The Gospel According to John

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.'

John 1:1-3

As John writes His book, he wants the reader to know whom he is meeting. In His forgiving of sins, His calming of waves, His raising of a dead friend’s body and His changing of His friends’ dead hearts, John has shown the reader this Jesus is God.

This is no impersonal universal force watching what we do with good intentions and a distant smile. This is the uncreated, unending, eternal personal God with a name and a chosen people and a story to tell. This Logos (“Word”) in this book of John dwells in unapproachable light, makes bad angels shake with fear, and chooses to speak things like stars and birds and your grandmother into existence.

Not one element of the world around you was created but by the say-so of the man whose words you read as He sits next to a sexually sinful woman at a well in John 4. There isn’t one drop of the Pacific Ocean, one fleck of snow at the peak of Everest right now, that doesn’t owe its existence to the creativity of the One who cooked breakfast for Peter.

We walk on this Logos’ earth, we breathe this Logos’ air, we sin against this Logos’ image bearers, we break this Logos’ Law. John will not let us have a low, irreverent view of God, and therefore John will not let us have a low view of Jesus. Because John tells us Jesus is God.

Why does this matter so much? Why does John hammer home that “All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made”? Because the Writer of your heart and of your heart’s world is speaking. Christian, He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows your sins, and He can forgive them. He knows your gifts, because He planted them like seeds in new soil. He knows your sufferings, because He ordained them to do you good and to bring Him glory. He knows the world you walk in, because He is bringing all that He intends to pass in it. He knows the evils that have been done to you, and He will judge every last one, either on the Cross or in the Lake whose fire never goes out. This is Whom you read in John 3 as He teaches Israel’s teacher, in John 6 as He offers His flesh to eat and His blood to drink to men who grumbling and walking away angry, in John 9 as He gives sight to a man born blind and infuriates the religious hypocrites who treasure the glory of man. You are reading your Maker and your world’s Maker, your Judge and your world’s Judge, you are reading the Author who wrote you into this wider story about who He is. 

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

This God took on flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.

For the pagans and their philosophers, this story makes no sense, and must be changed. The uncreated Creator entering creation, the transcendent God of no beginning and no end being nourished by an umbilical cord in a woman’s womb in the first century Middle East, this is nonsensical. To children, or to those who will receive it like children, it poses less problems.

John will not let us lose sight of this Logos’ flesh: 20:27, 21:12-14. To lose the human nature of Christ is to lose our priest, our mediator, our savior, our elder brother. Do not let into your heart or into your worship this pagan idea of a merely spiritual Jesus who had no true earthly body. The King of creation is with our Father right now with the same hole in His side that Thomas put his hand in.

God cares about flesh. This material world is not an illusion, it is not a mistake, it is not a cheap imitation of some higher reality. God made Adam as a man with feet and eyes and a circulatory system because He wanted to, and when He was done He called it good. Those of us who are in God’s family through Christ’s blood (His blood, mind you, not His good feelings), will someday be raised up as human beings whose bodies cannot break or perish. We won’t be worshiping Him as disembodied ghosts. We will be like He is, our risen, bodied Savior, who of His own free will took on this very good thing He created called “flesh.”

An implication of this: Does your body hurt? Do you carry around pain in your lower back, your feet, your neck? Do you hate an addiction that claws at your thoughts and screams in your blood? Is there a depression or an anxiety that seems to you to be in your nerves, a sadness or a fear that you can’t banish from behind your eyes? This Messiah is not merely our God in some untethered sky. He felt the pain of injury, put His human hands on lepers to heal their skin and their tissues, restored a blind man’s sight with the saliva from His own mouth, and spilled blood and water from His very human side that this John saw with his own very human eyes. This Messiah knows, in His human nature, what it is to suffer and sweat and tremble and bleed. Close your eyes the next time you pray and know that the name you pray in belonged to a man with a blood type. An eye color. Molars. A singing voice. This Logos who is God took on flesh, and other than sin He took on everything it means to be human. Christian, your priest knows your pain.

‘For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.’

John 6:38-40

This Logos came down from Heaven for God’s plan, God’s story, God’s glory. What Jesus came to do is going to showcase the brilliance and beauty and worth of God. He came down out of Heaven with Heaven’s will. Lots of men believe they’re doing God’s will with no good reason for believing it. But this man who is the unmade Maker, this carpenter’s son who is the Logos, He descended from the throne room at the top of creation, He knows exactly what God’s will is. Heaven’s heart is beating in His own chest, and He will carry it all the way to the Cross.

God is for God, and that is how it should be. A heart that does not value things in proportion to their worth is not a good heart, and there is no better heart than God’s. He values His own glory above everything else that exists because He is worth more, is more beautiful and praiseworthy and valuable, than anything else in existence. Heaven knows this, and that is why the angels sing the way they do. Jesus places the glory of God first in His own heart because His heart is good; God’s glory should be the thing we are consumed with, addicted to, living and dying to showcase.

And in God’s breathtaking wisdom He is glorified in dying and rising to give forgiveness and eternal life to bad men and women like us here in this room. That is the act, the wonder of history, that brings greatest glory to this God. Jesus does the Father’s will, and the Father’s will is to glorify Father, Son, and Spirit in the Gospel. Jesus for man because He is for God, and God is glorifying Himself by saving wicked human beings from His just wrath.