If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles please to John chapter 1. We’re going to focus on the latter portion of 14 to 18, but I’m going to reread up to that point.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things through him were made, and without him not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light but came to bear witness about the light. The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. 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 comes after me; 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.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the confidence that we may have in it as being your inspired, inerrant, holy word, given for us to instruct us and guide us in all of our lives to be the final authority and rule for life and faith for us. Help us to hear your word and respond obediently and with love, forgiving us when we fail and giving us grace to turn to you and seek forgiveness when those times come. Build us up and let it fill our hearts and be always on our minds as we come and go, living for you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So we often speak about the beginning portion of John’s Gospel as a prologue because verses 1 through 18 establish the theological foundation for John. They inform us of the Apostle’s presuppositions by reframing the creation narrative of Genesis in order to effectively reintroduce our Creator as being also our Savior and our adopter; the one who first established our relationship to the Lord God as also the one who will restore it and transform it.
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. But to all who did receive him, he gave the right to become children of God. However, almost surprisingly, the Gospel writer does not ground his exposition upon the authority of his own firsthand knowledge and experience as one of Jesus’ apostles, as one of his closest followers and students. Instead, here he appeals to the authority of another person, a person with authority whom the Apostle would expect us to already be familiar with: John the Baptist.
All four of the Gospels identify the Baptist with Isaiah’s prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord and calling God’s people to repentance. Now, theologically, this is a very important and necessary role, one that he wholly fulfilled, and one which makes the Baptist the greatest Old Covenant prophet. However, the Apostle ascribes and defines another part of the Baptist’s role, which only Luke otherwise touches on briefly when he recounts the prophetic song sung by Zechariah at the time of John’s naming, where he sung, ‘And you, O child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way, to give knowledge of salvation to the people and the forgiveness of their sins because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’
See, the Apostle reminds us that the greater duty of the Baptist was a role beyond calling Israel to repentance and faith. It was to point them towards the Christ, to stand as a qualified witness to testify to who Jesus is—the divine light, the false who is Theos. Yet, the way in which the Apostle mentions the Baptist’s witnessing occurs strangely in the narrative, twice John’s flow is interrupted by the interjection of the Baptist’s affirming testimony into the stories of creation and incarnation.
Though these interruptions may seem inappropriate or jarring to us as readers and hearers, being intentionally placed there by the Apostle under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they must be important for us. The Apostle shows the Apostle relying upon the authority of the Baptist, supporting his argument because what these facts about Jesus that he testifies to are not otherwise immediately obvious: his deity and eternality, his status as the Creator and source of life, and his authoritative role as the divine Word, the logos.
But if the Apostle’s authority here—or if the Apostle’s authority—is usually based upon his firsthand knowledge and experience, then where does the Baptist get his authority? Where does it come from? The Apostle explains that John the Baptist was sent from God, and the Greek root word here is ‘aposta,’ a word from which we otherwise derive ‘apostle.’ Our working definition of capital ‘A’ Apostle uniquely marks someone as having been directly sent by God or by Jesus Christ, who is God, with the Gospel message.
And the Apostle here names the Baptist as a witness three times, emphasizing his purpose was to give testimony and provide evidence in support of something factual. Giving this testimony was perhaps the most important purpose for which he was sent by God. But what was that he was supposed to testify to? The Baptist was sent to bear witness to something, to someone that he had seen—the light, the false who was Theos.
And the Baptist was sent to testify about someone he already knew and had already experienced, someone whose presence he had stood before, thereby allowing him to recognize him when he later encountered them again. But when, or how, did the Baptist see or encounter the divine light in order to testify about it? He will later deny ever recognizing it within Jesus before the time of his baptism. But this question speaks to something which we do not often talk about, suggesting a thought concerning which Scripture is otherwise rather quiet about—a question of when do we begin? When does our clock actually start ticking?
