Amen. If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles please to John chapter 1. We start at verse 10:
‘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 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.’
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord, we thank you for your Word, for sending your Son, who is the Word, to us to help us to know you and to love you. Give us wisdom, give us understanding, and help us to see and know how important and special this is for us, that you were born like us so that we might become and be born like you. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So this morning we will begin to focus actually on one single verse of scripture, and you know that’s not something which I care to do very often. However, it is not being removed from its context because we are actually now more aware of its context considering what we’ve seen and heard over the past few weeks.
This verse, which is verse 14, is something that we can and we should focus on this way because it is a fulcrum; it is perhaps the most crucial pivot point around which the whole of the Bible turns. Everything written by John up to this moment, prior to this verse, is building up to this.
This verse is an orchestral crescendo; it is like the cannon fire in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Everything builds up to this moment. Yet, when the climax is reached, it shocks us even when we know that it’s coming. Just like the irregular cannon fire, everything from ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ to ‘he was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him’ leads us to the most glorious, profound, and unique declaration in any religious text ever: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.’
This is the miracle of the Incarnation, the singular event we celebrate every Christmas. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us.
But why did God choose to become man? For koinonia, for fellowship with us, to dwell with his people and live together in relationship with his beloved adopted children.
Now thus far, John has told us that God, the Theos, created all things through the Word, the Logos, by his sovereign will and through his sovereign command. God, the Theos, came into the world as the True Light. This light generates and supports life, and it’s also the light of knowledge of God’s general revelation—the knowledge that God is.
The world neither recognized nor comprehended God or his light, nor did God’s chosen people Israel recognize or comprehend him. Instead, both rejected him, preferring the darkness. But now, John tells us that God, the Word, the Logos, took on flesh and became man to more fully reveal himself to us and to show us his glory.
The Incarnation of the Logos of Jesus into the world is a revelation, like the entrance of God’s ‘fal,’ of the light. The ‘fal’ is God’s general or natural revelation of his being and his presence. The Incarnation of the Logos is then God’s special self-revelation to the world. The Logos reveals to us who the Lord is and what the Lord is like.
Just like the ‘fal’ of Theos, the Logos, Jesus, is universally knowable, even as he is not universally known. Yet what does ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ mean for us? Is this really so special or even unique to Christianity? Yes, it is.
The God becoming flesh is unique in religion, and it’s important for us to understand—very important—because misunderstanding this has led to many heresies and confusions about the identity of Jesus, about who he really is.
According to Greco-Roman mythology, their deities would take on human form and walk among the people. However, from their viewpoint, although they had a human shape, likeness, and appearance, they did not become human. Nor did the deities of ancient Near East religions become human because more often than not their appearance was often a monstrous form.
Nor did the deities of Egypt become human; their likenesses were often depicted as human-like in body but crowned with the head of an animal. See, deities just did not become human. Even if they looked human, they remained a deity alone. But John tells us that God became also man without surrendering any of his divinity.
This idea is something which has troubled theologians and Christians for 2,000 years, trying to understand the concept of how does that work? Faithful Christians have tried to explain it in countless ways, but most attempts ended in heresy because they always describe something less than what scripture says about Jesus—something less than God.
Some have denied the eternal divine nature of the Word, as Jehovah’s Witnesses do, or they suggest that the Word was a subordinate creature that ascended to divinity, which was a common occurrence in Greek myth. The Docetists taught that Jesus did not have a physical body, instead only seeming or appearing to. The Nestorians believed that Jesus Christ had two separate and distinct persons, dividing Jesus the man and Christ the Son of God, teaching that Jesus the man died on the cross, not God the Son. There’s still many others.
But truly, God becoming man proves for us that our God is God, that he’s greater and different than all other gods of the nations, that he himself is true.
Fortunately for us, the church finally settled on our present understanding in 451 A.D. where a council in Chalcedon defined the familiar known facts and accepted the mystery of how Jesus Christ became the God-man, writing that Jesus Christ, although one person, possesses two distinct natures, divine and human. Writing that he was without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence.
But unfortunately, that still does not describe how it works. It just affirms for us that it does work. And it feels unsatisfying to admit that we do not know and we cannot know how Jesus is the God-man. That remains a mystery that we must just accept and take on faith as a testimony of scripture.
So accepting that, that somehow God became also human, what is the big deal and why is that so important for us? See, the Incarnation of the Logos is God’s great promise to his people. He promised it to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, and God promised it through the prophet Isaiah. This is the promise of Emmanuel, God with us.
