John 1:3-5

The Shepherd's Church

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Lord God, would you allow your word tonight to shine brightly? Lord, your text says that Christ is the light of the world and Christ has left us his word.

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And Lord, as we seek to understand you tonight, seek to wrestle with your word, would you let us understand it?

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Would you let us give all love and honor and glory to Christ? It's in your name we pray, amen.

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Amen. Last week we began our series in the Gospel of John by discussing the point of the book.

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If you remember, in John 20, 31, we see John's intended written point of the book.

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He says, but these things, meaning all of the gospel, has been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the

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Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you may have life in his name.

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John is saying that if you have the right knowledge about Jesus and it will lead you to right belief about Jesus, which will lead you to life in Jesus.

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John is calling us to have right beliefs about the person of Jesus Christ, and that's what the Gospel of John is all about.

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Of all the books in the New Testament, John is the most densely rich Christology, doctrine of Christ, in all of the

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New Testament. He's saying that if we understand who Jesus is in his humanity and in his divinity, then we will have life in his name.

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Now, if you'll remember, last week we talked about verses one through two, where we pulled back the veil of eternity and we saw who

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Christ was before the universe and the stars were created, before God said, let there be light.

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And in those wonderful texts, we saw three propositional statements that tied all of it together.

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In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was

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God. And in those three propositional statements, we learned three fundamental doctrines.

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Remember, if you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, you will have life in his name. These three doctrines we learned last week are necessary for you to believe and have life in Jesus's name.

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The three doctrines that we learned are the preexistence of Christ, the personhood of Christ, and the preeminence of Christ, or maybe you would say the divinity of Christ.

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As far as his preexistence, the text says, in the beginning, and what we learned last week, that that means before the beginning, that Jesus has always existed from all eternity.

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There's not a moment in eternity's past when Jesus did not exist. He is eternal, he has always existed.

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Therefore, he is preexistent. And that's necessary for us to believe because the error of many, from Arius all the way to Jehovah's Witnesses, are that Jesus is a created being.

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You cannot believe that and have life in his name. That's not what John says. He is preexistent, he is eternal.

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The second doctrine that we looked at is the personhood of Christ. Now, I'll say it this way.

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Jesus did not become a person when he was born in Bethlehem. When the Holy Spirit came into the womb of Mary, Jesus, at that moment, did not become a person.

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Jesus has always been a person. The text says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, meaning that for all eternity, he has been with God.

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Jesus is not a phantom force, and he's not a deified vegetable that is lacking personhood.

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Jesus has always been God. And because he's been with God, that signifies relationship. And relationship signals that he's a relational being.

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And only relational beings can have personality and personhood, therefore, Jesus is a person.

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He didn't become a person in his incarnation. He's always been a person. Does that make sense?

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That's the second doctrine that we looked at, that Jesus has always, for all eternity, had ongoing, beautiful fellowship with the

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Father and with the Spirit. And in that personhood, he's a personal

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God. The third doctrine is what we call the preeminence of Christ, or maybe you would call it the divinity of Christ.

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John doesn't just say that he was with the Father. He says that he was God. And it doesn't mean that he and God are both the same person.

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That's not the way that the Trinity works. Although our limited minds cannot possibly understand one

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God in three persons, that is what it is. Jesus and God don't have a sort of deified schizophrenia or multiple personality disorders.

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That's not who they are. One God in three distinct persons. So for all eternity, they've been co -equal with one another.

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Jesus has always been God, but he is distinct from God. So what we're saying in that is that this

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Jesus, who we believe existed from all eternity, is God. This Jesus who lie in a manger is God.

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This Jesus who died on a Roman cross is God. He's not the Father, he's not the

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Spirit, but he is God. That's what John is trying to teach us. Now, if we left our understanding in verse one and two, then we would have this beautiful doctrine of a creator, but no creation.

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We would have a God who has lived perfectly in his triune community, but he has no relationship with us.

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So I think that's why John continues to pull back the veil, and this week we're gonna pull back the veil on creation.

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What was Jesus doing when the world was created? What was Jesus' ongoing role once it was created, and what was

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Jesus' role once the creation fell? That's the three things that we're gonna look at today. And we're gonna also be learning three doctrines from this text, that Christ is the creator, that Christ is the sustainer, and that Christ is the recreator and redeemer.

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So if you will, turn with me to John one. We're gonna be in verses three through five as we explore these three doctrines together.

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It says, all things came into being through him. And apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

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In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

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Now, we're gonna talk about these three doctrines, but I can't help myself. We've gotta first talk about this thing that I'm gonna call verbal repetitions.