The psalmist writes that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that the Lord’s eyes see our unformed substance. ‘In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them.’ Jeremiah writes about God’s early intimate knowledge of us, describing his prenatal calling, writing, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you.’ And then Luke also tells us that when Mary came to visit her pregnant relative Elizabeth, the not yet born baby John the Baptist leapt in her womb.
Today we commonly use those examples as scriptural evidence for human life beginning within the womb, but especially as regards to the Baptist we must wonder: when could he have first seen the light? The false that he was testifying about—might he, and we, begin before conception? I’m inclined to believe that, according to the power and wisdom of God, John the Baptist saw, knew, and experienced the false who is Theos sometime before his conception. Because if the testimony of John the Baptist is to be believed and considered to have authority, then he must have seen the light and known it before he could testify to it.
To me, that is the only logical conclusion that would justify his credible testimony about the divine life before the people and his ability to recognize Jesus as that same light. But that is only my speculation; I get to it by considering our beginning to be when God first forms us in his mind.
But then, immediately following the Apostle’s declaration of the Incarnation, ‘And the word became flesh and dwelt among us,’ we encounter our second interjection of the Baptist testimony: ‘John bore witness about him and cried out, ‘This was he whom I said: He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me.”
This interjection tells us two things. First, that John bore witness about him, with him being the logos—suggesting and affirming an equivalency between the false and the Theos, the logos and the light.
Secondly, by using what appears like a contradiction, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me,’ he’s explaining their implied hierarchy of relationship and authority.
I would not be surprised if you’re a little bit confused by this explanation, especially once we realize that the Baptist’s statement would have sounded illogical to a first-century mind, even though it may not raise the same kind of concern to our modern perspectives.
See, our culture today assumes an implicit goodness to what the world calls progress. It teaches us that whatever is new must be better than the old. It assumes that our present quality of life is better than it was a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago in every respect.
However, I might suggest that apart from indoor flushing toilets and the mechanical pencil, there are few modern advancements which have honestly improved our overall quality of life. I mean, thanks to the internet, social media, and cell phones, it is easier to connect with more people over greater distances, yet one of our most common complaints is the social disconnect that everyone seems to feel, as people focus themselves into their screened devices rather than talking to the person sitting right next to them.
Newer updated appliances like refrigerators, washers, dryers, and dishwashers may be more energy-efficient, but they also cost more to make and are more expensive to replace and have a short lifespan than the appliances of 50 years ago, which were all made to be repaired instead of just being replaced. During the 1960s, we experienced an explosion of technological advancements through the Space Race, culminating with us landing men on the moon and returning them home safely.
However, now the average digital watch, not to mention a cell phone, contains more computing power than the Apollo lunar module, and we are somehow unable to replicate that achievement. Although in earlier times the human lifespan was shorter, now that we tend to live so much longer, we keep discovering more age-related diseases and ways for our body and mind to degenerate, thus causing more people to die in far worse ways. So much for the perpetual positive advancement of progress, right?
Two thousand years ago, the attitude of most people was very different: older was better than newer. Tried and true methods were better than innovation—experimentation and discovery were feared rather than celebrated. Normality and conformity were virtues, while uniqueness and diversity were distrusted and suspicious. Therefore, back then, a person’s relative age contributed to their authority and reliability. In first-century Judea, elders, by the mere virtue of being older, were generally assumed to be wiser and more knowledgeable.
Age and experience usually counted for more than the energy of youth and their willingness to do, and the applied hierarchy and social subordination within families, tribes, and clans was ordinarily implemented according to birth order. Thus, John the Baptist would have naturally been considered greater than Jesus because he came first; he was technically older, even if only for a few months, and because his ministry started first. John was from a Levitical family, whereas Jesus was from a family of tradesmen, likely with minimal social importance.
Ordinary convention would presume that John was the teacher while Jesus was previously his student. We follow the same convention today; John Gerstner was greater than R.C. Sproul, Billy Graham was greater than Franklin Graham, Martin Luther was greater than Philip Melanchthon.
