Incarnation in John

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will take out your Bibles and turn with me to John chapter 1.
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Over the last two weeks we have been studying the birth narratives of Christ from the Gospels and just to remind you some things that we have learned already, in case either you weren't here or maybe you have forgotten, we have looked at Matthew and Luke because only Matthew and Luke provide to us a birth narrative for Jesus, but I said this was going to be a three-part lesson because really we're dealing with more than just the birth of Christ, but we are dealing with a theological principle called the Incarnation.
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The Incarnation.
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And so even though the Gospel of John does not provide for us a narrative of Jesus's birth, what the Gospel of John does provide for us is it provides for us one of the clearest, in in all of Scripture.
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Now when we say Incarnation, we are referring to the word the word Incarnation is it comes from Latin, it means to be made flesh, to be made flesh.
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And so we'll go ahead and put that up here just so we can be reminded if you think of carne as flesh, Incarnation means to be made flesh.
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And that is based on the 14th verse of John's Gospel, first chapter 1 verse 14, but we're gonna we're gonna read beginning at verse 1, but I want to mention that the term made flesh or became flesh is actually from the Scripture.
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The term became flesh is there in the text, so this is not this is not an extra biblical doctrine imposed on the Bible, but this is a doctrine drawn directly out of Scripture.
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The Incarnation is is certainly not something that we have invented.
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A lot of people accuse Christianity of stealing its foundational principles from other religions.
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I talked about this on my podcast today, I talked about how some people accuse Christ's story of being mixed with the story of Horus, or the story of Attis, or the story of the Egyptian god Ra, or any, you know, the Sun God.
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A lot of people accuse Christ's story of being blended in with those.
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Mithras is another one, and you'll hear people say, well, Mithras was born of a virgin, and you know, this one had twelve disciples, and this one was died and resurrected.
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None of those things are true, and again, if you want to go back and listen to the podcast, I explain a little bit more about that, but the point is the foundational truths that we believe about Jesus are right here in the text of the Bible, and the Bible is not stealing from other sources.
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The Bible is primary source document.
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John saw this.
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John is writing about the man he walked with for three years, and so this is primary source document.
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This is the writer having seen Jesus, having walked with Jesus, and he had disciples that would come later that would testify to him having written this, so it's not as if some someone else wrote it and just put John's name on it, but there are men who came along later that testified to John having written his gospel and having written his epistles and Revelation, so we have great confidence that John wrote these things.
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Now, over the last two weeks, we talked about Matthew and Luke, and we said that Matthew and Luke gives us birth narratives, and we said they were from two different perspectives.
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Does anybody remember what the perspective of Matthew was? Yes, Matthew gives us the perspective from Joseph, and in fact, it doesn't mention Mary much except for that she was a virgin.
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It does point that out, but it doesn't really talk.
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It doesn't talk about the angel visiting her.
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It doesn't talk about the trip to Bethlehem.
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It just mentions that they were there.
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It doesn't talk about being even born in a manger.
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None of that's laid in a manger once he was born.
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None of that's mentioned in Matthew.
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Matthew focuses primarily on Joseph, who was going to separate from Mary.
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He was going to cancel the betrothal because he thought that she had been unfaithful.
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When the angel visited him in the dream, told him that she wasn't unfaithful, we get his perspective, his side of it.
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Luke gives us the perspective then of Mary, so we have Matthew's gospel gives us Joseph's perspective.
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Luke's gospel gives us Mary's perspective.
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Now, I want to throw an idea out there here.
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This is not certainly something that I would demand anyone to believe, but I would say this is how I kind of am seeing it as I've been thinking today and studying and looking at this text.
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A text I've looked at really more than probably I've looked at any other text in the New Testament is John 1.
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And I got to thinking, I think if we think of the birth narratives of Christ, Matthew gives us Joseph's perspective, Luke gives us Mary's perspective, and if we could think of John as perhaps giving us God's perspective, because John doesn't begin in Nazareth and John doesn't begin in Bethlehem, but John begins in the beginning.
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And where else do we have that phrase, in the beginning? At the very beginning of the Bible, it begins with the words, in the beginning.
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Now, that is in Hebrew.
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This is in Greek, but if you were to go to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is called the Septuagint, which is, I mentioned it a lot, it's a very important document, and you were to read the first opening line of Genesis in Greek, in the beginning, it reads the same as John's, in the beginning.
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The phrase in Greek is, in arche, in the beginning, and where we get the word archetype or archaeology, studying things that are from the past, from the beginning.
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And so, when we see this phrase, in the beginning, we know this, John and the other Apostles had access to the Septuagint.
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In fact, many of their quotations we know are direct quotations of the Septuagint, not of the Hebrew Bible.
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And you say, well, how can you know that? Because the Septuagint makes some specific ways of translating things that the Apostles copy as they're translating, and so we can tell that they're citing the Septuagint.
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So, we know that not only did the Septuagint exist, but we know the Septuagint was used by the Apostles in citing Scripture.
