Who Do You Say Jesus Is? - [John 1:1-5]

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Well, I would encourage you and invite you to open your Bibles to John, the Gospel of John, chapter 1.
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We're going to be looking at verses 1 to 5 this evening, and I titled this sermon, Who Do You Say Jesus Is?
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I mean, there are a multitude of titles I could have used. I thought about In the
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Beginning, and I don't know, just a lot of different things. But I think this is really kind of the issue to wrestle with, especially,
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I mean, it's the issue all through the Gospel of John, because he wrote it. Why? So that we would know, he wrote the
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Gospel of John so that we would know who Jesus is, and in knowing that, have eternal life.
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So that is the issue throughout the book. But you would think that just reading even these first five verses would sort of settle the issue.
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And I'm really just going to move this thing, because I just, I don't want to go all rock star and knock it over.
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You would think that just even the first five verses, just reading it would settle a lot of these issues, but they don't.
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There's a lot of confusion by a lot of people, a lot of people who would say that they're Christians, and then we have other people who like to chime in with their opinions.
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And I can't resist these days, Richard Dawkins, and for those of you who don't know who Richard Dawkins is, he is one of the premier atheists, and there's this new strain of atheism.
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It's not enough to just, you know, quietly be an atheist, to hate
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God on your own. You know, they're kind of, they've become evangelistic atheists, which is a unique thing, you know.
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I mean, pretty soon they'll be going door to door, hi, we're atheists, we're here to destroy your life. But he says this about Jesus.
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Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing.
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He explicitly departed from them. Now, what do you suppose he's talking about there? He explicitly departed from them.
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I think it's when Jesus said, you've heard it said, but I say to you. And so, you know, that was a departing from the scriptures.
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Was that even true? No. What Jesus did over and over again, when he said, you have heard it said, was he was challenging the religious authorities and those people who were teaching these things.
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He says, listen, this is what you've heard. This is what the rabbis have told you. This is what the Pharisees say. But here's the original intent of the scripture.
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You've heard it said you should not commit adultery. And so you go to great ends not to physically commit adultery.
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But I say to you, it's a matter of the heart. So Dawkins is like, well, see, he explicitly departed from the scriptures that he was taught.
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And that's not true at all. But he goes on to say, Jesus has to be honored as a model for this idea that we do not and should not derive our morals from scripture.
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Jesus never said that. He never said anything like that. On another occasion, he said this.
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I think we owe Jesus the honor of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural or supernatural nonsense, which he inevitably espoused as a man of his time.
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That's I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But this is the idea of this atheism that truly enlightened, smart, intelligent, rational people, people who think for themselves would never believe what's in the
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Bible. Well, you're stupid if you believe what's in the Bible.
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That's the idea. There are others who would call themselves Christians. Some known as Oneness Pentecostals.
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Oneness Pentecostalism would include people like Joyce Meyer, T .D. Jakes, others.
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This is one definition of it. Listen carefully. Oneness Pentecostalism derives its distinctive name from its teaching on the
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Godhead. There is one God, they say. True. Listen.
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A singular spirit who manifests himself in many ways, including
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Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. In other words, one God who basically takes on a different role, who shows you a different part of himself.
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But this is all one God, one being who just has different masks, as it were. Jehovah Witnesses, quoting here from Ron Rhodes, he says,
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The Watchtower teaches that Jehovah... The Watchtower is another name for the
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Jehovah Witnesses. That's their teaching arm is the Watchtower. ...teaches that Jehovah, the
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Father, only created one thing directly, the Logos. And we're going to be hearing that word tonight.
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It means the words, the Greek word for word, or Jesus. It was Jesus, according to the
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Watchtower, who created all other things. So then who is the creator of all?
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Jesus, but according to them, he's not God. Mormonism.
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In Mormonism, Jesus Christ is the created Son of God, the Father. In Islam, Jesus is a great prophet.
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But not the Son of God, and certainly not God himself. Others today would say that he's a wise man, and would have said, and would have not said, the things ascribed to them.
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Some of those people, for example, in the Jesus Seminar would say, Jesus certainly said a lot of great and wise things, but he was not
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God. Now, to just review, a few weeks ago I did a jet tour of John, and I asked three questions.