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John is doing something grammatically that we weren't able to talk about last week, but I think it's absolutely important.

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John one one and John one two are the first verses chronologically in the entire

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Bible. They talk about things that happened beforehand, but I want us to also see how John makes the transition to time and space.

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And he does this through verbal repetitions. In verse one, he repeats the same verb three times.

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He says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was

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God, three times. He's telling us in Jesus's divinity, this is a threefold testament to that.

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Now, in John three through four, he does this again. The structure is not accidental here.

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It is absolutely intentional. In verses three through four, namely verse three, he uses the other past tense verb for existence, aginata, and he repeats it three times.

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He says, all things came into being through him. Apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

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So twice now, John has attested to the work of Christ through a trinity of verbs, and that's important.

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In the Bible, when you announce something three times, you are bringing it to the superlative level. In the

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Old Testament, when the angels say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, they are asserting that God's holiness is beyond comprehension.

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John introduces Jesus with a double set of three verbal repetitions to say that his work as divine creator is firmly established.

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It's irrefutable. His work in eternity in verses one, irrefutable. His verse in creation, it is absolute.

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That's the first thing I want us to see by these repetitions. The first set announces his divine work in eternity.

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The second set announces his temporal work on the earth and in creation.

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Now, in Genesis one, we see that God did create the world and he finished creating the world in six literal days.

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So there's an exact time period that the Bible is describing there. And John uses this structure, not by accident, to show that Jesus is doing a specific and definite work in creation.

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John is intentionally, this is an aside, he's intentionally teaching us through literary structure and I think that his carefulness to detail means that we can trust him.

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He is intentionally structuring his book in a way that it's undeniable, which means that he's being careful and he's looking at the details and I think that we can trust him through that.

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His precision on every single word of this narrative is there for a reason. But I also think that he's doing this for triune considerations because when he's describing the work of Christ, he wants to showcase that Jesus is not on a rebel

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Lone Ranger mission, that he is working within the unity and within the favor of the

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Trinity. When Christ works, it's a Trinitarian work. Christ does not leave heaven because he's tired of hanging out with God and go to a blue rock floating around in the space and create a few friends to hang out with.

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That's not what Christ is doing. He is sent forth by the Father. He is sent in unity with the Spirit. So in the beginning was

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God and the word was God or with God and the word was God. It's a triune work.

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Everything that happened before creation was a triune work and John is highlighting Jesus as part of that. Everything in creation is a triune work and John is highlighting

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Jesus's role in that. In Genesis, we see God the Father speaking in creation, coming to existence.

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In John, we see that Jesus is the author of creation. And this is not a contradiction because it's a triune work.

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That's what's so important that we understand. It was Christ working in triune unity with the

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Father, Son and Spirit that created all things. That's what John is emphasizing here. Now that leads us to our first point of doctrine.

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Christ is creator. It says, all things came into being through him.

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And apart from him, nothing came into being. That has come into being. That's saying that Jesus is the creator.

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That's saying that Jesus is the one who created the universe. From the most distant galaxy that you could see in a

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NASA telescope to the closest particle, I think that we can, the smallest particle we've identified as a quark that you can look at in Harvard Laboratory, in both of those,

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Jesus is sovereign and Lord over all. From the largest, most distant items to the smallest, most delicate features of life,

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Jesus is sovereign over all of it. Now, John is not the only writer in the New Testament who talks about Jesus being creator.

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Paul says it in Colossians 1 .16. He says, for by him, all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created, not only through him, but for him.

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It's an astounding statement. Abraham Kuyper says something very similar. He's a Dutch Reformed theologian.

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He lived in Europe. He said, there is not one square inch in all of creation over which

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Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not point his finger and say, mine.

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There's not a square inch. Now, we could go through lots of examples.

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I had fun writing some of these down, but this means Jesus created the angels that praised him, who sing in endless praise of God.

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This means that Jesus created the celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, and the stars that give life to our planet.

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This means that Jesus also created the fine -tuning in our universe, because our earth is actually, if it were one degree closer to the sun, we would all burn up.

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If it were one degree further away, we would all freeze. If the moon was further away or closer, our tidal systems would be all messed up.

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Jesus, in his creation, not only created the world, he created it with fine -tuning and specificity so that it only can support life by the way he created it.

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He's a personal creator. When we think about the rain that gathers together in molecules and water droplets and cumulus clouds, those are not just so that the earth, the barren earth will get wet, but so that it will support human life, because he's personal and he loves his people.

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He created the atmosphere that protects us from damaging UV rays and holds the heat within the earth.

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He created photosynthesis so that oxygen and light could be, or carbon dioxide and light could be combined for oxygen so that we could have an oxygenated planet where we can live.