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So, they considered it to be just as good as the Hebrew Bible.
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People wonder, is the English just as good as the Hebrew? Well, the disciples were okay with the translation.
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We should be okay with the translation, especially if we don't speak Hebrew or Greek.
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We should understand that a translation can be used by God, and the Apostles used the translation.
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They used the Septuagint.
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And when they wrote, when John wrote, in arche, he was following the same pattern as the translators of Moses.
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And what's something about Moses and John that they have in common regarding what they're writing? Neither one of them were there.
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Moses writes, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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He weren't there.
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You know, Moses wasn't there when God created the world.
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Moses wasn't there when Adam was created.
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Moses wasn't there when Abraham walked the earth.
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Moses wasn't there when Isaac or Jacob walked the earth.
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In fact, all of Genesis' narrative is written from the perspective of God, because God has to reveal this to Moses to write.
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Moses is writing revelation from God, because he wasn't there to witness any of it.
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So, when Moses writes, in the beginning, God created, the only person who could have told him that was God, because God was the only one there to see it.
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There wasn't like, it wasn't like God had witnesses watching.
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You know, it was him.
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God created, and he told Moses, this is how I did it.
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Day one, I did this.
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Day two, I did this.
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Day three, I did this.
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Well, later, John is dealing with the same situation.
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He's writing about something that he didn't see.
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He didn't see in the beginning.
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He wasn't there in the beginning.
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That's why I'm saying I believe it's God's perspective, because it's not John's perspective.
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It's God's perspective.
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You've got John's perspective in certain parts of the gospel, because he'll talk about himself, and he talks about situations, but this prologue of John is revelation from God.
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This is, it's all revelation from God, but this is revealing something John could not have known outside of God revealing it to him.
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And what does he tell us? He says, in the beginning was the Word.
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Now, the Word is the Greek word Lagos, and that word has been, a lot has been said about the term Lagos.
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It has a very strong Greek foundation used a lot in Greek philosophy to reference not only words, because it can mean simply just words, but it also had the idea of wisdom and philosophy.
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The Lagos was higher than just words.
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It was, it was ideas.
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It was thoughts.
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It was philosophy, and some have thought that John was trying to, in a sense, bring in the idea that Jesus is, he is the encapsulation of wisdom.
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He's the encapsulation of knowledge.
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He's the encapsulation of all of these things, and so rather than saying, in the beginning was Jesus, which would have been, in a sense, accurate, but odd to say it that way, because Jesus of Nazareth, as a man, came into being in Bethlehem, but the Word made flesh has always been, and so John is making a distinction here between the divine nature of Christ, which is eternal, and the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth, which did come into being at a point in time.
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Jesus has always existed as the divine Word, but he's not always existed as the carpenter from Nazareth.
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We understand that.
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The theological distinction there is known as the hypostatic union.
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You were, you've probably heard that, Jackie.
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We've talked about that some in our class.
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I know Daisy, well, we've talked about it here for our theology class when we went through, and wisdom.
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That's right.
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That's right, and so there, and there were times where Jesus admitted to not knowing things from a human perspective.
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The date of his return, and things like that.
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So yes, we have to make a distinction between the human nature and the divine nature, while still maintaining their inseparability.
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Christ is inseparably divine and human, but the human nature comes into existence in Bethlehem.
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The divine nature has always been.
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So the point I'm making is, when John says, in the beginning, he doesn't say, in the beginning, Jesus.
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He says, in the beginning was the Word, because he's making a distinction between the divine nature and the human nature.
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The Word is John's way of describing the divine nature of the Son of God.
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The Word is John's way of describing the second person of the Trinity.
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In fact, he does this in his epistle.
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He refers to him as the Word, right? And when you get to Revelation, as John is writing Revelation, it's clear that he sees the person of Jesus as being divine, because he calls him the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the one who was, and is, and is to come.
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He is divine.
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John clearly teaches us that, but the first writing of his gospel is the absolute clearest.
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In the beginning was the Word.
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And I want to, I didn't mean to stick with verse one this whole time, but I guess we will, because what he is saying when he uses the word was, is he is indicating that when the beginning happened, and that would be the beginning of time, he's saying that when the beginning happened, the Word already was.
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In fact, the New English Translation, which is the Net Bible, it's available online for free.
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I like it.
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It's a very good translation.
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I don't ever use it when I'm preaching, because there's not many people have the paper version.
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Most people only have the online version.
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But the Net Bible is good, plus we've all kind of, you know, we've got the pulpit translation, which is ESV, and that's kind of got me trapped.
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Not that it's bad, it just sort of is what it is, you know.
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But the Net Bible, that's the way it translates it.
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It translates that in the beginning the Word already was.
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And I think that's the essence of the Greek.
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It's n-r-k, ein ha logos.
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Ein is the preposition, was.
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Right? N-r-k, in the beginning, ein ha logos.
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Ein is the preposition, was the Word.
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And the was there is indicating was already.
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So the idea is that when the beginning happened, the Word already existed.
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He was already there.