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And these were drawn from John 20, verses 30 and 31.
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Don't turn there, but I'm just going to read verse 31. These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the
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Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
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That's the purpose of John. The three questions I asked were, who is Jesus?
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What does it mean to believe in Jesus? And what is eternal life? So I just took these basic ideas and expanded them throughout the book.
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This book is a gospel. It is good news.
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It is also, though, a biography. It tells us about Jesus. Its purpose is to present a powerful, irrefutable case that Jesus Christ is
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God, that he is fully divine, that in him alone salvation has been accomplished to the glory of the
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Father. Now, each one of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is unique.
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They have different emphases. And I mentioned several, or a few weeks ago when I preached, that if you pick up a biography, and you read it, and you think that that biography is neutral, even today, if you go and you read a book on Lincoln, Napoleon, whoever you want to pick, and you just think that that author has no objective in writing it, all they want to do is just give you the truth.
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They're completely neutral. Well, you're just sadly mistaken. That's never the point. And each one of these gospels, while they don't, they each tell the truth, but they come at it from a different perspective, and their purposes are different.
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For example, Matthew presented Jesus as the Messiah, as the King, as the fulfillment of the promises in the
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Old Testament. Mark presented Jesus as servant. Luke emphasized
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Jesus' humanness. And in John, he is emphasizing
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Jesus as God. In the Gospel of Matthew, he starts with a genealogy, which gives us the lineage and shows us his
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Davidic ancestry. In Mark, we get a brief introduction straight to John the
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Baptist, and then to the beginning of the ministry of Christ. I mean, it's like, bam, bam, and you're into the ministry.
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No genealogy, no nothing. Why? Because that wasn't his purpose. And in Luke, we get an introductory note.
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Then we get a genealogy, again, to prove his humanness. But in John, even as Pastor Mike was saying this morning, he begins with a divine genealogy, a divine kind of ancestral scroll so that we can see where he comes from.
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Luther wrote of this gospel, this is the unique, tender, gender, gender, genuine chief gospel.
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I love this part. He says, Luther said this, he goes, should a tyrant succeed in destroying the Holy Scriptures and only a single copy of the epistle to the
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Romans and the gospel according to John escape him, Christianity would be saved.
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That's high praise for this gospel, I think. James Montgomery Boyce said that Luther must have especially loved the gospel because he preached on it for many years from the pulpit of the parish church of Wittenberg, kind of his base camp.
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All right, let's go to the text, John 1, 1 -5. In the beginning was the
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Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
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He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
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In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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This evening, I'm going to ask five questions drawn from our text so that you will be able to both disarm the arguments of unbelievers of various stripes and with the additional purpose that you will be able to stand in appropriate awe of what has been done on your behalf.
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I mean, this is incredible. When we read these verses here, when we stretch them out, when we look at them, when we expose what's here, it is incredible that anyone would do this for us, that someone would come on to this earth and take on a body of flesh, basically submitting himself to the
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Father's will and subjugating himself to all the limits of the flesh.
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Why? Well, to please the Father, but also for our sake. It's amazing.
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It's absolutely amazing. These five verses prove beyond any doubt that Jesus Christ is
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God. And that alone ought to put you into a state of constant thankfulness that the
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God of the universe would condescend to die on your behalf. So our first question, has
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Jesus always existed? And you think, well, I know that.
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That's easy. A lot of people don't. Again, verse one,
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In the beginning was the word. In the beginning, what does that remind you of right away? Genesis 1 .1.
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I mean, that's easy. That's a slam dunk, and that's intentional. Again, I think John's primary audience was probably
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Jewish. I mean, others certainly read it and are still reading it now, but his primary audience was probably
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Jewish, and so he goes back to this direct allusion to Genesis 1 .1.
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Now, Genesis, what we call Genesis, that word means origins. But in Hebrew, if you pick up a
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Hebrew Bible, the name of the book is not Genesis. It's In the
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Beginning. That's the name of it, is the Hebrew word for In the Beginning.
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And much of the imagery in these first few verses of John is very similar to that of the opening passage of Genesis.
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We see repeated themes of life and light and darkness.
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I mean, it almost reads very, it's very similar to Genesis 1. But this beginning, to which
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John refers to, is the start of creation, the very dawn of the universe.