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Jesus created colors and hues of light so that you wouldn't have to look at a boring gray world, but he's a infinitely creative creator.

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He created colors that I can't even pronounce. Go to Home Depot and you look at the cards and you're like,

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I think that's pink. No, no. Think about the amount of colors that Jesus created.

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He created our palate so that we could taste things, so that we could taste beautiful, delicate dishes.

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I went to a restaurant in South Carolina one time where I had a cinnamon -encrusted ribeye steak and it was flambeaued,

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I just wanted to say that, and it was awesome. You could cut it with a spoon. He created our palate to be able to enjoy all of the different tastes that he created.

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Think about it, he created all of the fish. There's fish down in the bottom of the ocean that can't even see, but they have radar technology on their antenna so that they can move about in pitch black darkness.

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He created the whales that come up to the surface and gas for air and everything in between. He created birds and all of their uniqueness.

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Everything that he created is meant for us to praise him because he's a beautiful and wonderful designer.

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His purpose in doing all of this is so that all of us would be in awe of him. That is why he created the things that he did.

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And Jesus, John says that it was Jesus who was that author who created these things.

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Nothing that was made was made by accident, John is saying. And this is where I want to say that we have a personal creation from an infinitely wise and intelligent creator, not a creation of blind, dumb, mute, and deaf forces.

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You see evolution, Darwinian evolution, Big Bang theory, and even theistic evolution is a distortion of the biblical gospel and the biblical data.

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John will not allow for it. He says, these things have been written so that you will believe. He includes the doctrine of creation in his list so that if you look at him and you say, no,

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Jesus, the personal creator did not create it. Blind forces created this world because I'm an acquiesce to science instead of God.

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I'm not saying that you're not a Christian, but I am saying he says you need to believe these things about Jesus or you will not have life in his name.

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According to John, we cannot believe that there was an accidental explosion of non -created matter from nothingness into somethingness.

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And I believe that's why John includes that in his gospel. It's not a secondary issue for John.

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I don't think that he tells us that we can look at the Bible as a spiritual book and say,

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God, thank you so much for saving my soul, but I don't have enough faith that you can create matter and energy, so I'm gonna go with science on this one.

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John is clear. Creation was made by an infinitely wise creator, God, and his name is

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Jesus Christ. If you stop and think about the doctrine of evolution or theistic evolution, which just means that you're not a

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Christian, you're a Christian who wants to accommodate science and believe that God used evolution as a mechanism for creating the world,

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I believe that that doctrine dishonors God because he says his son is the one who personally created all things.

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He didn't create all things through blind forces or through accidental chance. I don't believe that we have the right because science tells us that we're wrong to snuggle up to the world's ideologies and think that we have to go with them or else we look foolish.

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We are foolish. It says we were created to be foolish. It says that he made us foolish so that the wise would be confounded.

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Think about it this way. Believing that the world just so happened to pop into existence is kind of like believing that an airplane could crash in the middle of a field and in the midst of all of the flying debris and metal and atoms that an iPad can just so happen to come together in perfect working order.

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Someone might look at you and say, don't let it fool you. It may look like it's designed.

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It may look like it came from the factory in Palo Alto, California. It may look like it has purpose, but it doesn't.

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It's just the exploding of atoms that just so happened to bounce in the perfect right order and now you have a functioning iPad.

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If I were to tell you that, you would think I was crazy. If I were to tell you that, you would want to put me in a padded room.

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But yeah, this doctrine has creeped into the church. Many pastors and congregants now are thinking that the world is billions of years old because science says it is.

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Or that God used a Big Bang. It says that God created everything through Christ.

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It doesn't say that he created it through a Big Bang. I'm not a scientist, but I think the text is clear on this.

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Now, the question we have to ask ourself is did God lie to us? Did God tell us that he created everything personally, decently, in good order?

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Did he say that it was a personal creation and he was just lying because one day we would really figure out that it wasn't?

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There's consequences to our belief. If you believe that Jesus created the world, the world will look at you like you're foolish.

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The world will look at you like you're a simpleton. If you're in the field of science, you'll probably be fired from your post.

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You'll be denied grants. You'll be denied research opportunities. In a sense, believing in an intelligent creator puts you on the same footing as flat earth theory to the modern secular world.

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There's nothing different to them on how you look. But the irony for me is that believing nothing can explode into something is somehow more logical than a loving creator who's infinitely powerful, who had a plan and a purpose creating the world.

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Somehow, random nothingness exploding into somethingness makes more sense, sarcasm included.

