Tag Archives: Gospel of John

A Prayer Prompted by John 1

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Heavenly Father,

We thank you for sending Jesus Christ your Son, the eternal and living Word of God, to reveal you to us.  We also gladly trust in him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  As those who believe, we thank you for giving us the right to become children of God.

We thank you for the new birth that comes to us by faith in Christ. We thank you for this new eternal life.  We also see our need to be true disciples of Jesus and to be disciple-makers ourselves.  Help us to be part of the movement to multiply committed followers of Christ, the Messiah.

We receive the life that you offer and we pray that you would allow us to see many others come to faith in you.

And we pray all of this through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen

And the Word became flesh – John 1:14

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The late Grant Osborne, commenting on this verse, said, 

In my opinion, this is the single greatest sentence ever written in the history of the human language, the deepest theological statement ever written.*

Here it is in its entirety,

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.

We live very far removed from stable in Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.  From our standpoint, we look back on millennia of church history, some of which is exceedingly troubling to look back on, assuming we ever take the time.  But if we go back far enough, we see the truth of the incarnation, the moment when God the Son took upon himself the nature of humanity.  This makes all the difference.

He became one of us.  One result of that universe-changing event is that we never have the need, nor even the option, to hesitatingly raise our eyes to heaven, turn our thoughts toward God, and imagine that he does not know what it is like to live the life that we live.

His was only one life, but it was full enough of relatable experience.  He was born under the specter of illegitimacy in a cultural setting where that mattered a great deal.  It would seem by the time he entered public life that his adopted father Joseph was deceased.  This means he bore substantial responsibility for the family’s provision while he was still young.  Though he attracted a following in his ministry, those closest to him and those who mattered in religious circles tended to misunderstand or oppose him.  Eventually he was betrayed by a friend, arrested, tried and sentenced to death unjustly.

There were those, however, like the Apostle John, who realized when they were in his presence that they were in the presence of deity.  He was human, but so much more than human – so much more than anyone or anything that anyone had ever seen.  His was a glory unique to himself.  

This didn’t have to happen.  Christ didn’t have to be born, or die, or take our sins upon himself at Calvary, or rise from the dead.  This was God coming down to meet us on our own level and living a life full of tedious, miserable human experience.  This life was made glorious simply because he lived it, and nothing he ever did could remain poor or miserable or insignificant.  

And he did it for our sake. 

No deeper theology need ever be written and no deeper encouragement need ever be offered than what we find here in John 1:14.  Let us never tire of it.  We have everything to gain from this reality and everything to lose if we fail to appreciate its wonder.

* Osborne, Grant R.. John Verse by Verse (Osborne New Testament Commentaries) (Kindle Locations 703-704). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.

A chance to repent – Luke 13:1-5

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When extreme tragedy strikes, there is an almost universal tendency to see that the person somehow had it coming to them.  Call it karma, call it something else, the tendency has always been there.  The Bible has a version of this, memorably expressed by Paul in Galatians 6:7-8.

7 Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. 8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

At the same time, the Bible sees this principle as limited, at least in this life.  The story of Job is an excellent example.  A perfectly righteous man endures terrible hardship, while his friends try to make sense of it as best they can.  Perhaps inevitably, they resort to blaming Job for his own troubles.  They were wrong, but they add much insult to Job’s injury before they are forced to see it.  God sets all things right at the very end, but it took Job a long time and a lot of undeserved suffering to get there.

Jesus encountered this kind of thinking one day and answered it perfectly as always.  Let’s read it from Luke 13.

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. 4 Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The Galileans killed by Pilate and the victims of the fallen tower were no worse people than anyone else.  The twist in Christ’s version is not that they were especially innocent in God’s eyes, but that everyone else is comparably guilty.  This is the biblical view of sin.  It is the bad news that makes the good news of the gospel good.

We are all in need of repentance.  That is one of the earliest lessons that the Bible aims to teach us.  At some level, we are guilty before a perfectly holy God.  Sure, there may be mitigating factors to the particular level of our guilt.  A certain temptation was especially difficult.  Under the circumstances there were no good choices.  We have a natural tendency to do this or that.  Someone or something drove us to a point where we reacted, which was wrong.  But, in the end, we are wrong too.  We have sinned because we are fundamentally flawed members of a flawed race who eventually lived up – or maybe down – to our potential.  We sinned and fell short of perfect holiness, which is the standard of the one and only thoroughly holy God.

The solution is repentance.  We are not to hold onto our sin and cherish it.  We are to turn from it and turn our hearts toward our divinely provided Savior.  This is the point made by Jesus when he says, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

John 3:16 steers us directly to this principle.  We have a chance to repent right now.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Don’t demand a sign – Mark 8:11-13

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As was often the case, Jesus found himself in another argument with some Pharisees.

11 The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. 12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” 13 And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side.

The interesting thing is that Jesus did in fact give a number of signs pointing to his being the Messiah.  The Gospel of John is perhaps the clearest on this point.

The first was his changing the water into wine, after which John 2:11 says, “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.”

After healing an official’s son, John 4:54 informs us, “This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.”  Later we read, “Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him,” in John 12:37.

And of course, near the end of his Gospel (John 20:30-31) John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

The best way to understand Christ’s point in refusing the Pharisees the sign that they seek may simply be that he’ll be the one to decide what sign(s) he is willing to perform.  Their job and ours is merely to accept the signs that he gives. His ultimate sign was his resurrection, but of course they didn’t accept that one either.  We must do so if we are truly to be his followers.

When we deal with God, we need to maintain a healthy attitude of submission.  Making demands on him reverses the relationship.  He may do what we ask if he so chooses, but he is not obligated.  On the other hand we need to always be at his service.  If he makes a demand on us, it is only right.  The only right response is to do what he says.  This becomes easier the more we accept the fact that he knows and wants what is best for us and teaches us through this process.