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In other words, before anything exists, in the beginning. Now, our
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English language sometimes fails to convey accurately the clarity of the Greek. In verse 1,
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John uses the imperfect tense of to be, or was, three times.
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Why does he do that? One commentator says that. He says, the verb was is most naturally understood of the eternal existence of the word.
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The word continually was. We just don't talk like that.
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We don't even think like that. He was continually. The word continually was.
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He says that language is appropriate to an eternal, unchanging being.
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Well, basically, why would he do that? It's to give the sense that everything came to be created. That when everything came to be created, the word was already there.
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He'd always been there. In other words, John, as he always is, as we study the
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Gospel of John, you will see this, he is always careful with his words. He's careful to construct his thoughts in such a way as to give us an essential truth about God.
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Over and over again, this is what he does. The word, whom we later learn, of course, in verse 14, is the
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Lord Jesus Christ, is described in terms that affirm his aseity, the theological 50 -cent word that means his self -existence, that he never has a beginning, and he never has an end.
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He always just is. And in this case, he's described as, in the beginning, was the word.
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He was there. And this construction alone puts the lie to the idea promoted by Arius and his followers.
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We hear the term Arianism. That's what this is. The idea that Jesus was created.
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That's what Arius said. Arius said that he was physically begotten, that he was not
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God from the beginning. Some of the proponents of that today would be like the
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Mormons. You know, someone says that they're a Mormon and they're a Christian. Well, there's a problem because they don't believe
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John 1 .1. Jesus was not a created being.
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He always existed. So simply put, there was never a time when Jesus, as the second person of the
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Trinity, did not exist. I had a friend, a co -worker, super nice guy, when
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I was on the sheriff's department, and he was a Mormon missionary. And he used to tell me that he was a
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Christian. So one night we were talking and I said, well, you know, I'm just like, oh, come on.
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I know all your tricks. I said, did Jesus die for your sins? And he said, yes. And I'm going, this isn't going to be so easy.
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Are you going to go to heaven on the basis of Jesus' death? Yes. And we kind of played this whole thing back and forth.
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And I'm going, I know I can stump this guy because I know he's not right. I've been there. I've seen that movie.
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So I thought about it for a minute and I said, okay, was there ever a time when
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Jesus Christ did not exist? Ever. And he said, yes.
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Was there ever a time that Jesus did not exist? And he said, yes. That's not what this verse says.
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It's in direct contradiction to what the Apostle John wrote via the Holy Spirit, by the agency of the
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Holy Spirit. He was there. Nothing else existed. In eternity past, we have only
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God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Those are the only ones there. In this particular verse, all he's talking about is
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Jesus. But in the beginning was the word, or in this part of the verse, it's just Jesus that he's talking about.
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But he was there. Before anything else existed, he wasn't created. Our second question, is
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Jesus God? And again, you say, well, these are no -brainers. These are easy. Well, they're not so easy for a lot of people.
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And these are the truths that you have to put forth, that you have to defend in order to what?
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If you want to present the gospel, people have to know this. They have to believe these things about Jesus.
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Is Jesus God? Well, look again at verse 1. And the word was with God, and the word was
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God. You say, well, that's simple enough. The word was God. And I agree, it is simple enough.
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Let's back up for a second and look at that. The word was with God, or the logos was with God.
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What is the meaning of the word, word? Why does
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John use that word? Why does he use word? It's interesting, because there were many philosophies at that time that used that idea, the logos, and they assigned different meanings to it.
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And I'm not going to go into all those, because they don't really matter. Because I think it's clear that given the context and the parallels between this passage in Genesis 1 and the power of the concept of the word of God in the
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Old Testament, it's pretty clear that what John is trying to attempt to, or what he's communicating here, is that the word is
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God's means of communicating to mankind. So, in other words, when
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Jesus speaks, or to take it a step further, when Jesus speaks, what does he say? What is he constantly saying to his disciples, to those who are listening, when he talks to them?
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He says, you know, well, I'm here to do things on my own authority. I'd like to tell you what
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I think. Here's my opinion. No, listen to some of these. John 7, 16.
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So Jesus answered them, My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.
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The Father's teaching. John 14, 24. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.