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If that's not a bad enough problem, the problem of material is a bigger one. If I were to tell you to go take a plane and crash it and form an iPad, that's at least theoretically possible.

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It's mathematically almost impossible. It's philosophically impossible, but theoretically it's possible because there's real metal, real plastic, real wires, all these things that could just so happen to form into an iPad.

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But where'd you get the material from? What if I were to tell you, no, I want you to go and I want you to start with nothing?

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I want you to have a plane crash, but I want the plane to spontaneously invent itself.

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And then when it does, I want it to explode and then I want this whole reaction to happen. That's kind of what they're saying.

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They're saying that with no material, with no intelligence, with no guidance, with no recipe, with no formula, with no plan, nothing turned into something instead of simply believing that a good

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God made it all. I think what baffles me, this is one of the things that brought me to a stronger faith in God is just looking at the complexity in the universe.

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That's something that's fascinated me. Think about a simple atom. An atom has protons, neurons, and electrons.

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An atom is made up of subatomic parts, and those subatomic parts are now made up of quantum parts, however you want to describe it.

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It's a beautiful machine, one atom. Think about the logical absurdity that a single atom could explode into being out of nothing.

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Out of nothing. And now think about how unlikely it would be for two. Think about how unlikely it would be for three.

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Think about all the variety. When those atoms combine, there's 109 elements that make up all matter of life.

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It's the periodic table. Think about the 109 different combination of atoms that make that up.

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And then when you think about that, think about that scientist, the same scientist who believed that everything was created out of nothing, theorized that today there's 10 to the 82nd atoms in the universe.

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Most people believe that number's too small. What we're talking about here is 109 different variations of elements, and 10 to the 82nd number of atoms, which means you write the number 10 on a piece of paper, and then follow that by 82 zeros, and that is how many atoms are in the universe.

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So not only does one perfectly working, machine -like functioning atom have to pop into existence, 10 to the 82nd, which is incomprehensible.

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And not only do they have to pop into existence out of nothing, they have to organize themself, and they have to function as a system.

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We are not just a collection of atoms, we are a collection of things that work together, that make compounds, and then systems, and then organs, and then structures.

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This is absurd. It's like, on a very small scale, going to Market Basket, and buying all the ingredients for a cake, and then your car getting into a car accident, and you flipping, and flipping, and flipping, and then as the ingredients are flying throughout your car, the most beautiful, perfect cake is created.

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But even more than that, because you don't have material, at least in the car wreck, you do. It would be like me buying a 100 trillion piece puzzle, which, by the way, is only 10 to the 15th.

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A 100 trillion piece puzzle, putting it in a can, and blowing it into the stratosphere, and me sincerely believing that when it falls, it's all gonna perfectly fall in place.

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I can't even put together a 1 ,000 piece puzzle nicely without getting an attitude. 100 trillion, and because it's only 10 to the 15th, you would have to believe that it happened five or six times in a row, in perfect order, and that's the likelihood that the universe just popped into being with material.

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You still can't account for the fact that where the material come from. It's madness to believe that.

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But as we will learn today, darkness is what keeps people from believing in God.

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We'll talk about that in a little bit. Let's get back to John. John gives us a better option than that.

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He says, all things came into being through him, and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

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What this is saying is Christians have always had the answer to the origins question. An eternal

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God who always existed, infinitely intelligent and personal in his character, created everything that exists.

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Carefully, meticulously, beautifully, he designed it. The world screams of design.

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You look at one cell. There's a book by a famous Christian apologist called

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The Signature in the Cell. Every cell, he said, bears his name. It's true.

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Jesus said, even the rocks will cry out if you want, because creation knows who this

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God is, even when we are too rock -headed to understand it ourselves. But even more incredible than that,

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John doesn't just talk about a God who is powerful but is aloof. He doesn't talk about a

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God who is busy, too busy for us, like Deist, who says that God wound the world up and then he left it to its own devices.

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John talks about a personal creator, a creator who we read in Genesis who knelt down on the ground and fashioned the man out of his bare hands, a creator who breathed his own breath into the man.

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How much more intimate can you get? What John is talking about is the eternal

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Christ who personally and perfectly created all things, from the most distant star to the tiniest little life in a mother's womb, all of it bears his name.

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That's the first doctrine, Jesus is creator. And I think it's indisputable when you look at the evidence.

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The second doctrine that we're gonna look at is that he is sustainer. John says, in him was life and the life was the light of men.

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So John here switches verb tense. He talked about the creation and now he's talking about what happened after that in day seven and beyond.

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Now, I don't wanna do too much of this, but you love me so you have to indulge me in my nerdiness.

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Greek has three ways of doing past tense verbs. John uses all three in these verses, so I think it's important.

