When Christians profess that the Word became a man, do we mean that the Word ceased to be God? We all know the answer is no, of course not. God can’t stop being God. The Word cannot stop being God. So what does it mean that the Word became flesh?

And here it’s helpful to remind ourselves of some terms that we already know well. In answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism question 21, We all confess that the only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who being the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was and continues to be God and man in two distinct natures, and one person forever. The two terms that I want us to really focus on are the terms nature and person. We confess that Jesus has two natures, the divine and man, and that he is fully God and also fully man. But we also confess at the same time that he is one person. This is kind of difficult for us to grasp as humans because we’re limited in our understanding of the nature of reality.

But what’s important to understand is that prior to becoming a man, Jesus Prior to being conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and becoming man, the Word already existed. The person who is given the name Jesus at birth already existed prior to becoming man.

And he existed as God, the second person of the Trinity. He was truly and fully divine as we learned in verses one through five. But at the incarnation, that same God, the same person of the Trinity humbled himself and he took on another nature, a new nature that is a human nature. And in this moment, the divine entered into human history in a way that had never occurred before. The Word, who is infinite and eternal, who is not bound by time, took for himself a human body, and thereby he entered into the finite.”

But notice something, that John does not say that God became flesh. He writes that the second person of the Trinity, the Word, became flesh. I think he does this purposefully because He wants to emphasize that God’s nature has not changed. The Word still possesses his divine nature. He only takes on this second nature. Now, in some sense, we can, of course, say that God became man. Because of course the word is God and he became man so we can say that God can became man. But what John is leading us to believe is that the person of the word is what became man.

His divine nature has not changed. Now all this is complicated. And it makes our head hurt at times, but the point we really need to remember is that when the Word became man, he did not give up his divinity. He was fully God, and at the same time, he was fully man.

So then in verse 14, which is the culmination, the high point of John’s prologue, we see that the eternal God, the second person of the Trinity, who transcends all things and he created all things, has now taken on to himself a nature, a human nature, and thereby has humbled himself and entered his creation. But John goes on, not only has God become man, he also dwells among us. Or more literally, he has tabernacled with us. And this brings us to our second point, the word tabernacles with us. John continues on, the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Now immediately when we hear these words, our minds should be coming back to the Old Testament. Throughout the Old Testament, we see that God’s glory is tied to the fact, tied to him dwelling with his people. In Exodus chapter 25, for example, in verse eight, God commands Israel to make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. God desires to dwell with and fellowship with his people. And later in Exodus, we see this moment where it actually occurs. Please turn with me there to Exodus chapter 40. Exodus chapter 40, and we’ll read from verses 33 through 38. Exodus chapter 40, verses 33 through 38.

And he erected the court around the tabernacle and the altar and set up the screen of the gate of the court. So Moses finished the work. Then the cloud covered the tent of the meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of the meeting because the cloud had settled on it. And the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Throughout all their journeys, whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel would set out. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and the fire in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel throughout all of their journeys.

We see here that when God dwells with his people, his glory is manifested among them. What an awe-inspiring sight this must have been to witness the glory of God coming to dwell in their midst. Yet as we read in the Old Testament, we see that Israel broke their covenant with God. And the glory of the Lord would end up departing from his people, as we see in the vision of Ezekiel. And yet God promises that one day he would dwell with his people forever, that his glory would be restored, and this time, his glory would never depart. Ezekiel writes this in chapter 37, my dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

This promise is fulfilled in part in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The eternal word becomes flesh and dwells among his people in a uniquely full and personal way. While God had truly dwelt with his people in the tabernacle in the Old Testament, in many ways it was mediated through priests and through Moses. Yet Jesus Christ comes in the flesh in a more personal, in a more full way, brings the glory and the revelation of God. The Son reveals the Father in a direct, in a more personal way, so that in Him, God’s people can encounter God’s presence more immediately than ever before.

But what about God’s glory? In the Old Testament, the description of God’s glory was obvious when it appeared. No one could mistake God’s glory when they saw it. The holiness and the gloriousness of his presence was clear to all who saw it. Yet John writes in verse 14, that we, meaning the disciples and those who believed in him, have seen his glory. Glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. What about this glory?

At this point, We just need to make a short note about the wording here. Most of us, if not all of us, know the Nicene Creed by heart. And the Nicene Creed states that we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. You may have wondered, where does this language begotten come from? And it comes from passages like this passage, John chapter one, verse 14, and Psalm chapter two.

Now you may be thinking, well, It doesn’t say begotten in our ESV. It says only Son. Well, many of the older translations, if you look them up, will say only begotten. The creed that we profess takes the language from this passage to profess that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God.

But for reasons that we won’t go through right now, modern scholars believe that this wording is translated incorrectly, and that it should be translated as only son instead of only begotten son. The point I want to make It’s not to go through all of that, but just to point out that the wording that we profess and confess week by week comes from this passage that Jesus, the Son of God, has always been the Son of God. That the Father and the Son have always had a Father-Son relationship, and we see that in this passage. The Son has always been in a relationship with the Father.