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And the word that you hear is not mine, but the Father's who sent me.
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He communicates, Jesus communicates exactly what the Father wants him to communicate. He communicates the
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Father to us, though, in ways other than simply words. Again, more verses from, well, one from John and then one from Matthew.
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Listen. John 1, 18. No one has ever seen God, the only
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God, who is at the Father's side. He has made him known. Well, how is it that you see
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God? The only way that you see God is by seeing the Son, by seeing
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Christ. Matthew 11, 27. All things have been handed over to me by my
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Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the
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Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. How can we know the
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Father? Through the Son. That's the only way to know him. So there's many ways in which
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Christ is the Logos. He is God's word to us. He is the living word, the embodiment of God's communication, his message to us.
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Now, again, going back to the first century when this was written, the idea of word or Logos would be keenly connected in the
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Jewish mind to creation. Again, consistent with this context here.
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Nine times in Genesis 1, we would read something to this effect, and God said.
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And what happens after God says something? The first seven times, anyway, what happens? Something comes into being that wasn't in existence before that.
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God said, let there be light, and there was light. And on and on it goes.
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And again, as John wanted his largely Jewish audience to understand who Jesus was in light of their monotheistic worldview, they only believed in one
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God, Deuteronomy 6 .4. The fact that he is the Logos, the word,
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God's agent of creation, God's message to them, would aid them in understanding
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Christ as the second person of the Trinity. In other words, you have a Jewish person who says,
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I only believe in one God, and you're going to tell me this Jesus is God? And he's like, well, let me tell you about Jesus.
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Jesus always existed, and he was the means by which, and I'm getting ahead of myself, but he's the means by which
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God created all things. Now, again, look at verse 1.
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The word with is a bit misleading, because Jesus wasn't merely in the area of the
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Father. He wasn't just in the same room. They weren't in the same area code.
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They weren't in the same town. Nothing like that. That preposition there, with, really is often to.
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Most often it's to or towards something. Listen to what Kistemacher says.
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He says, The grammatical construction indicates the word existed in the closest possible fellowship with the
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Father. Some commentators even say that it's kind of the idea of face -to -face, that it's not just the word was with God, or Jesus was with the
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Father, but they were as close as two beings can possibly be. That's the idea, that they had this intricate communication and relationship.
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Listen to just get another idea of how close this relationship is.
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John 17, verse 5. Jesus in his high priestly prayer, where he's praying to the Father, interceding on behalf of the elect.
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Listen to what he says in John 17, verse 5. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
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You think he existed before anything else? You think he always existed and is right there again?
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All he says in that high priestly prayer is, he wants exactly the same kind of glory and intensity of relationship that he had before he came down to the earth.
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For all eternity, before there was even time to measure. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoyed perfect fellowship.
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A level of communication, joy, and love that we will never fully grasp.
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We can't get our arms fully around the Trinity. But occasionally we get glimpses of it like that in John 17.
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Now imagine how great the love of the Son for the Father had to be for him to willingly give up some part of that fellowship to come to this sinful world.
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And we get even a better idea of why Jesus on the cross said what? My God, my
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God, why have you forsaken me? That perfect community is split because God the
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Father turns his back on him. Now the second part of that, the
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Logos, the Word was God. Mounce writes this, The Word order tells us that Jesus Christ had all the divine attributes that the
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Father has. The lack of the article tells us that Jesus Christ is not the
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Father. In other words, there's a definite article missing that if it was there we could say, well,
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Jesus Christ is the Father. Well, he's not. He's very clearly not.
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The ancient heretic who came up with this theory, I already described it, modalism,
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Sibelius was his name. I wonder why his name wasn't modal. But anyway, it's Sibelius, who argued in the third century that God was not three persons, but three modes or aspects of God.
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And from one perspective, I can almost admire what they're trying to do here, what he was trying to do.
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Why? Because he knew that there was only one God. So he said to himself,
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OK, well, if Jesus is God, and I know the Father's God, and I know the
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Spirit's God, well, maybe there's some kind of way where God just kind of takes on different faces, as it were, presents himself in different ways.
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He didn't really want to go outside that boundary of hero Israel, the Lord our God is one.
