Dennis Tuuri

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness of him and cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me.” And of his fullness we have all received, grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Let us sing this song and by way of singing it pray that God would illumine the text for understanding. The younger children can be dismissed to the nursery.

This past week I watched, of all things, a movie. It’s actually a series of made-for-television movies, one hour long, from Poland originally. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to watch this particular series—it was filmed in Poland, I don’t know, 15 years ago or so, maybe 10 years ago. I’m not sure. A series of 10 of them called Decalogue, and they chronicle, they roughly correlate to the Ten Commandments. The first story is very moving, very difficult to watch.

It’s a story of a young boy and a father. The mother’s gone somewhere. The father has a sister. So the boy’s aunt is a Christian, but the father is not. The father is a rational man. Everything is measurements to him. His sister explains to the boy that’s why his father is not a Christian—because he thinks that everything has to be measured objectively. So he’s a rationalist man. The boy is, I don’t know, eight or nine years old or something.

The boy wants to go skating one morning on the pond. It’s winter in Poland and they’re in a city, but there’s a pond in the middle of the city. He wants to know if it’s safe. The father does calculations on his computer. Both he and his boy have a computer, and he teaches the boy how to make calculations, how to make measurements. He’s a nice guy, but he’s a rational man. Based on his measurements and the ground temperature for the last three days, he calculates that the lake could hold a boy three times the weight of his son.

Then he tells his son, “Yeah, it’s safe.” And he gives his son an early Christmas present of ice skates. Well, of course, you see where the story’s going. The next morning, the boy goes—classes are canceled—and he goes skating and he falls through the ice and drowns. The man has exercised belief in his worldview. He has exercised belief in what he believes to be the salvation for mankind: measurements, objective scientific measurements, formulas. And he has trusted his only begotten son, as it were. That phrase in the text from John here—”only begotten”—has reference not primarily to the begottenness of our Savior. It has implications, but Jesus is unique.

Well, this man has a son and he trusts this son to his measurements, with his—the life of his son—and he loses his son. At the end of the movie, he doesn’t come to repentance. He goes to an altar where Mary is there crying in a picture, and he pushes the candles over in rebellion to God, hating God, reflecting the true nature of his soul, even as rational as a man that he was at the beginning of the movie.

And at the end, the only thing left of his son is a videotape image on the television, flickering. And there’s his son running around. They had been taped at their school classroom that day by the news services.

He had told the boy at the beginning of the movie that after death, death is the end. The only thing that remains are memories of what you looked like, whether you had a chip tooth or not, etc. And that’s all he has left.

Well, I bring that up to remember that last week we said that the purpose of John the Baptist is the same purpose as John, the writer of this gospel: that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And that believing, we might have life in his name. And what we said is that belief is not intellectual assent. It is to trust or to rely upon Jesus Christ in our times of difficulty, trials, and tribulations. It’s very much related to today’s text, because as we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, our experience of him is grace upon grace.

I couldn’t wait to get to that verse. We’ll get to it in fuller fashion here, but it is a miraculous verse. Abounding grace, grace upon grace is our experience of the Lord Jesus Christ whom we believe in.

Last week we talked about this need to believe, and we said that to believe—as I said, and I’ve got this on the children’s outline again today—another way we could say to believe is to trust in or to rely upon. The man trusted in his measurements, relied upon them with the life of his son. The message of John the baptizer, who is different from the John who writes this gospel—the gospel is written by a different John than the baptizer, children.

But the purpose of both of these testimonies is that all might believe. And we saw last week that if we do, or we are brought to that faith, not by the will of man but by the will of God, his sovereignty in salvation is talked about. But we are then designated in this prologue as children of God. And we said that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. But then there’s this comparison. Although there’s a contrast, he is unique. We’ll see that again today.

But there is this comparison. And just as the Lord Jesus Christ’s virgin birth was a miracle, so really the movement, as we witness by way of ritual or symbolically here, from death to life, from old Adam to new Adam—that is every bit as much a miracle as the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is impossible for man to accomplish this. The will of man can’t do it. Man’s efforts and family planning can’t do it. His lust can’t do it. His generation of seed cannot do it. Only the will of the Father can affect this change. It is miraculous, and it is the result of the Holy Spirit’s work in the context of the elect people.

