THE UNSEEN GOD - by Revd Gilbert Wong
Scripture: John 1:1-14; Proverbs 8:1, 22-31
19 February 2006 Second Sunday before Lent
Prayer:
Almighty God, give us reverence for all creation and respect for every person, that we may mirror your likeness in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Sermon in a Sentence: We are to be like God as seen in the life of Jesus Christ
Introduction:
These eighteen verses “summarizes how the ‘Word’ which was with God in the very beginning came into the sphere of time, history, tangibility – in other words, how the Son of God was sent into the world to become the Jesus of history, so that the glory and grace of God might be uniquely and perfectly disclosed. The rest of the book is nothing other than an expansion of this theme” (Carson, p. 111).
JESUS IS GOD HIMSELF FROM THE BEGINNING (verses 1-5)
It is crucial that Jesus is God himself. He is fully God and fully man. When Jesus came upon this earth, he has not become a lesser God or a lesser man. Rather Jesus is God and came upon this earth to assume humanity to be fully man. If Jesus is less than human, then he is not fit to save us since he would not be able to understand the sinful temptations of humankind. If he is less than God, then Jesus is powerless to save us. He might know all the struggles of humans but because Jesus is not God, he is powerless to save us. The doctrine of Incarnation teaches us that Jesus did not leave his Godhood behind in heaven. He retains his Godhood and with it goes through the worst of all human temptation and he paid the ultimate price by dying on the cross.
John locates the Word (logos in Greek) back to the very beginning – before time – before the creation of the world. The Word in not part of the creation – was not created – but stood with God before creation. John is not writing to the readers of his time but also included the Old Testament so that the Jews could see that Jesus is the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies.
When John uses the words “in the beginning”, he is modelling his gospel after the creation account in Genesis. Genesis 1:1 also has the same words: “in the beginning”. You see, the Jewish people know the book of their scriptures by their first words. So when they read John’s gospel, the Jewish people would recall the creation story found in Genesis.
So the Jewish understand that logos refers to Jesus and that all of their Old Testament Scriptures have been fulfilled in Jesus. Moreover Proverbs 8:1, 22-31 contains a regular word Wisdom. Wisdom us the feminine equivalent of Logos. That means that John in eighteen verses of Chapter 1 tells his Jewish readers that Jesus is God.
Through Jesus, all things were created. During Jesus’ time, people saw the world in dualistic ways. That means that they saw matters as essentially bad and evil. Anything to do with the human flesh is evil. But Jesus created human flesh and we should not ignore our body for our bodies as Paul says are the temple of the Holy Spirit. In those days, people would spend time and money on acquiring knowledge because it is knowledge that saves.
But what is happening to us these days is that we value our human body to the extreme to the neglect and detriment of our spiritual life. We are reading God’s word less and also praying less. We are less keen to worship God together in his temple. We would rather spend hours looking after our bodies through exercises, beauty injections, slimming centres, spa, and such similar things than to spend an hour reading the Bible and praying. It is little wonder that modern Christians are not able to influence the world since very little knowledge of God’s word is acquired. More often than not, the world shapes us or should I say we allowed the world to shape us. What we should do is to critically examine the worldly influence with the word of God. And it is our hope as members of our Christian Education that our members would long to learn more of God through his word.
But John goes on to say in verses 4-5 that light was created to bring life to the world but the darkness has not understood it. “The darkness stands for the state of mind in which mankind fails to welcome the light” (Howard, 466). The Bible tells us that darkness did not and will not overcome the light. This is “because…, this fight is not our fight, but God’s; and he is in it with us. And unless the Almighty fail, goodness cannot be conquered; and must win in the end” (Gossip, 468).