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He didn't want to go outside of the Shema of Israel, Deuteronomy 6 -4, and say that there were more gods, because that's what all the pagan nations did.
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So in that sense, I can sort of, you know, almost admire it.
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The doctrine of the Trinity is not easy for us to grasp. It's not easy for us to fathom that one
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God can exist in three persons, and yet not be three different gods, or three different personalities, or anything like that.
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But this, the Greek, the language here is very precise, and it could not be any more precise.
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The fact that we can't fully grasp it is more a reflection on us than it is on John, or it is on the nature of God.
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That we can't wrap our finite minds around the infinite is not that surprising. But John is remarkably clear.
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There's a perfectly good Greek adjective, for example, if he wanted to say the word was divine, not the word was
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God, but the word was divine, he could say it. If he wanted to say that Jesus had a
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God -like nature, or a nature that merely above a human being, like if he wanted to describe him as an archangel, or if he knew he was the archangel
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Michael, he could have done that. But he didn't. He was very specific in his construction.
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And one commentator writes this about that phrase, the word was God. He said, nothing higher could be said.
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All that may be said about God, the Father, may fitly be said about the word, about the
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Lord Jesus Christ. So what's the practical outworking of that? As I said earlier, when
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I named T .D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and other Oneness Pentecostals, they can be rightly termed heretics, because they are teachers of false doctrines.
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They have distorted the self -revelation of God. God has told us, this is what I'm like. And they've said, we don't want that God, we'd prefer to create our own, thank you.
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Other practical application, you ever had a Jehovah Witness at your door? Anybody ever been visited by the
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Watchtower? Here's an amazing thing, and you know this if you've been visited by them, they carry
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Bibles. Now a word to the wise, don't try to take their
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Bibles and disprove their doctrine. I thought I was pretty slick once, I tried to do that.
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I said, I'm going to prove to these guys the Trinity from the Old Testament. Isaiah 48, 16, here, give me that Bible, son.
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They changed it. Those guys are good, they go through, they change everything, and they've done the same thing here in John 1, 1.
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In John 1, 1, the New World Translation, which is their translation, says the word was
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Agod. Now I'm not going to go into all the technicalities, but there's no justification in the
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Greek for that. And in fact, that same construction exists dozens of times throughout the New Testament.
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And they never do it. They never change it, they never put the A in there any other time, it's just this one.
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I mean, do you realize, now just think again, let's just put ourselves in the mindset of John. Writing this letter to convince
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Jewish, either Jewish believers to more firmly believe, just affirm them in their faith, or Jewish non -believers, that Jesus Christ really is
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God in the flesh. Now if he intended to say that Jesus was
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Agod, well what does that indicate? That there are many gods.
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Who knows how many? How would a Jew receive that? If you just said, oh yeah, monotheism, forget that.
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There's God the Father, and then there's another God. They never would have gone for that. And that's not, again, that's not what's indicated in the
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Greek. So why does the Watchtower do that? Because their theology, what they believe about God, determines their interpretation of Scripture, which is exactly what?
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It's upside down. Our interpretation of Scripture, our understanding of it, our diving into the structure of it, should inform our theology, not the other way around.
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That is deadly. Our theology has to be driven by Scripture, not determining, not vice versa.
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We don't get our theology by somehow determining beforehand what our interpretation of Scripture is going to be.
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That's just totally backwards. God alone tells us who he is. This is
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God's self -revelation to mankind, not something we can tinker around with.
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This is no small doctrine that we're talking about. If you get the nature of God wrong, everything else will be wrong, too.
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So our first question, has Jesus always existed? Our second one, is Jesus God? Our third one, and this is going to be really a fast one, is
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Jesus eternal? Well, I've already said it, but let's look again at verse 2, because John repeats this, basically, to make it clear.
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He says, he was in the beginning with God. Now, as I said,
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Mormons claim that Jesus became God, that he was the firstborn of an immense multitude of spirit beings, which would have included all of us.
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But here John says, he was in the beginning. Again, that imperfect sense that he always was in the beginning.
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And this simply cannot be reconciled with, this Mormon idea cannot be reconciled with what
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John writes here, any more than you can square a circle. And for emphasis,
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John repeats two truths, the eternality of God, or the eternality of Christ, and the immeasurably close relationship with the
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Father. Those things are here again, said again. And one of the traits of Jewish writing is a repetition for emphasis.