So in answer to question number five on your outline, children, it is all of the above. And yes, God is your Father. And yes, you are powerful. I’ll return to that theme next week when we talk about verse 18, the capstone to this prologue. But understand that Christians, their essential identity is declared for us in the middle of this prologue as powerful children of God. He gave them the right, the power to make manifest their being begotten of God, as it were—different from the Savior, but nonetheless true.

We are children of God and we do have power. We’re so used to reminding our children, “No, no, we are weak, but he is strong.” Well, he’s strong. And that’s a communicable attribute that he gives to his people. We are strong as well. Now, we’re strongest when we recognize our weakness. When we recognize that our life is grace upon grace. But nonetheless, we are powerful children of God. And we’ll speak more about that next week.

We saw, we read rather, in the context of the text for today, verses 14 and following, what some commentators have said is one of the most beautiful, trenchant, meaning-filled passages of the entire Scripture. In verse 14: “The Word became flesh.”

This text moves from verse 14 up to verse 16, where we receive grace upon grace from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Our mission for today in terms of this text is to look for God’s grace in our lives, to give him thanks for those areas of grace, and to expect our life to abound with grace upon grace.

So our mission from today’s text is to look for God’s grace in our lives. It begins here in the first phrase of verse 14: “The Word became flesh.” Preachers can spend months on just that phrase. We’ll have to rush through it, but understand that there are several things going on here. First of all, we have put forward in this phrase: the Word becomes flesh. We have a repetition, a reference again to the Word of God.

Understand that this links this back to verses one and two. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God.” And then verses 2 to verse 13—basically, verses 3 to 13—can be seen as almost parenthetical. You see, the word has not appeared in verses 3 to 13—that designation of Christ. He’s life and he’s light and other things have been talked about. But now we return to the subject that the whole gospel began with, which is the Word. “The Word became flesh.”

So it’s almost as if between verses 1 and 14, there’s a parenthesis to describe some other stuff. But the central flow of this prologue is: In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. And this Word now became flesh.

Now, this is important not just in saying the way the text is laid out. That’s important in and of itself. But right away, what that tells us is this idea of recreation that verse one clearly spoke of. In the beginning was the Word, and now the Word becomes flesh. So we have this correlation to the original creation spoken of in Genesis 1: “In the beginning.” And now this new beginning is made possible. It happens because of the event that’s described here: the Word became flesh.

And so we’re told here a very important piece of evidence of what we’re going to talk about here. We’re going to talk about the new created order. I mentioned this text before, but if you turn to Colossians 1, we’ll see that in this newly created order, just as in the old creation, Jesus Christ is the center of it. In Colossians 1:15-20, there is a parallelism that goes on in this verse. The parallelism first speaks about the old creation, the first creation, and then he talks about the recreation of all things in Jesus.

So in verse 15, we read that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. So he’s the firstborn. He’s the captain, as it were—that’s what the term could also be translated as. He is the captain of all creation. So this speaks of the first creation of all things, and Jesus Christ is firstborn of every creature.

“For by him were all things created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things and by him all things consist.”

So the Lord Jesus Christ is said to be the center of the original created order. He was the firstborn of creation, and in him all things were created—whether the heavens, the earth, visible, invisible, thrones and dominions and powers. And then we have that all things have been created through him and for him. So that wraps up the first creation.

Then the next portion of this moves on to the next section, referring, I think, to the new creation. Verse 18: “He is the head of the body, the church, and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might come to have first place in everything, the preeminence of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Now, in being firstborn from the dead, in terms of the recreation of all things through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, this is here described. He is the head of the body of the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he might have the preeminence.

“For it pleased the Father that in him should all things dwell, and having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself, by him I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.”

So what Colossians is telling us is that Jesus Christ is the center. He’s the captain. He’s the purpose of the original creation. All were created by him and for him. And in terms of the recreation of all things, this is accomplished by him becoming the firstborn from the dead, that he might come to have first place in everything. For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in him. We’ll look at that same phrase here in this text as well. The fullness of the Godhead dwells in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And on the basis of that fullness, he is in the process of reconciling all things to himself. So verse 14 tells us some important information about the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it tells us that this is the link between the first creation and the recreation that is going to happen through the person and work of the Word becoming flesh.