This was something new and unexpected because, as most ancient peoples understood things, the powerful and transcendent deity was always supposed to remain aloof, above, unattainable, and inaccessible. But here, the only Sovereign God intentionally condescends to dwell with his people and share koinonia with us.
The Lord God, the infinite Creator, chose in his sovereignty to live with, among, and within the limits of his creation. The Lord God condescended to live among his chosen people not as a master surrounded by servants but as a father surrounded by his beloved children.
And the Word became flesh, and the Logos became ‘sarx.’
Now ‘sarx’ has to touch on this because the Apostle Paul, when he used that word, it’s a theologically loaded word. Paul used it to mean the sin corruption of our human nature. But when John uses it, he uses it for far more simply. He uses it in just the physical sense of human nature, our flesh, blood, and bone.
But again, how did the ‘sarx’—how did the Logos become ‘sarx’? The verb for ‘became’ here suffers again from another peculiarity of the Greek conjugation. It’s written in what they call a middle voice. Greek verbs are ordinarily written in one of three voices: active, passive, and this middle voice.
The active voice tells us that the subject of the verb is performing the action: John drove the car to the store. The passive voice tells us the action is being performed on the subject: the car was driven by John to the store. But the middle voice does not suit either sense—it is both active and passive at the same time. It lacks a clear verbal analog into English, forcing interpreters to choose whether a verb is being more active or passive depending on the context when they translate.
Yet here, the middle voice makes more sense when we consider the Trinitarian roles of the three Divine persons. This verb ‘become’ is really being affected by two persons cooperating, as the Logos—God the Son—chooses and wills to become and take on to himself a physical human nature while the Theos—God the Father—also wills and causes the Logos to become and add humanity to his eternally pre-existent divine nature.
So in the Incarnation, the Logos does and is done to in this miraculous and humanly inexplicable act of becoming flesh.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. To dwell is a verb which we do not use very often anymore, nor do we often use its noun form of dwelling place or dwelling. Instead, we now speak about living someplace like a house or apartment, a place that we usually choose to call home. But that’s not what John means by ‘to dwell.’ He does not mean a fixed structure or place.
Instead, the Greek verb ‘skēnō’ is a very specific verb relating to the spreading of a tent or another kind of temporary shelter. It is a function of the noun ‘skēnē,’ which often translates the Hebrew term ‘mishkan.’ What both of these terms refer to—what they mean—is a dwelling place or shelter that is implicitly temporary and transient, a residence, not an absolute permanent home.
Both ‘skēnē’ and ‘mishkan’ are translated into Latin as ‘tabernaculum,’ a word which we will more recognizably and familiarly refer to as ‘Tabernacle.’ This is why you’ll hear some readers say, ‘and the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.’
This is why we consider Jesus to be the true Tabernacle of God, where, just as with the Tabernacle in the wilderness, through the Incarnation the Logos—Jesus—traveled around and dwelt in the midst of his people, coming and going and resting in one place, never for very long.
Therefore, Jesus is the first, fullest, and most personal expression and sign of God’s presence being in the midst of his chosen people. And the indwelling Holy Spirit is the second. Jesus, God the Son, the Logos, came to dwell among us for a time. Then he sent us his Holy Spirit to be our comforter, our teacher, and our advocate until Jesus returns to take us home—to bring us to dwell then with him.
But still, why is the Incarnation such a big deal? This is a big deal because God choosing to dwell with man helps define our purpose in life and our reason to exist. This is a big deal because it describes our relationship; it defines our relationship with the heavenly Father and his Son, Jesus.
You may have heard me say this before, but truly there are only two religions in the world, irrespective of name. There are only the religion of works and the religion of grace—the religion of what a person does for God and the religion of what God does for people.
Every religion and myth that is not Christian is centered around the premise of humanity’s indentured service or slavery to divine whims, and we discern this most clearly in their stories about creation. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians believed that the gods created humanity to be their servants, to do all the work that the gods did not want to do, to feed them and wait upon them.
Well, the Greek god Prometheus created man, and Athena breathed life and spirit into him. But Zeus didn’t like humanity, so he decreed and demanded their worship and sacrifices. Then Zeus punishes man because we received the gift of fire from Prometheus, so he created Pandora, the first woman, who then unleashed all mortal misfortune upon the world by opening her infamous box.
The Jews practiced rigorous obedience to the law of Moses, believing erroneously that doing so kept them in the Lord’s favor and that he would bless them according to their faithfulness and devotion. Muslims believe that they must perfectly obey Allah to possibly be allowed into Paradise. But even if they are perfect servants, they have no certainty of receiving either his approval or favor. Allah is described as a tyrant who does not care about humanity or creation, only caring that he is obeyed.