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It's rare that you have all three types of past tense verbs in one sentence. So I wanna highlight this for you.

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You don't have to remember the titles, but there's the aorist, the imperfect, doesn't mean that it's bad, and the perfect, doesn't mean that it's good.

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Aorist, imperfect, imperfect. The aorist is a verbal tense that talks about the past, but it talks about completed action.

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It talks about something that started and finished, simple. It's the simplest of all those cases.

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And when John is talking about everything that came into being, and nothing came into being apart from him, he's talking in the aorist.

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He's saying that this Jesus created, he started creating, and he finished creating, and that was it.

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It was a single process, and it was finished, and then it was no more. That's what the aorist tense means, and John uses that in verse three.

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The second type of Greek verb that describes the past is called the perfect. Again, doesn't mean that it's great.

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It's just a verbal tense. And John uses this also in verse three, when he says everything that has come into being.

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You see, the perfect doesn't talk about completed action. The perfect talks about an action that started at a point, and then continues on into the future.

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The most famous instance of this is to telestai, it is finished. Jesus said on the cross, it is finished, meaning that I am forgiving you right now, but it iterates, and it goes on, and that forgiveness echoes throughout the halls of the church.

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It starts here, but it's gonna continue on. Forgiveness is not limited. It's perfect.

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That's the most famous example. And here, what we're talking about is, John is saying, and he uses a very specific verb to describe this,

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God doesn't just create the first creation, and that's it. He's also ruling over creation.

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So when Adam and Eve have their first child, or when a plant drops its first seed, it's not like the first class of created beings and created plants are the only ones that he's ruling over.

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It's saying that he starts the work of creation, and he rules over it once it continues on.

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That's why he uses the perfect verb in the end of verse three. This is even more clear in verse four, when he uses the final type of verb, the imperfect verb.

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The imperfect verb doesn't describe completed action. It doesn't describe something that starts and continues.

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It describes something that's continuous action, something that continues on. Verse one says, in the beginning was the word.

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He continually existed with God for all eternity in this subset of time that we're calling in the beginning.

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So he uses the imperfect verb. In verse four, he says, in him was life, past tense, and that life was the light of men, meaning at some point in the past,

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Jesus was giving his life to creation. He was sustaining it, and his life was light for all mankind.

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That is what John is saying. He switches from the heiress to the imperfect, which is kind of like saying that he switches from the workbench where he created everything to the throne where he's gonna rule everything.

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That's what John is saying. Day seven, Jesus doesn't take a lazy day. Day seven,

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Jesus doesn't put on his pajamas and kick his feet up, and he doesn't take a vacay. On day seven,

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Jesus comes off the workbench, and he begins to sit on the throne so that he can have an ongoing rule of his newly created creation.

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Another way to read verse four, understanding this imperfect tense might be to say it like this. In him was the ongoing sustaining life for his creation, and this ongoing life was sustaining the life of men.

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So Jesus was actively involved in keeping his creation alive and with light.

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Let's break this apart piece by piece so that we can understand what he's saying. First, it says in him was life.

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After Jesus finished all of his work of creating new material, he sat down to rule in a continuous and ongoing fashion.

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Not like kings of old who rule with iron fist or who rule out of selfishness or rule for their own personal agenda.

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His rule means life. His rule brings life to creation. His rule brings ongoing life to creation.

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It's kind of like a lamp. You don't just create a lamp without a cord. You create a lamp with a cord because you wanna illuminate it.

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Christ didn't just create a shell of creation. He created creation and he sustained it through his life and his light so that it would not die.

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His rule doesn't bring war, pestilence, and disease. His war brings life, hope, and the tenderness, affection of his rule.

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And this has, secondly, incredible implications for us today because if Jesus is the one who sustained the original creation, then that meant if for a single moment he decided to stop sustaining that creation, it would have ceased to exist.

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If he stopped giving life, the whole thing would have fell apart. The sun would have instantly blown out.

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The planets would have fallen out of orbit. The oceans would have been lifeless coffins for the millions and billions of animals that just perished instantly.

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The birds would have fallen like kamikaze bombers out of the sky and every system in our bodies would have shut down all because for a moment he stopped sustaining it.

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That is why I say that there's a necessity of Christ for creation, meaning

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Christ doesn't need creation, but creation desperately needs Christ. If for a moment

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Christ is not sustaining creation, it all falls apart. Every molecule he designed, he was keeping alive.

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There was no such thing as death. There were no brown withered flowers. I can't keep a flower alive. Imagine what it would have been like in Eden.

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You plant it, it's good. I can't even keep weeds alive. That's the curse.