Now, this Word becoming flesh—I’ve got on your outlines: hypostatic union. The word is important that identifies creation and recreation. The term flesh is also important. It doesn’t say the Word became a man. It says the Word became flesh. It doesn’t say the Word took on a man or became a man for a little while. It says the Word became flesh.

And that phrase is filled with meaning. This word “became” means signifies something changed its features or begins a new situation by becoming what it was not beforehand. So two important aspects of what this means—the Word became flesh. This first: that the two natures of the Lord Jesus Christ, his deity and his humanity, were so united in one person in Christ that one and the same Christ is true God and true man. The second implication is that the unity of person does not hinder the two natures from becoming distinct, so that his divinity retains all that is peculiar to itself and his humanity holds separately whatever belongs to it.

I’m going to read from the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon. Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood. He is still the Word—Godhead—and he takes on flesh—manhood—complete in Godhood and complete in manhood. Truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body.

When Jesus takes on flesh, we’re to understand that he took on all the implications of what flesh means, and that includes a human soul or spirit. There are various heresies of the church, and one says, “Well, he just kind of put on a body, but he did not have a soul.” Well, the Chalcedon definition correctly says: “Truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body.”

“Of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was face to face—that’s what it says in verse one. The Word was turned toward, the Word was at home with God the Father. The Word was one in essence with God the Father. He’s the Word. He remains that Word. But he takes on flesh. He became flesh. And in his flesh, we have union with the Lord Jesus Christ in the context of him taking on flesh.

“So he is of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time, of one substance with us as regards his manhood, like us in all respects apart from sin. As regards his Godhead: begotten of the Father before the ages. But yet as regards his manhood: begotten for us men and for our salvation of Mary the Virgin—eternally begotten, but begotten as taking on flesh of the Virgin Mary. The Godbearer, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union.”

Okay, this is what’s referred to with the early church fathers as the hypostatic union: two natures, one person. Two natures—divinity and humanity—existing in one person, being in no way unlike the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and substance, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and only begotten God, the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.

“Even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.”

Okay, this is a big, kind of confusing definition, and I’m going to try to make it a little clearer. The Word became flesh. He had a human body but he did not have a human soul. Is that true or false?

That is false. He takes on all of humanity, not just a part of it, not just its physical body. He has a human soul. He was two persons, God and man. No, he was not two persons. He had two natures, but he is one person. We don’t end up with four persons in the Trinity. He is one person with two natures. To say he had two persons—that is false. He had two natures: deity and humanity. That is correct according to the church definitions and according to the implications of the Word became flesh.

The union of the Lord Jesus Christ of these two natures into one person is what is taught in this verse. So he did have two natures: deity and humanity. He was a man who became God. No. Absolutely wrong. It doesn’t say the flesh, this man, became God, or took on God. No, the Word became flesh. We can’t become God. We’re never uncreated as Jesus was. We never will be. Our union with God through Christ is in terms of his humanity. And we take on eternal life, but we always had a beginning. We’re always created beings. We’re never part of deity.

Man cannot climb the ladder the way the Greeks taught to become God. God isn’t just a bigger man. God is completely separate. But God condescends to men, to take on human flesh, to affect our salvation, a human nature. He was God, and then became a person. He was God and then became a person. Almost sounds right, but it’s not. Because some people have taught erroneously, falsely, that God was not a person until Jesus became, took on flesh. Well, that’s wrong. God is always a person. Jesus is always the second person of the Trinity.

He has personality, not some sort of substance or energy that somehow occasionally works in a mode of being a person. No, he was not God and then became a person. He was God, and because he was God, he was a person. The second person of the Trinity eternally. He has always been a person. That’s true.

Jesus has always been a person. He is one person and two natures. That’s right. That’s what Chalcedon said. That’s the implications of the Word became flesh. And that’s what we believe. He took over somebody else’s body. Well, you know, Mary was going to have a baby and then he took over that body. Wrong. False. Doesn’t say the Word took over a body. The Word became flesh in his incarnation. He is God and never really became a man. Some people have taught that whether or not he came in the flesh is unimportant. He didn’t really take on humanity, take on flesh in that sense. That’s wrong as well. He really—the Word became flesh.

