A reading this evening comes from the Gospel of John chapter 1. The evangelist writes, ‘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. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Son, the word, through whom all things were made at the power of your voice. And this word came and was a tangible word among us. Now we have our word of scripture that tells his story to us, that contains his word as he is the word speaking your truth. Open our hearts to hear you speak and receive your love. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So tonight, we are gathered to remember and to celebrate the day when the wondrous miracle known as the incarnation occurred, the birth of Jesus Christ. Now, the incarnation of Christ is one of the five most important moments in history: creation, the fall, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and finally, his future oncoming, impending, imminent return. Each of these other four events were involved around the incarnation as the pivot point of history.
Creation gave us a place, a perfect world, which was just waiting to be filled with life. But Adam’s fall introduced sin into God’s good creation, changing and corrupting this perfect world and causing our need for salvation and redemption. Together, Jesus’ death and his resurrection satisfied our debt of sin, justifying us and redeeming us from the righteous wrath that we all deserve. Then, when Christ returns in glory, he shall make all things new, restoring everything to its original state of perfection, or making them even better.
Now, those first two events established and created the need for the incarnation, while the latter two, as consequences of the incarnation, satisfied and fulfilled that need. That’s how we make the wondrous birth of Jesus and understand it as the fulcrum point and center of history. That is why we celebrate and remember Christmas because it is truly the most important day in human history.
It’s the day when the word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is the day when God lovingly gave his Son as a gracious gift for the salvation of his elect children. And while this verse is set within the evangelist’s preamble to his gospel, it is the simplest and most perfect summary explaining God’s gift of his only begotten Son, Jesus.
Now, earlier, John has already explained that the word, the Logos, is eternally God. And now he tells us about what God the word did after his initial work of creation: that God became flesh and dwelt among us. God the word became flesh. He came down from heaven and entered into our world, into our space and time. God became incarnate, but he did not become in the sense of changing.
That which had only ever been purely spirit now became physical as well. The physical was added to the spiritual without change, confusion, or mixture. And so God became man, adding humanity to his divinity without changing either. He became a human person, a male child, a baby boy. He was born Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, with all three of them being descended from King David, the man after God’s own heart.
He was born in Bethlehem, in Judea, during the reigns of King Herod and Caesar Augustus. He was born at a specific moment in history. He grew up and was raised to be a carpenter like his earthly father, and he was raised to be the king like his heavenly father. But by saying that God the word became flesh, the evangelist does not mean that God just suddenly changed.
God did not transform and stop being the transcendent God and become an infinitely lesser creature. When he took on flesh, God did not surrender his divine nature, nor did he corrupt or mix it with the human nature. Instead, John shows us that in becoming flesh, by taking on flesh, God added a finite human nature to his eternally existing infinite divine nature, making the incarnation truly a mystery, a mystery of addition.
The spiritual added the physical to itself. And in so doing, the spiritual divine nature continued unchanged but was now clothed in flesh by his human nature. Then, the evangelist goes on to explain that God the word dwelt among us. See, God, he tabernacled with us. Transcendent divinity came down and lived imminently among us, base humanity.
God chose to pitch his tent, to settle down and join the community life of his people, Israel. God made himself easily accessible to everyone who wanted to draw near. However, what John describes here is different from what the Lord had done in the past. This was the truest fulfillment of God’s promise of Emmanuel, of God with us.
Back near the beginning, during the cool of the day, the Lord walked in the garden where Adam and Eve lived, strolling among his people. Then Enoch walked with God, and then he was not, for God took him. See, the Lord brought Enoch directly up into heaven without suffering death to be with him and to dwell among his divine presence.
And the Lord, well, he spoke to Abraham through visions, and he even visited his tent. But God never did dwell with that wandering Aramean. However, during Israel’s time in the wilderness, the Lord commanded Moses to build him a tent to dwell in so he could live among the people. This tent was set up and traveled right in the midst of the Israelite host, with all of God’s people organized around it.
Whenever their traveling ceased, the Lord’s glorious cloud, the Shekinah, would settle upon the tent, covering it as a visible sign of his presence. After David had conquered the city of Jerusalem and he established it as his capital, he had God’s ark of the covenant brought into the city with him. But while he was forbidden from building a magnificent temple to the Lord, to build him a house of cedar like his own, his son Solomon was permitted to build the Lord a house.
The cloud of the Lord’s glory filled it as well. Thereafter, whenever Israel was faithful and obedient to God, their lives revolved around God’s temple, his religious calendar, his requirements of purity, his law, and his divine authority as mediated through the Davidic kings. So back in the past, while the Lord God did dwell in the midst of his people, now, when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the character of his dwelling changed dramatically and extraordinarily.
Previously, the character of his dwelling was like mixing oil and water. God and man may have been together, placed in close proximity, but they never truly mixed. Our respective natures are indissolvable because the Lord is holy, and we are not. God is spirit, while we are physical. The Lord is the creator, and we’re creatures. The Lord is righteous, but we’re wicked. And although his presence was right here, imminent, he remained still transcendent above and beyond.