But ironically, these successors were each able to achieve greater things through building upon the earlier foundation. It’s also fair to say that Jesus did the same thing when we consider that the practical purpose of John’s ministry was to go before the Lord and prepare his ways—to give knowledge of salvation to his people and the forgiveness of their sins. Because the Baptist’s ministry of repentance prepared many people to hear and receive Jesus as the Christ.
And although we consider John the Baptist to be the last and greatest of the Old Testament prophets, Jesus was a greater prophet still. Through John’s proclamation about Jesus, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me,’ John willingly humbled himself and subordinated himself and his ministry of baptism under the authority of Jesus.
The reason he gave for this subordination was the priority of antiquity, which returns to the fact that he was sent by the Lord to testify to a fact which would not, and could not, otherwise be known through ordinary observation or through our mere human experience. That means the authority of the eternal pre-existent divine logos supersedes that of the Baptist.
The Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus’ primacy declares more than just his superiority to John; it sets up the Apostle’s argument for Jesus’ authority as being superior to that of Moses. 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.
Please remember that Moses was the single most important historical figure in Israelite religion. Moses was a prophet, the mediator of the old covenant, the go-between God and Israel—speaking for God to the people and speaking to God for the people. He was the lawgiver, declaring all the commandments and stipulations of the Lord to the people, recording them as a legal code, declaring the will of God for the people of God in the Torah.
Even King David did not have as much of an impact upon God’s people or religion, despite him writing most of the Psalms. The importance and authority of Moses was unquestionable in Israel, especially during this Second Temple period. We know this because the so-called traditions of the elders are also described in the Mishnah as being an oral Torah given by Moses and then passed down to complement the written Torah or scriptures. These elders appealed to the authority of this oral Torah for their traditions, meaning that from their perspective, they were actually appealing to the authority of Moses.
This further explains the astonished response of the people to Jesus’s teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes. The people were so astonished because Jesus claimed authority over Moses—he claimed to have an authority superior to Moses by teaching his own understanding and issuing his own interpretation and commentary on Moses, saying, ‘You’ve heard it said, but I say to you.’
See, Jesus did not need to cite the authority of others like Moses as he interpreted Scripture because, as the divine logos, Jesus is the ultimate author of Scripture. Therefore, Jesus’s words are themselves authoritative, which is why they’re recorded and preserved for us as Scripture.
Now, while all of that takes place much later in the synoptic Gospels, it is easy for us to overlook that layer of significance. How does the Apostle John establish Jesus’s superiority to Moses? The Apostle tells us that Jesus will be, according to the Baptist, a greater prophet than John and so perhaps greater than Moses, as he’ll be the mediator of a New Covenant.
Although that’s not really established in this Gospel, the Apostle here does establish Jesus’s mediatorial role. When Jesus speaks to the people, he speaks for God as God, with his ‘I am’ statements. When he speaks to God for the people, he speaks as man for men.
And Jesus is the grace giver, bestowing and imputing God’s grace upon and into the Lord’s chosen and beloved people, his adopted children, thereby fulfilling the will of God for the people of God through his work of salvation.
How does the Apostle make it clear that Jesus is greater than Moses? By his statement: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he—Jesus, the logos—has made him God the Father known.’
Remember, Moses was God’s number one go-to guy; you could say that Moses and God were on a first-name basis. But although Scripture says that the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend, this only means that they conversed—that God spoke directly to Moses and Moses spoke directly to him, that they were engaged in dialogue.
What this does not mean, however, is that Moses ever actually saw God’s face. Remember when Moses was up on the mountain asking God to forgive Israel for the golden calf incident? Then he asked God, ‘Please show me your glory.’ And God answers him, saying, ‘You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.’
And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.’
Moses stood in the presence of the Lord and beheld God’s glory so often that beams of radiant light shone out from his face, causing him to wear a veil. But Moses was still only allowed to see the hindquarters of God; he never saw the face of God in all his 120 years.