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Now, there's no brown withered plants. There's no infant mortality. All of it's being held together by Christ.

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Sounds amazing. What happened? Then enters man.

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One of the things that Jesus did in his original creation is he gave human beings authority to rule.

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He put the sun, the moon, and the stars to rule over the sky and he put the man in the garden to rule over the garden.

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Jesus created an entire cosmos and he made the garden. There's many scholars who believe this, that the garden is a little microcosm of the universe, the way that it's designed, the way that things are in there.

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And the temple later points this out. We don't have time to go there. Gosh, I wish we did. But Christ creates a cosmos.

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He gives his people a garden. He does it with life and light and he tells them to imitate him by bringing life and light to the garden.

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They were told to work the ground so that plants would grow out of it. They were told to make favorable conditions so that animals could reproduce and multiply.

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They were told to reproduce themselves so that they could have life. The original goal of the original creation was that human beings would multiply life in that little garden.

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So they had to extend it into a small community of people and they would have to extend that into a city and they would have to extend that into a society and then they would have to extend that into a nation and then finally the whole world would be filled with worshipers who loved

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God, who loved life and who were committed to sustaining life and not breaking it and tearing it down.

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In him was life and light. So our role as people is to imitate him and bringing life and light to the world.

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That was the original goal. What happened?

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In our ability to rule, we also had the ability to rebel. He gave us everything, a paradise to live in and every kind of fruit imaginable, especially without pollution and GMOs.

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Imagine how beautiful a tomato would have tasted when it's not so plastic when they spray the CO2 on it.

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All of that would have been perfect. He gave them intimacy in their relationships, no walls, no boundaries, no hurt, no brokenness, no betrayal, no rejection.

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I think about it this way. Adam and Eve went to sleep by the grace of God and they awoke by the grace of God and every moment of their life they were being sustained by Christ.

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So what could have went wrong? And then enters the serpent. And he tells them something that they actually wanted more than Christ.

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You see, what he tells them is that they can have everything that Jesus is offering him, but without him.

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They could have all of his stuff, but not the person. They were convinced that they could find those things by biting a single bite of a poisoned fruit and not having a relationship with Christ.

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And this is the goal of Satan in every single temptation that you will ever face. He wants to get your eyes off of the creator and onto the creation.

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He wants you to believe that the creation can give you what only the creator can give you. And that leads to death and darkness, not life and light.

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And unfortunately, Eve and Adam acquiesced to the serpent and they brought stain upon his beautiful and perfect creation.

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It would be like a madman throwing a can of black paint on the Mona Lisa. It's priceless and now it's gone.

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In our sin, we stained God's perfect creation. We defiled his masterpiece and Jesus gave us the power to do that.

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He gave us the ability to be able to choose in the garden to follow the serpent and to rebel against him and we broke the world.

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And we caused death to enter into existence. But not just death, darkness.

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Jesus said that he was not only life, but he was also light so that when we rebelled, we brought darkness into the world.

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And this is a very specific kind of darkness. The Greek word there is skatia. Don't name your kids

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Scotty, it means dark. It's a fair point.

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This is not just darkness because remember, God created night and night was good.

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Every evening in Eden, the sun went down and it was good. And I've been in the

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Middle East where there's no lamps and there's no lights. It is dark at night when you don't have flashlights and streetlights and everything else.

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You can really see the stars in that. So it was dark. That's not what John is talking about.

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He's talking about moral darkness, a deeper kind of darkness. He's talking about the worst kind of darkness that was unleashed upon this earth, the kind of darkness that leaves mankind fumbling about in their darkened, moral, spiritual, poisoned state and renders them incapable of seeking after God.

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It's the kind of death and darkness that entered the world that rendered us incapable of knowing

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God. While physical death did enter into the world, that was grace because if they lived in eternity in their darkened state, that would have been hell.

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Death was grace, but a deeper death happens, spiritual death, spiritual darkness. And that's the real curse that was on the creation.

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That doesn't mean that man doesn't attempt to find God because they do. The whole story of the Old Testament is man trying to find

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God with religion and with systems and trying to worship the creator and manipulate creation in order to get

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God to love them. The point of the curse is not that we've lost our tendencies towards religiosity.

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The point of the curse is we've lost our ability to find the one true God. That was sin.

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That was unleashed upon the world and rendered us incapable. We rejected his life, we rejected his light, and by doing that, we accepted death and darkness.

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Now, you may think to yourself, and I've heard many Christians say, this isn't fair. I wasn't there.

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I didn't bite the fruit. It's not an apple, by the way. That's just a Latin perversion.