That’s very important. It’s important because that tells us if Jesus takes on flesh, then it is not bad. Now, we should know that already because of the first creation. God created flesh, humanity, bodies. But here, the Lord Jesus takes upon himself a body. And so we’re told again that he really took on flesh. And that isn’t bad or that isn’t wrong. So there is a complete humanity that Jesus assumes here.

The Word became not a man individually or part of a man. The Word became flesh—human soul and body. It was a real and permanent humanity that Jesus Christ became. He doesn’t take it on for a little bit and then when he goes to heaven drop the humanity part. He takes flesh into heaven in the presence of God. He takes humanity in his resurrection. There’s no new third nature to Jesus here. He takes on humanity. The human and divine natures were combined into one person. That’s what this word means.

Now, I said that flesh isn’t bad. The Greeks, if a Greek was reading this gospel at this point, he would just say, “Oh, horror! No, because the flesh is bad. Flesh and spirit are completely separated. And so to imagine God taking on flesh, a Word becoming flesh, and to exist in that for the rest of eternity—this is horrible to the Greek mindset, and unfortunately to all too many Christians as well.”

One reason people think about this is in Philippians 2. So I’m going to read from Philippians 2. There’s a description here of what we’re reading about here. It says: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of man, taking on flesh. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto the point of death, even the death of the cross.”

Now, when we read there that he, being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself and became obedient unto the point of death—what is that humility of Jesus that it’s talking about? What is that? When did he humble himself and take upon himself death and go to the cross and die? He humbled himself on the cross by receiving the imputation of humanity’s sin, the elect’s sin, upon himself. Jesus’s humility, his humbling, was not taking on flesh. His humility was taking upon himself, having imputed to him, the sins of his people. That’s what identifies Jesus as the sin bearer of the elect, not taking on flesh.

Flesh—what we’re going to see here, as this verse goes on to say, is that the Word became flesh, and we realized his humility. We realized his shame. No, that’s not what the verse says. It says: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” The glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Jesus Christ’s incarnation becomes the vehicle whereby flesh becomes the vehicle whereby the Father makes manifest his glory in humanity, being assumed by the Lord Jesus Christ, and him living a life in obedience to the law and demonstrating the life and power of God.

All right. So this verse talks about the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it goes on from that incarnation—the Word became flesh—to tell us what the results of the Word becoming flesh are. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Now, I’m spending a lot of time on verse 14. We won’t spend much time on the last three verses, so you won’t worry about getting through the outline on time. Most of the time is spent on verse 14. It’s packed full of meaning, and it is the setup, as I put on the outline, for the wonderful description of human life given in verse 16.

The Word became flesh and tabernacled. That’s what the Greek word means here. Tabernacled amongst us. Now, again here, if we’re thinking in terms of New Testament only, and if we’re sitting in a tribe and we got the gospel of John and we read about Jesus tabernacling amongst us and we’ve never even heard of the book of Genesis, we haven’t heard of the book of Exodus where the tabernacle is described, and we never heard of the glory that existed in the context of the Exodus from Egypt—and specifically the glory that filled the tabernacle and then later the glory that filled the temple—we’re not going to get this verse.

But we know all those things. We’ve been taught about the importance of the model that the Old Testament set up for us. That while man fell in Adam, God is going about a new creation. He’s restoring mankind. He’s bringing about a new world. And that world is pictured in various ways in the Old Testament. And one was the tabernacle in which God dwelt with his people. And then the next was the temple, whereby God dwelt with his people.

The temple and tabernacle were pictures of the world and God’s presence in the context of the world. He was going to come to the world and make all the world his tabernacle or his temple. So by the end of the book of Revelation, that’s just what we see. The city of God comes down and surrounds or caps off the entire earth—the whole world becomes the mountain of the Lord.

So when we know all that stuff and now we know that the Word links specifically in this verse back to “in the beginning”—that this Word now tabernacles amongst us—and not only does he tabernacle, but it goes on to say that we beheld his glory. Well, the associations are exceedingly clear. This tabernacling of Jesus Christ amongst us speaks of the glory of God as it existed in shadow form in the Old Testament in the tabernacle and in the temple.