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In other words, you say something, and then you say it again, just so the people get it, so they don't miss it.
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Now, just imagine that you're in a Jewish synagogue, and you hear, you know,
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John 1 .1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
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Well, it's not going to be, you know, silent, everybody just kind of going, okay, read verse 2. They'd be like, it's a little breathtaking.
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There might even be a little muttering. So just in case you miss it, he says it again in verse 2, just to emphasize the point.
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There's no mistaking it. Question number 4, is
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Jesus creator? Is Jesus creator? And these are great questions if you're going to evangelize someone.
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They need to believe, they need to understand who Jesus Christ is. Look again at verse 3.
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All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
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You know, and I just read this, and I go, you know, there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians, and say they believe in evolution.
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That's been a growing trend here lately. And do you know why? Why do you suppose it is that people want to say that they're
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Christians, and yet they believe in evolution? I think it's because they want to be smart.
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What was it one of the presidential candidates said here a couple weeks ago? They want to appear smart. One man said, you know what, we're not going to win this presidency if we're the party that stands against science.
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Same kind of idea here. You know, if you're a Christian, and you don't believe in evolution, well, you're just against science.
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You just don't believe in science. You're just stupid. So, you know, you can balance that by saying that, well,
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I believe in Christ, but I also believe in evolution. Well, then you just don't believe in the Bible, which makes you not a
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Christian. If you believe not just the Old Testament, Genesis, but right here.
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All things were made through him. Nothing simply came into being.
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There wasn't just this massive stuff hanging around, waiting to create life.
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Listen again to verse 3. All things were made through him, through the Logos, through Christ.
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Evolutionists would have you believe that matter and energy existed, and eventually life just came to be.
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You know, you take enough energy and enough mass, and you just kind of leave it alone for long enough, and life forms happen.
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And you wait long enough, and those life forms are just going to change, and transform, and mutate, and grow, and become more complex.
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But to believe in evolution is to expressly reject what the Bible says about Jesus.
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All things were made through him. So a Christian who believes in the theory of macroevolution, that is, that species changes into different species, is a non -existent entity.
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You can't be both. He may think of himself as a Christian, but an evolutionist does not believe in Jesus as presented in Scripture, and has made for himself an idol, a false god, with whom he agrees.
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Right? I'm not going to yield to Scripture, so I'll just kind of change my understanding of Scripture, so that I have a god
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I can worship. The Apostle John is clear. All things, every single thing in existence, was made through him.
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That is, he was the agent through whom creation came into being. The Father and Son were both involved, as was the
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Spirit who was hovering over him. Genesis 1 -2, we're not going to go through all that. But the idea here is that God the
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Father basically communicated what he wanted, and Jesus did it. Jesus brought it all into existence.
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Everything that exists was created by the pre -incarnate Jesus. Again, look at verse 3. And without him was not anything made that was made.
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One commentator says that this should or could be rendered. Without him was not even one thing made.
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In other words, it's just the opposite. We're looking at the opposite side of the same coin. Jesus made all things, and nothing was made apart from Jesus.
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That pretty much excludes everything. Or includes everything, however you want to look at it.
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He made everything. Everything that exists was made by him. No exceptions, and no species mutations.
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The universe is not eternal. The universe is not eternal. Christ is eternal.
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Someday everything in the universe is going to be destroyed. And Jesus is going to destroy it. Life in all of its variety did not just happen.
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It was created by its designer, the Lord Jesus Christ. And this part of the verse also helps to put to the lie the idea of the heretic areas.
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This is not very complex. Christ could not have been a created being. If he were, this verse tells us that all things were created by Jesus, so he would have had to have created himself.
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That's just not possible. Be kind of like being your own dad. It's just not possible. Impossible.
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Just think about those who would distort scripture. It's just shocking. How could
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Jesus be an archangel? Even an archangel is a creature. How could he be just like you and me, like the
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Mormons say? Just men, his creatures. Jesus Christ created everything.
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Question number five. Is Jesus the provider of life and light?