And when the Son became a man, it says that he revealed the glory that could only come from the Son of God, full of grace and truth. But again, the question arises, if Jesus revealed the glory of God, why couldn’t everyone see it immediately? Everyone in the Old Testament knew where God was by seeing his glory. John says that Jesus has revealed the glory of God. Why can’t We see it. Why couldn’t they see it?

I mean, I think we can answer this from passages like Philippians chapter two. Let’s turn there now. Philippians chapter two, verses six through eight. Philippians two, verses six through eight. I’ll start from verse five. Paul writes, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Paul writes that Jesus emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of man. In other words, the word of God, when he took on human flesh, truly was a man in every sense of the word, such that his divine glory was veiled in his incarnate state so that those who did not believe could not perceive the glory that he had. So how was it, if his glory was veiled, that John and the others were able to behold it?

Well, for those who believe in Jesus, their eyes have been opened and their ears can hear. They can perceive Jesus Christ’s glory. They see his signs and his miracles. Jesus Christ clearly showed the glory of God through his miracles. On the Mount of Transfiguration, probably the most prominent example, three of his disciples, including John, saw the glory more directly. As Matthew writes about the Mount of Transfiguration, this is about Jesus, he was transfigured before them and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And of course, lastly, in his resurrection, Jesus shined brighter and the glory of God was most clearly seen in his defeat of sin and death.

But all of these things, the miracles, the signs, the prophecy, and the resurrection can only be seen by those who have faith. For those like the Pharisees and Sadducees, oftentimes, when they saw Jesus’s miracles and his wonders, It was a stumbling block for them, and it caused them to hate him even more.

In other words, when John says that Jesus revealed the glory of the only begotten Son, he truly did reveal the glory of God, but it was only seen by those who had faith, who were able to see the truth. And this glory was full of grace and truth, John writes. What this means, we’ll expound a little bit more next week, but for now, the glory of Christ that was brought to this earth was no longer in types and shadows. Jesus brought the fullness of grace and truth. The Old Testament shadows and types gave the saints a veiled vision of the revelation of God and the gospel that Christ would bring to his people. But in Jesus, this truth of the gospel and the grace of God are fully revealed to God’s people.

It is only because of the reality of our words in our passage tonight, that the eternal word of God became man and dwelt among us, that you and I can have life, that we can have truth, that we can have forgiveness, that we can have love, that we can have fellowship and forgiveness with fellow believers. The practical implications for our lives from this passage are countless. The whole rest of the New Testament is bringing out the implications of the incarnation. But let’s just consider a few before ending tonight.

Brothers and sisters, we serve a God who is wholly unlike us. He is perfectly holy. God is perfectly just. God is perfectly loving. God is perfectly wise. There is no sin or no blemish or weakness in our God. He is infinite and he is eternal. He is boundless. And you and I are none of those things.

As Paul says in Ephesians 2, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.” And the two most comforting words to us. We have this bad news. But God, being rich in mercy, because of great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive in Christ.

God is holy and we are not. God is infinite and we are not. But the eternal word did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself and became a man. So yes, Our God is greater and so far above creation that we will never fully comprehend him.

But at the same time, he has not left us in our sin and in our misery. He has drawn near to us and he has become a man. He, Jesus, as the author of Hebrews puts it, is a high priest who sympathizes with our weakness because he is a God who actually and truly entered into history. He understands the trials and the difficulties which we go through. So our God is not just far off. He has drawn near to us and he has dwelt with us in his Son, Jesus Christ. So now draw near to your Savior. knows your weaknesses. He knows your temptations. He knows your hurt. He knows the danger that you face. He knows the feelings of hunger and sadness.

There is nothing that you are going through which our God cannot sympathize with. So go to Him, pour out your heart to Him, and trust Him that He is your God, who truly became man, who understands your weaknesses, and who is drawing near to you. Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you and praise you that you are a God who is not like us, and that you are all-powerful, that you are all-glorious, that you are holy, that your love is perfect, that there is no sin, no blemish, no weakness in you. Yet, O Lord, we thank you, O Lord, that you are also gracious and kind toward us. And that while we were yet sinners, you sent your son to die on the cross for our sins. We thank you, oh Lord, that you are a God who has taken on human flesh, that you have become like us so that we can have a perfect lamb who can die on the cross for our sins, who can live a perfect life for us so that we can have the righteousness of Christ.

I pray, oh Lord, that we would not hide this truth this week, but that we would live it out in our lives, that our lives would be marked by a love for you, that those around us would see the love of Christ in us, that we would proclaim it boldly, and that through the gospel, many would come to know you this week. I pray all this in your son’s name, amen. Let’s stand and sing our closing hymn, closing psalm, Psalm 8B. Please stand and sing with Psalm 8B.