And so we expect then to see the Lord Jesus Christ in terms of this tabernacle or temple imagery. And we’ll get to that in just a moment. Well, the end result of him tabernacling amongst us, it says, is that we beheld his glory. And again here, this glory we can relate immediately to the glory of God in the context of the tabernacle.

So children, when it says he dwelt among us, what’s another word for dwelt? The word is tabernacled. And this is a specific Greek word used to translate, in the Greek translations of the Old Testament, the word for tabernacle. So this glory is the glory that God manifested at the Exodus. The Exodus was a picture of a new creation. The glory is the glory of God filling the tabernacle of God.

We read about this in Exodus 40:35: “Moses were not able to enter the tabernacle of meeting because the cloud rested above it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” So we have this glory of Jesus Christ being portrayed. And then specifically it goes on to say this is the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

The phrase here “only begotten” means the unique Son of God. While we are children of God, this verse draws a separation between Jesus and us. He is the only begotten of the Father. The emphasis is not on his begottenness. I think the emphasis really is on his uniqueness, although certainly Jesus, as we said last week, is eternally begotten of the Father.

And I wanted to make just a comment or two about that. Now, we read in the Old Testament that a father begets a son. You know, a father, a man and wife, marry and they have children. And it says that he begets a son. And so then we read about Jesus being the only begotten of the Father, and we say, “Well, you know, that must mean he has a starting point.”

But here, as I said, the idea is he is the only begotten of the Father. There’s uniqueness implied. And the reason we have trouble with that is that we’re going from humans to God. But God always wants us to think in terms of who he is and then who we are. You see, God doesn’t accommodate himself to a human situation. He doesn’t say, “Well, let’s see. They have kids that they beget, and so I can describe this second person as a son, and they’ll understand that because I begot him.” That’s not the way it works. We’re made in God’s image. He’s not made in our image.

Well, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. There is always the relationship of father and son between the first and second persons of the Trinity. And the Spirit is sent by God the Father and by God the Son to do particular missions. We talk about the procession of the Holy Ghost. That’s what we mean. He proceeds. The Father says accomplish this, and the Spirit accomplishes it. The Son says go take my truth to my people, the Spirit then goes on that mission. He proceeds.

They’re all equal in essence. They’re all three persons are all God. But they have different functions. And this function of father and son is a love relationship, where the Son images the character of the Father and makes it manifest to the creation. Now, that love that exists between the Father and the Son—Augustine in his development of the Trinity and the interpersonal relationship of the Trinity—he said that’s really the Spirit. The Spirit is the love that God sheds abroad on his people. He sheds abroad the Spirit in our hearts, and that love is what the Spirit accomplishes. He’s always working with the bride to cause her to love the Bridegroom Jesus.

So we can say that this Trinity that’s described here—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—have particular emphases given to them. The Father is always the Father. The Son is always the Son. Always begotten. Always is in a relationship of father and son to the Father, with the Spirit involved in that relationship as well. So now we have children begotten of us. And now we’re not eternal. We’re not like the Father in that sense, and our children—they all have a beginning place. So it’s not like it in that sense, but we do image the relationship of father and son that is the eternal begottenness of Lord Jesus Christ.

So if you remember just that the Trinity forms our understanding of what we do, then you avoid this idea that begottenness means that Jesus had a beginning point. It only does for us because that’s the way God has created humankind, that this relationship is one that has a beginning point to it. And that is dissimilar to God. Of course, he’s eternal, as these verses have made abundantly clear and will again in a couple of minutes.

But understand that our begottenness is modeled upon the begottenness of the Son from the Father. But it’s different because we’re created beings. But the implications of that are great. And we’ll talk more about that next week when we go to verse 18, that the Son precedes the Father. What we’ll see, and what we’re going to stress again here at the end of this sermon, is that we as children of God reflect those same communicable attributes that are found in the Lord Jesus Christ as he takes on humanity.

All right. So are there these interpersonal relationships. And the Lord Jesus Christ is the only begotten of the Father. And he is full, the text says, of grace and truth. Grace—the unmerited favor of God. He’s full of grace. Gifts. Gifts that we don’t deserve, but gifts that he brings to us anyway. This idea of the Greek term grace, by the way, always had a connection of beauty to it. You know, you think about grace as unmerited favor, but you also know the use of the term grace to mean that somebody moves graciously through the world.