Our modern secular world, which denies everything spiritual and supernatural, whenever it speaks about these divine characters, it still connects their power and existence to the devotion and quantity of their followers, still keeping humanity in service to the divine and keeping the divine dependent upon humanity.
Neil Gaiman wrote a novel which has since been adapted for television called ‘American Gods,’ where he describes a conflict between the old gods of ancient myth against the new gods of our present day—gods like Technical Boy, Media, or Mr. World—a conflict that’s fought over the waning and waxing of humanity’s belief in each of them.
See, every expression of the works religion is founded upon the belief that humanity’s purpose and reason to exist is to serve the whims of the gods. But here, in our religion of grace, God doesn’t need humanity to serve him. God doesn’t even need humanity.
Matthew summed it up for us, summing up this unique relationship with the Divine, writing, ‘even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many.’
We exist because we’re loved by God. We were created for the dual purpose of being loved by God and to love God in return. So the grace found in Christianity is the polar opposite of the works religion. Our obedience to Jesus Christ does not service for his benefit, nor does it gain us his favor. Instead, obedience and faithfulness is the grateful and loving response to what God has already done for us by grace.
So the Logos, who is Theos, took on flesh and became human to serve humanity by rescuing us from our sin. The rescue, our salvation, required an agent that is both God and man—God to suffer and satisfy God’s wrath against sin, and man to serve as the perfect substitute for sinful humanity. That’s the work by which we’re justified—the work of Jesus Christ, which frees us from our bondage to Satan and sin and facilitates our adoption into the household of God as his chosen sons and daughters.
This leads us to the greatest reason of why the Incarnation, the dwelling of the Theos with his people, is such a big deal. But to understand this, I want to ask us two questions, and they’re kind of sensitive.
How does it feel being in your parents’ home alone? Whether you were home alone because they were at work or at the store, or whether they had recently passed. And to those of you who are parents, how does it feel when your children are gone from home? Whether off to school for the day or because you are now an empty nester, the feeling is hard to describe, isn’t it?
But I expect that you would agree that it just does not feel right somehow. It feels off; something feels missing. There is a felt absence of presence that makes it not feel quite like home as it is supposed to be.
That same kind of absence of presence is what we all felt when we were separated from the Lord. That’s what everyone feels, and we all know before we answer Jesus’s effectual call in our lives. We felt it, but we could not describe it, nor could we have known what it was that we were missing until the Lord gave us the ears to hear and the eyes to see.
All we knew was that something was missing, and we tried to fill it with anything and everything until our eyes were opened to Jesus and we learned that he is everything that we lacked. That’s why the Incarnation is so great. It’s that presence—God with us and us with him—it’s correcting that absence, and this is the wonderful consequence and miracle of the Logos and our adoption.
Because we’re now brought into the household and family of God, and he now lives at home with us. The presence of God in Christ Jesus—in Jesus—was a special joy that the apostles got to experience, walking and talking with him every day, living life with him, sharing and caring together.
That is the joy we look forward to when we’re finally called to our heavenly home. And since the Logos became flesh, we now relate to Jesus as our great high priest and know that he empathizes with us because he suffered and experienced all that humanity possibly can and still remained obedient to the Father for our sake. While through it all, he did not succumb to sin as we so often do.
But even though the physical body of Jesus is not present with us now, Jesus is still with us. He is still our Emmanuel in body and in spirit every day and every moment. His Holy Spirit is present with us through all of our comings and goings, and he is present with us whenever we gather together in his holy name for worship, for praise, and prayer, for study, and for fellowship.
He’s with us in all of our relationships. He is the third strand of the braided cord of our marriage unions. He is with us when parents teach their young children and when children care for their aging parents. He is with us when we are in school learning, and he is with us when we’re on the road driving.
But especially, he is with us even when we do not think he’s present. Being in his presence, knowing that he is with us, gives each of us joy.
And on Sunday mornings, our Sunday mornings should be even more joyous because presently, we are gathered here together as the body of Christ, and we know that he is here with us. We, the church, are now the physical expression of Jesus Christ in the world, representing him and doing his work.
Look all around you. Go ahead, and you will see Jesus looking back at you behind the face of every neighbor and friend, brother and sister, husband and wife, parent and child here. Truly, we are in the Lord’s presence.
We come here intending to be with him, and we know that he comes and meets us here, also intending to be with us. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God became like us to be with us so that someday we can be with him because he loves us.
Because now, having received the ‘fal,’ who is the Logos and the Theos, we have become the children of God—adopted and chosen in sovereign love. Truly, God is with us—with you. Jesus is with you because he loves you, and he wants you to be with him. Amen.