God is the one who’s worshipped and obeyed, while we are the ones who worship and obey. While we were in community and in relationship together with him, it was with God as our king and we as his subjects. He is the Lord and our master, and we were his servants.
But now, God became clothed in flesh, and although his divinity was obscured by his humanity, it could not be entirely hidden because glimpses of his glory still broke through. Now instead of simply dwelling among us, God the word dwelt with us. The Lord lived with us. He lived like us. He lived as we live, experiencing what we experience the same way that we all experience it.
God experienced the fullness of humanity except for the human flaw of sinfulness, except for suffering the tragic effect of our sinning. We are still reminded that we are all sinners because we sin. Or we are and we sin because our human nature was corrupted by Adam’s sin first. But God the word, in his incarnation, enjoyed the benefit of the true and perfect human nature—sinless, the perfection that each and every Christian that we long for and will someday receive when the final trumpet sounds and we’re all raised into glory.
Clothed in flesh, God the word, the Logos who stayed us and Andrews, experienced and suffered every human temptation without sin. Clothed in human flesh, the Logos who stayed us and Andrews kept the law of Moses. He obeyed the Lord and perfectly satisfied all of the requirements of his holy law by not breaking the law and by positively doing what it commands, achieving an active state of righteousness—something that is impossible for sinners like us because of our inherited corruption.
Clothed in flesh, God the word was unjustly condemned and died as an atonement to satisfy our debt of sin. The righteous for the unrighteous, the innocent for the guilty, divinity for humanity. Clothed in flesh, God the word was raised from the dead, proving that he truly is the holy and righteous son of God and confirming the justification that he has purchased for us, for all those who believe in and trust him.
Then after describing what God has done, the evangelist next describes what we do, describing our Christian response, saying, ‘And we have seen his glory.’ But that’s not as simple or straightforward as it seems because the glory of Christ, this glory of God the word, the glory of the Logos was not obvious or plainly evident to everyone.
Clearly, because since we’ve read the rest of the story, we know that not everyone saw this glory. Because otherwise, if they had, then everyone who saw it would have known and understood that Jesus is God and therefore believed. Instead, our expected relationship of cause and effect concerning the idea of seeing is reversed. They, and we, did not see the glory and then believe.
But rather, we believe and therefore we saw his glory. The Holy Spirit opened our eyes to see Christ’s glory, and he opened our hearts to receive Jesus, and then we believed because we were caused to believe. Our God-given faith was further rewarded by the sight of Jesus’ glory. So, in seeing, we were also believing and receiving. In seeing and receiving, we were also becoming.
We were becoming the children of God, as John wrote just immediately before tonight’s verse, ‘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.’ Seeing, receiving, and becoming by the sole power and will of God. What a Christmas present.
So in seeing and becoming children of God, we are also becoming obedient to God. We’re gaining the desire to try, at least, to try and obey our heavenly Father as our response of love. We were gaining credit for Christ’s— for Jesus’— active obedience, his justifying righteousness through our belief and trust in him.
But what is this glory that we’ve seen? We’ve seen the glory as of the only son from the Father. We’ve seen the glory of the word made flesh. The word who is God. The word who was with God in the beginning. The word through whom all things were made. We’ve seen the glory of God the son, which is the glory of God the Father, whose glory also belongs to the son and the Holy Spirit.
We have seen the glory of God, a glory which is full of grace and truth. The Lord is glorified, and he is glorious in his merciful grace. God is glorified by his forgiveness, and God is glorified through justice and the judgment of his wrath. God is glorified in his holiness, his perfect righteousness.
God is glorified in truth and with truth because he is the truth. He is the absolute standard that defines everything which is true. God is glorified through his word by truthfully keeping every promise he makes. So all of this is mixed into and fills throughout the whole wonder of what we call Christmas.
The miracle of the incarnation can really be reduced to one simple fact: that when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, when God entered into our world in the person of his son Jesus Christ, he was giving himself to us. To give himself for us. So that he might bring us to himself as his adopted children.
God gave us his son for Christmas to be our sacrificial lamb. God became incarnate so that we could become his beloved sons and daughters forevermore. The word of God came and dwelt among us on Earth so that we could go to dwell with him in heaven and upon the new Earth that is to come. That is why Christmas, the day of Christ’s incarnation and birth, is not only the most important day in all of human history but also the most important day for your own life.
So, if you believe this and if you can already see how gloriously wonderful this is, then you may know and trust that Jesus was born for you. Jesus lived for you. Jesus died for you. Jesus rose from the dead for you. Jesus ascended to heaven for you, and guess what? Jesus is coming back for you.
But if you do not yet believe that truth, then search your heart. Confess your sins and repent. You have a gift in this very moment to take the opportunity to repent and turn to Jesus Christ in faith. To believe, to receive mercy, to be forgiven and to be saved from unending wrath.
The offer and the promise of God’s gift of grace is here before you, waiting to be seen and received. So, ask the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to see and open your heart to receive so that you may truly believe and fully experience the Christmas miracle tonight and forevermore. Amen.