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Is Jesus the provider of life and light? Look at verse four. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
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John uses the word life more than any other New Testament writer. And he normally uses it in the sense of eternal life.
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However, here it is life in that sense, but also in the broader sense of existence.
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Just as creation did not evolve, life did not just independently spring forth.
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Genesis 2 -7 reads this way. Then the
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Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
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The power to give life is only in God. Only in God, and therefore in Christ.
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As I said before, though, the bigger issue is spiritual life. I mean, certainly he had to create all life, all physical life, and give everything life.
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But listen to these verses in which he talks about spiritual life, that is eternal life. John 5 -26.
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Listen to John 5 -39 -40. You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.
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Well, they were already physically living, he was talking about eternal life.
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John 6 -53. He didn't mean physical life, he meant spiritual life.
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John 10 -28. And no one will snatch them out of my hand.
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John 11 -25. Again, this idea that he is the source of eternal life.
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He's also the source of spiritual light. Again, going back to the parallels in Genesis 1.
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What was the first thing God created? God said, let there be light, and there was light.
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Genesis 1 -3. Listen to these verses from John again.
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Again, John 8 -12. John 9 -5.
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John 12 -46. So that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.
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Same picture. So what happens when the light is on display?
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When light comes into a room, when you go into a room and it's completely dark, and you turn on a light, what happens?
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The darkness disappears. So what about the eternal light, the Lord Jesus?
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He comes into the world and does the darkness disappear? Look at verse 5.
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Well, it's true, the darkness has not overcome it, but he hasn't yet conquered, although he will in the end conquer all the darkness.
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But it is intriguing that John changes tenses here. Most of what he's written has been in the eras or the past tense.
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But now he shifts to the present. The present shines. It shines in the darkness.
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It shined when John wrote this. The light did, and it shines today.
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Constantly shining is this spiritual light, this Jesus, shining into a darkened world filled with sinful people, run by the father of darkness,
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Satan himself. So the ending of the verse is a little bit curious. What does it mean that darkness has not overcome it, meaning the light?
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Well, this is a war. It's a struggle. But it's so much more.
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We know the ending, right? The ending's already written. But listen to what that verb means, to overcome.
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It means to make something one's own, win, attain. The darkness is not passive.
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It hates the light. Hates it. John 3, 19 and 20.
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And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
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Why do they love the darkness so much if their deeds are evil? Because they can hide and not be seen.
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For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his work should be exposed.
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Thankfully, Facebook is good for some things, including this example. Someone posted this, one of my friends.
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I have a lot of friends who aren't saved. Posted this. This is from the New York Times, writing about this new atheism.
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He says there are those, Dawkins, for example, or existentialists like Sartre, we'll get it, for another, who are invigorated.
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Listen to this. Who are invigorated. These atheists are invigorated at the very thought that there is no guiding power in the universe.
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Why would anybody find that idea invigorating? Why would that be interesting? Why would that just move you?
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Why do you find that emotionally stirring? No God, meaning no guiding power, means that there's no punishment for sin.
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You can do whatever you want. And to the unsaved man, that's thrilling. All that thrills my soul is sin, they would sing if they could, if they wanted to, if they wanted to rewrite it.
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No fear of retribution. No conscience going off. Why? Because you just shut that thing.
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I mean, it's like the alarm clock, you know, that goes off in the morning. And not only have you shut it off, you know, reaching over there, you picked it up and you smash it up against the wall.
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They're done with all that. It's thrilling. One man who commented on this
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Facebook post said that he was a big fan of there being no guiding power. And then he said, I thought this was weird, apart from the second law of thermodynamics.
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Really? What is it exactly that upholds that second law of thermodynamics?
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Why is it that in this chaotic universe that just kind of haphazardly came into existence, why is it that the second law of thermodynamics even works?
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How lucky can you get? Well, when we are saved, to get back to this idea of light and darkness, when we are saved, what happens?
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Paul wrote in Colossians 1 .13, he, speaking of God, has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved
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Son. We're taken out of the darkness and into the light by an act of God. Now, again, back to this idea, this battle, the struggle between darkness and the light.
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Can darkness ever defeat the light? You might as well ask, can Satan thwart God? Are sinful men able to stop the eternal plans of God?