Well, I think that’s true here. Jesus is full of grace for his people. But he also, in every action of his life in those 33 years he lived, exhibited the beauty of the incarnate God in humanity. In Jesus we see the sheer beauty, the comeliness, the winsomeness of the Godhead. And we go through the Gospel of John, we’ll see these beautiful representations of the Father through the Son.

Jesus Christ represents grace. He’s full of grace, and he’s a grace that is unmerited favor to us. But is also the demonstration of the beauty of God. He is also full of truth. And this word truth can mean several different things and probably is used in its general sense here by John to mean all of them.

I might add, by the way, that grace is only used four times in this gospel, and it’s only in these two or three verses right here. No more grace mentioned. His life is a representation of grace. He doesn’t need to use the word anymore because he sets us up as how to interpret every event.

Jesus Christ is also truth. Truth means mostly two things. One, it means truth as apart from falsehood. It means the truth of the matter is this and not that. It accords with reality. But secondly, truth also has the connotation throughout the Scriptures of faithfulness. He always does what he’s supposed to do. He’s true. You know, my aim is true. His aim was true. He always is accomplishing what he was sent to do by the Father. He is truthful. You can count on his word. He is faithful.

So when we see these attributes of the Lord Jesus Christ—of graciousness, truthfulness, and then of faithfulness in doing what God wants us to do—we can see these attributes, of course, are ones that we want to image as children of God. We want to be gracious. We want to be kind to other people. We want to move through life with a beauty. We want to be truth tellers. God hates lies. So we want to be truth tellers. We want to be truthful. And we also want to be faithful, as the Lord Jesus Christ was full of grace and truth, so we should be as well.

There’s one other implication of the word true, and that is this particular Greek word means to comport to reality—full of grace and reality. This is what life is all about. This is what the deceptiveness of man, and his deceit, and his sin seeks to suppress. But this is true. This is real.

You know, I was going to use an illustration. Last week about John the Baptist being named—and they want people around say, “Well, he should be named Zacharias like his dad.” And they go to his dad and say, “Well, what do you want to name the boy?” And he says, “His name is John.” A statement of reality. God had determined that his name was John. Man doesn’t make it so. Man obeys and conforms his sense of reality to the reality of God the Father. And so John is named—not really named by men. Men simply assent to the fact that God has named him John, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I mentioned last week another movie I saw where at the beginning of it there’s two women on a bus, and it’s about how this child is going to become used by God, kind of a prophet child. And there’s this star in the sky, and it’s the same star that was over Bethlehem supposedly. And one woman says to the other one, “You know, if you see that star tonight it means somebody special is coming into the world.”

And the other woman says, “Well, I don’t really believe in that.” She said, “I’m sorry.” The first person says, “God is sending somebody special in the world to do his will.” And the other woman says, “Well, I don’t really believe in that.” And she says, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. It’s going to happen.”

Well, that’s what this is. You see, people can reject the gospel of Jesus Christ. It makes it no less true. Jesus is full of grace, and Jesus brings reality. He restores the sanity of man. He restores his children. He restores them to a sense of true reality.

So Jesus comes full of grace and truth. Now, we recognize in this, and I think I have some citations on your outline, that these are designations of God in the Old Testament. I’ll just read a couple. Psalm 25:10: “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.”

So see here again, when it says he’s full of grace and truth, he’s the only begotten of the Father, he exhibits the same grace and truth of the Father that’s described in Psalm 25:10. Or in Exodus 34: “The Lord passes before Moses, very importantly, and proclaims, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands.’”

So this “full of grace and truth” is one more set of evidence that Jesus is God incarnate.

And now I want to talk about the first emphasis that I want to make from this text. And again here, I know I’ve spent a lot of time on verse 14, but it’s very important. And one of the reasons it’s important is because it sets us up with one more way to look at this entire gospel. And this is on your outline still under point one on verse 14. The first emphasis is the setup for accelerating revelation.