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But I wasn't there, I didn't do that. Well, think about what sin has done to you in your nature.

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We shrug at sin. We wink at sin. We like to downplay it, like we excuse ourself when we tell little white lies.

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What is that? What is a white lie? It's a lie. We excuse ourself when we have angry outbursts.

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You don't know how I'm feeling. You don't know what I've been going through. We excuse ourself during moments of moral failings.

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Well, if you would have just done this for me or if you would have just done that for me. We call sin mistakes. Politicians who cheat on their wives all the time stand up and say,

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I've made a terrible mistake. No, sir, falling on a street corner is a terrible mistake.

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Falling off a house, as I well know, is a terrible mistake.

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Cheating on your wife is a sign of your wretchedness. I think we do this because we've lost the theology of what sin actually is.

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One sin brought the entire world down. So what's the state of our soul?

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We who sin constantly. One sin caused a cell in our bodies to begin misfiring so that wrinkles began, cancers began, diseases began, mental illnesses began, anger began, murder began in Genesis four.

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One sin caused the entire framework of our humanity to be poisoned. It caused animals to turn on one another in fear and in frustration so that the animals attack one another.

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It caused the safe and peaceful waters of the sea to turn into tidal waves and typhoons and hurricanes and water spouts.

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One sin caused the earth to cry volcanic tears. One sin caused a crack in the seismic shift of the plate so that earthquakes and volcanoes and everything else came.

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One sin caused Cain to raise the rock and crush his brother's head. One sin caused all lying and malice and cheating and erosion of family.

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It caused us to have gender confusion and sexuality confusion. It caused us everything. Every disease and every malady of man was caused by the unleashing of one sin.

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And we are not passive victims in this. We are willful participants, men and women, us who love our sin so much.

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This is why John says in him was life and that light was the light of men. Because we look around, and let's be honest, there's plenty of daylight, but we live in a dark world.

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We live in a world where awful things happen, where infants die and where all kinds of political evils are done all throughout the world.

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We look at what's done in North Korea. We look at what's done in Somalia. We look at what's done in America. We live in a dark world, and one sin brought all of that destruction.

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We think that we're passive victims of this. John says later in his book in chapter three, verse 19, this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and men, humans, both male and female, have loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds are evil.

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In his original design, there's life. There's light, relationship with God, but all we have gone astray.

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Darkness and death to pervade in this planet. All of us, every day, if you think about what sin actually is, it's nothing short of spiritual suicide, and we do it every day.

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In a community, it's nothing short of a terrorist, bomber, and we do it every day.

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If I were to pick up a knife right now, I would hope one of the men here would wrestle me to the ground and protect anyone in my path if I were to do that, but yet, in community, we look at other people and we laugh at their sin, and we turn our eye to their sin.

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We don't protect them. We don't challenge them because we don't want to be offensive. We pick up the knife of pornography and we hack our lives to death.

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We pick up the sword of gossip and we cut others down. We pick up the rusty blade of bitterness and we allow the gangrene to rot away in our soul.

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It's bleak. I'm straining to use the words to describe it, and yet, even right now, the sinful part of our heart is saying, mine's not that bad.

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You don't know my situation because we're deceived.

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Our minds are darkened. Our hearts are darkened. We laugh at sin because we don't really know what it is.

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I think the greatest curse, not just the death, not just the darkness, not just the sin, is that we can believe that we're okay.

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I think that's the greatest sin is that we can convince ourselves that, you know, next season,

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I'll be better. This is what's happened to the world, and for that crime,

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God does not have to save us. He would be just if we were convicted for our sins.

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But in the time that we have remaining, I wanna talk about how God both executed His perfect justice and how

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He also offered grace to those who need it. So let's look at verse five.

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This is beautiful. It says, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

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The light shines in the darkness. In English, that's hard to pick up, but in Greek, that's the only time in this entire narrative that He's used the present tense verb.

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Grammar is really important. That's a nerd saying that, but grammar's really important because everything that John has been describing so far is past tense.

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were created through Him.

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Everything that came into being in the past, now John is saying that even though we are the ones that unleashed darkness into this world, that present tense, as John is writing, he's saying, in my time, in my lifetime, night has dawned, night has come.

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That is what we're actually celebrating here at Christmas. Without verse five, there is no hope.

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Without verse five, with one, two, three, and four, and that's all that there was, we would only have that we have sinned, that we have fallen short of the glory of God, and we are destined for hell, that's it.

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But with verse five, light shining in the darkness, we can have hope.

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A beautiful theological point. John is comparing and contrasting

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Genesis 1 and John 1. What's the first thing that God did in His first creation?