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The answer, of course, is no, never will. Listen to what Kent says. He says it is because men are sinful and live in a world of spiritual darkness that they are not guided by the light of reason and conscience.
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I love that quote because I thought, you know what, if you ask these people, if you ask unbelievers, they think they're at the very height of reason.
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They think their consciences are very trained. They're enlightened. They live by the light of reason.
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I just think about my own friend,
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Han Cho, a man who went to Berkeley Law School.
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Extremely intelligent man and one with whom I had shared the gospel on a couple of occasions.
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Once, I mean, I, you know, we know that only the Holy Spirit can overcome a sinner's resistance.
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But, I mean, I plied him with my wife's pizza and I'm sure we had some great dessert and even that didn't work.
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I was distraught. I couldn't believe it. But after I moved here to Massachusetts, it was, in fact,
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November of 2004, he sent me an email because we'd been to church before and he said, you know what,
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I'd like to go to church with you again this Sunday. And I said, well, you know, are you ready to get on a plane?
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It's going to be a little flight because I'm in Massachusetts now. And he said, oh. I said, the good news is
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I'm coming back in a month and I'll meet you then. And we stayed up until 2 o 'clock in the morning talking.
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And after I got done presenting the gospel to him every way I knew how, my eyes were just falling shut because I'd only been in California 24 hours.
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And I said, Han, I just can't go anymore. I said, can I pray for you? And he said, sure.
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So I prayed. And I just remember praying and I'm ready to say amen and I say amen.
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And all of a sudden, he starts praying. And I thought, I didn't really expect that. I mean, it's 2 o 'clock in the morning.
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Can't we, you know, it's time to go to bed. And he started praying and I'm listening and I'm going, I don't know where he is.
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But if he believes what he's praying right now, he might be saved. And so, you know, we parted ways the next morning.
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He had to go to work and I went off to see somebody else. And then the next morning, I'm having breakfast with my old pastor.
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And my phone rings, I pick it up and it's Han. And he says, Steve, he goes, I've just been reading the gospel of John.
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It's incredible. He says, did you know that God sent his son into this world and they killed him?
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And I said, that's great, Han. You know, I'm just like, I'm going, yeah, I think that's what
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I was trying to tell you the other day, brother. But that's the whole point of the gospel of John.
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It builds this case. It is funny. It builds this case for the deity of Christ, for just the unimaginable work of God in sending his son and saying,
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Jesus, I want you to go. I don't know if he called him Jesus, but I want you to go into the world to take on a body of flesh, live a perfect life, fulfill the law that I've given man that they can never fill, that they can never live.
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Then I want you to die a death that you don't deserve. And by the way, while you're there, you're going to be subject to all the limitations of a human body.
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You're going to get tired. You're going to get hungry. You're going to be sad. You're going to have emotions that you have. Absolutely. You just can't imagine.
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You're going to go through all this, and then you're going to suffer the most excruciating death possible.
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Will you go? Yes. Yes. Because that's the sort of relationship that the father and the son had from the very beginning.
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When we get to John 17 some year, we'll see how much they love each other because it really amounts to this, that the people of God are given by the father to the son, who dies for them, and then says,
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Father, these are yours, and he gives them back to them. Why? Because we are, in effect, the object of God's love, yes, but we are also the gift of God's love, from one to the other and then back.
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This is the gospel of John is so Christ -centered, so Christ -focused, so much truth and doctrine, and just really exciting truths in here that when you evangelize someone,
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I would just always say to you, encourage people to read the gospel of John. You can't read it and just think, oh, you know, that Christianity stuff is just kind of boring.
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You're either going to hate the book of John or you're going to love it because the truth is, it's going to reveal how you think about Christ, whether you love him or whether you hate him.
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Let's pray. Father in heaven, we just thank you for your word.
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We thank you for its surety. We thank you for just the very idea that the second person of the
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Trinity would condescend to come and to serve such as us.
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Lord, we know that it is all for your glory, for your honor, but Father, just the idea,
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Jesus, eternally God, would come and live through what he lived through for us, that we might be made right with you who have no claim on you whatsoever.
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What a marvelous truth. What an unfathomable truth. You are a great
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God and worthy of all praise. And Father, we just love you and thank you in Christ's name. Amen.