We’ve said that there are three cycles in this prologue. We’re in the third cycle. There’s this accelerating revelation of Jesus Christ. And here the Word becomes flesh. So now that new creation is going to start taking effect. And specifically, it goes on from that to say that as he takes on flesh, he tabernacles and reveals the glory of God.

Now, it’s important that we recognize that this is one of the ways in which the rest of the gospel of John can be understood. We can come to understand the gospel of John very simply at this point in time if we just pay a little bit of attention here. Children, reflect upon these words that I’m going to say here.

We’ve said that one way to break this gospel up is that he comes to his own and his own don’t receive him. Then he comes to his disciples—to many as believe on him, he gives them the right to become children of God, who are born again, not of the will of the flesh or the will of the spirit or blood, but of God.

So the first half of the gospel, chapters 1-2, are about his rejection by his own—his own homeland, his own people in Israel. The last half, chapters 13-21, is his ministry to his disciples. And what we see in both halves of that book correlates with what verse 14 sets us up for. He is the tabernacle. He’s the temple.

Now, he’s going to say that again in chapter 2: “Tear down the temple and I’ll raise it up in three days.” They didn’t know their Old Testament hope as well as we do. And that he recognized that the temple or tabernacle was a picture of the world, but it was also a picture of humanity. It was the picture of the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ and his people. That’s very important for us.

Because when we get around to Paul in his epistles, what does he tell us? He says that corporately we’re the temple of God. But he also uses that same thing individually of us. “Don’t you know that you’re the temple of God? Should not be wedded to a prostitute.” Okay, he uses the same imagery.

So if we understand this about Jesus here, then it’s going to inform us about who we are in Jesus. We’re tabernacles. We’re temples. You see? Okay. Paul tells us that.

Okay. So first half of the book, well, after the prologue stops, we move through three specific tabernacle pieces of furniture. We go first to the laver. Then we go to the table of showbread, and we don’t have—we could use the lampstand, the presence, I suppose, in this church. Then we go to the lampstand, the light, that was in the holy place. You know, there was a lampstand, a sevenfold lampstand that looked like an almond tree. Well, that’s what Jesus does in the gospel of John. He starts at the laver. He then goes to the table of showbread where wine is on it too. The libations were put there on that table of showbread in the holy place. And then he talks about the lampstand.

Then, after the first half of the book is over, chapter 13, with his disciples, he starts back at the laver. Then he goes to the table and he moves on.

Okay, let’s talk about a little more detail. It’s on your outlines here. First cycle—laver. John the Baptist comes cleansing people, like we talked about with Lydia’s baptism. John comes cleansing people. Secondly, in the wedding at Cana of Galilee, he turns purification water into wine. Purification again—the laver is what’s being talked about. The water of cleansing. Then he, in chapter 2, last half of chapter 2, he cleanses the temple. Remember, he throws guys out, but he’s cleansing the temple is what’s going on there.

Then with Nicodemus, he tells Nicodemus he’s got to be born again of water and the Spirit. Now this is right in the context of John’s baptism. In the last half of chapter 3, after Nicodemus and that stuff goes on, he’s going—he’s going to go baptizing in the same area as John. The implication is clear. When he talks to Nicodemus, he’s talking about waters of baptism and this cleansing action again, going on with the new birth. Then in the last half of chapter 3, as I said, he’s in the same area with John the Baptist, the baptizer, and baptisms and cleansings are going on.

In chapter 4, he meets a woman at a well, and he cleanses, as it were. He’s the living water that she drinks, and she’s no longer thirsty. Last half of chapter 4, he heals the nobleman’s son. And very specifically, it says he did this in Cana, where the water became wine, linking that resurrection of the nobleman’s son, near death, to the water turning into wine. Cleansing of death, washing away of the deadness of the old man is what’s being spoken of there.

And then finally, in the beginning of chapter 5, he finds a lame man at the pool of Bethesda and brings him forth and cleanses him—who couldn’t be cleansed by the Old Testament, as it were, the Old Testament waters of Bethesda. So our Lord Jesus Christ comes, and what he does with the nation of Israel is he washes it. John the Baptist washes it. Jesus, you know, cleanses the marriage ceremony. He cleanses the man, the invalid at the pool of Bethesda. He cleanses.