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Let there be what? It's the first thing that Christ does.

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When He comes to recreate the world, He shines. Light has come, because He's bringing about a new creation.

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And this was not a surprise. Actually, the prophets talk about this. Last week, we read a verse,

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I'm gonna read it to you again, from Isaiah 9, verse two. It says, the people who walk in darkness will see a great light.

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Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. What John is saying is that when

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Jesus was born, light came back to the world. Light dawned upon humanity for the first time in thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

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However you date Genesis 1, go back to that, and that's how long it had been since Jesus' light has shined on the planet.

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Isaiah 42, 16, that Derek read to us earlier, I will lead, this is Jesus speaking through His prophet.

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This is Jesus speaking to His people. I will lead the blind by a way that they do not know.

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500 years before He came to earth, I will lead my people in paths that they do not know.

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I will guide them, and I will make darkness into light. Before them and rugged places into plains, these are the things that I will do and will not leave them undone.

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Basically, Jesus is saying, it can be not any way other than this.

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I will make darkness light. I will dawn upon the world. I will come, and that, brothers and sisters, is the miracle of Christmas, and that is what

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I want us to end with, and that is why we wanted to start with John. Even though we're gonna be in 15 years, at least one

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Christmas we're gonna be in John 1. What John is saying is that the artist didn't throw away the canvas.

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He entered into his own painting. The author didn't throw away the manuscript. He wrote himself into the tragedy.

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Out of darkness, light has come. This is one of the rally cries of the Reformation when they said, I'm gonna mess this up, post tenebros lux, meaning out of darkness comes light, because we understand that without Christ, we're living in a land of darkness, but with him, light has come.

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Without him, we're in a boat in the middle of a sea with no light, but Jesus turns on the lighthouse, and he leads us to safely back to God.

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This is what this is saying. At Christmas, we celebrate the fact that light has come to the world.

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The king of kings and the Lord of lords did not recline in heaven. He did not wash his hands of his creation.

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He came helplessly to lie in a manger. He left the throne of heaven to be turned away from a shabby inn.

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He left all of the riches and splendor due to him to be wrapped in shabby clothes and to lie in dirty hay.

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This Jesus and the angels constantly called holy, left heaven so that he could be marked among one of the lowly.

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In Christmas, we declare that light has come, that Emmanuel has come,

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God with us. He came to rescue us. He came to bring light back to a dark world. He came to bring life back to a dead planet.

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In Christmas, we don't just celebrate that he came and visited. We celebrate that he came to die.

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Christmas is not about sweet little baby Jesus. Christmas is about the baby who was born to hang on a cross.

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And because of that cross, we can have forgiveness of our sins and we can be found righteous before God because of what he did.

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He took on our darkness and let it consume him so that he could win light for us.

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He took on the death that we deserve so that he could give us life. In him is life and light.

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And because of him, now anyone who is in Christ can have that life and light. You don't have to live in darkness and death.

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That is what Jesus Christ has done. And at Christmas, we don't just celebrate just his birth.

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We celebrate the magnitude of who he is as a person. Jesus said in John 10, 28, we're in with this.

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I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

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Think about it. Adam lost the light because of sin. Adam lost the life because of sin.

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You and I, the only reason that we are different is because Jesus has decided that he will be the light for us, that we can't lose it.

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The only reason we are different than Adam and every other Old Testament figure is because Jesus has decided that we cannot lose the life.

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He is gonna give us the life and that no one will snatch us out of his hand. Not anyone, it cannot be revoked.

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In Jesus, the light has dawned and it is for us, the people of God, amen?

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Father God, we thank you for the fact that you sent your one and only son,

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Jesus. Lord, we thank you for the fact that we were incapable of saving ourselves.

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We were the people Isaiah was talking about. We are the ones who lived in a land filled with deep darkness. We are the ones who were fumbling about and could not respond to God.

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We were blind and we could not reach up and grab him. And yet, you brought the light of the world.

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You brought the one who put light back in our eyes so that we could see and behold

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Christ. You put life back in our dead souls so that we could yearn for the things of God.

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Lord, I love how you say it in Matthew. You say that we are the light of the world.

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How is that possible? Only through the fact that you came and shared your light with us.

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And your plan is to illuminate each and every one of us as we go out into a dark world to be light, to go out into a dark world to be witnesses to Christ.

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Lord, would you please embolden us? Lord, the verse says that the darkness cannot overcome the light.

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Lord, would you let us live in confidence? Lord, would you let us live in boldness? Lord, would you let us not live in fear of the darkness?

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But Lord, would you let us live in the boldness and the assurance and the warmth and the revelation and the illumination of your life and light?