While Moses then never saw God, the logos, who is Theos, did. He, who is the creator, light which came into the world, who is himself the light of life and the word made flesh, who was and is at the Father’s side, he has seen God, and thus he is the one who makes him known.
Therefore, Jesus Christ, the logos, God the Son, possesses an authority that is greater than Moses. He is the greatest authority in all creation, and he uses it to reveal the Father to us. He has used his authority to make him known in full. Moses was a man with authority given him from God, and they enjoyed a special relationship; the Lord revealed his covenant name of Yahweh to him and gave him his law for his chosen people, Israel.
But Moses only received a partial revelation of God; he only saw some of who the Lord is, some of his character. Using the authority he was given, Moses shared everything that had been revealed to him by God, and so Israel received his will and learned what they must do in order to live and continue to be blessed as God’s faithful people.
But the law they received from Moses was not a law that they could ever wholly keep. The righteous standard was set too high for them to reach, and they missed the point of it. The strict rigors of the law were never intended for them to actually achieve; they were meant to show the impossibility of ever measuring up. They were meant to drive us to despair of our own self-confidence and self-righteousness and, instead, prove our need for something—for someone else.
The law given by Moses was pitiless and joyless due to its strictness, but it did point the way towards hope—a hope in the grace given by Jesus Christ. Jesus is a man, the God-man, and he possesses all authority as God. He reveals the glory of God to the world; he reveals the truth of God to the world. He is the true earthly tabernacle of the Lord’s presence, Emmanuel.
Jesus is the logos who is there chaos; therefore, he is the fullest revelation of God, and he was born to make God our Father known because he was with God in the beginning and because he is God.
So it is from out of the fullness of his divinity, of his humanity, of his sovereign eternality, and of his sovereign works of creation and redemption that we have all received grace upon grace.
Once again, ‘all’ does not here, in this context, mean all humanity; instead, it means all of God’s adopted children, the elect. And it is his gracious blessing for us to receive from out of his overabundant fullness grace upon grace—a never-ending supply of mercy and forgiveness, of shalom and agape, of joy and life.
His fullness is such that the more he pours out, the more he has to pour out and the more we receive, the more we are able to receive and are able to pour out into others without ever worrying about endangering our own supply. Moses gave a law that can only lead to death, while Jesus gave us a grace that only leads to life.
That’s what the Apostle Paul meant in Romans 8: ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.’
That is how the Apostle John concludes his prologue with the promise and hope for a grace that comes through faith in Jesus Christ alone—our adoption as sons and daughters of God, having God choose to dwell among us and shine forth his glory, and for us to be filled with the light and life in Jesus Christ.
Finally, there is one practical particular application that I want to draw our attention to, and it regards the question of authority. Moses remained the highest authority in Israel even into the first century, even though he had been dead for 1500 years. His words, or words that were attributed to him, could still trump a king’s decree. But the authority of Moses, like all forms of authority, was ultimately derived from the Lord.
The Lord God is the one who establishes kings and tears down republics; he approves of justice and mercy while he punishes the unrighteous and wicked. The Lord is the source of all authority because he himself is the ultimate authority; his word can never and will never fail.
But unlike Moses, Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth because he is God the Son. He is the logos, who theos in Scripture. Scripture is the recorded special revelation of God’s word, the logos, the written testimony about Jesus, and it has been inspired by the Holy Spirit and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness—so that the man of God, that of all of God’s children, may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Scripture is God’s inherent work; therefore, it has authority over everything about which it speaks. And it does speak concerning every facet of our lives. Although sometimes it seems less clear, even still, just as Moses once could trump the word of kings, the Bible, the word of God, is the singular authority that will trump every scheme and every law or commandment of men.
But where Scripture carries the greatest authority is in how it tells the only way by which we may be saved—through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Jesus is the only way, truth, or source of life because no one comes into the loving embrace of the Father except through him—through the imputed sacrifice of his holy and precious blood.
So believe, receive, and trust Jesus Christ—know our heavenly Father whom he makes known—and be filled with the fullness of his freely given grace upon grace. Amen.