We know well full that even a little light can dispel darkness. And if we would spend a little time to begin with, we would be able to dispel the darkness from our lives and also the influence positively the world in which we live and move and have our being. F.F. Bruce writes “Light and darkness are opposite, but they are not opposites of equal power. Light is stronger than darkness; darkness cannot prevail against it…Similarly darkness cannot overcome…those who walk in the light (John 12:35)” (Bruce, 34)
Transitional Sentence: For we see that John was the light bearer
John the Light bearer (verses 6-8)
John’s purpose like ours today is to be witness to that light. We are to be the conscience of society ranging from national issues such as casino to domestic issues as educating our children. We should be constructively helpful and not destructive in our comments. Sometimes as we have seen in history as well as in John’s life that bearing witness for Jesus might mean death. At times, witnessing for Jesus provokes the forces of darkness to violence and the history of the church bears that out all too well. The Foxes’ Book of Martyrs is a book worth reading because in it, it contains countless true occurrences of Christians being killed for being witnesses to that light. John himself dies a martyr’s death because of his testimony regarding Herod’s marriage (Mark 6:14-29).
In Singapore and in the foreseeable future, we are unlikely to die for our faith. What is more subtle is not the widespread persecution we read of in the New Testament or of some countries today who arrest Christians because of faith. What is more subtle are the influences we get through advertisements and television programmes. Today, people would not be asking you whether something is true or false. They would be asking questions such as “Is it practical?”; “Does it feel good?”; “What do stand to gain?” and many such similar questions. We waste water without the thought that there are people out there who do not have a scoop of water to drink. We spend tons of money spending on ourselves whilst there are people who do not have the basic necessities of life. It just take a trip or two to some of our surrounding countries or even to some of our Anglican half-way houses and we would know how many more people who need help. It would take trips to some missionaries who have to suffer a great deal because of their firm stand in the faith
Transitional Sentence: Because we see that people do reject Jesus.
PEOPLE DO REJECT JESUS (verses 9-13)
“The true light…was coming into the world” (verse 9). This is quite a statement because this world is in rebellion against God. The fact that the light comes into the world does not mean that the world loves God. But rather it bears witness to God’s capacity for love.
What a disappointment it was for Jesus. In verse 11 tells us that Jesus went to his own but his own people rejected him. He came to the Israelites, God’s own chosen people. God has prepared them for centuries to receive him into their midst, but they reject him. But we should not be too quick to judge the Jewish people. Much of the world today is in rebellion. The world prefers darkness to light because its deeds are evil (3:19-20). This is true of all of us at certain points in our lives.
But all those who believed in Jesus would be adopted as sons and daughters which entitled us to all the privileges and honours of being God’s family members. It does not matter who are ancestors were. The Jews trace their ancestry to Abraham but really “it is spiritually irrelevant to be descended from Abraham in the natural order if one is not a child of Abraham in the only sense that matters before God – by reproducing Abraham’s faith” (Bruce, 40). In other words, we are to be born of God (verse 13). We are members of God’s family purely by God’s action. John 3:3, 5 tells us that “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above…without being born of water and Spirit.” And we need not depend on our past achievements or present accomplishment to attract God to us. Nothing we had or will do will make any difference to God since it is his love that causes him to come to us in the first place. However, taken too far it can also be dangerous. Some Christians advocate that since nothing we do would attract God to us and that it is pure grace that we are saved, then we can still live our old ways of life and if we do sinned we simply ask for his forgiveness and move on. So this cycle is repeated many times over. That is cycle is known as unrepentant. The best is to look at Jesus who is the visible image of the invisible God.
JESUS SHOWS US HOW TO LIVE (verse 14)
“And the word became flesh” (verse 14). This is a shocking statement for flesh (pronounced in Greek as Sarx) is a nearly vulgar word. Because some Jews believed that the flesh is evil, the thought of God becoming flesh is unimaginable – the equivalent of God becoming a pornographer or a prostitute. Paul uses sarx to speak of the sins of the flesh, but then he also says that God “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful sarx…he condemned sin in the sarx” (Romans 8:3). It is as if God has climbed into our sewer to deliver us from our sewage.
So now the Word has become flesh and lived amongst us. This verse 14 should be read with verse 1. The Word who dwelt with God now dwells with us. God in his love bridge this huge gap between God’s world and ours. And many a times, we find our lives a world apart from God’s world. Don’t we? But when Jesus lived his human life without sins, he has shown us that it is possible to conquer our sinful nature as Jesus himself did. That he who was in heaven now lived with us by His Spirit. And he is with us today. He did through the power of the Holy Spirit and we have the Holy Spirit residing in us and we should learn to know Spirit’s ways by relating to him through the daily and attentive reading of God’s word and through prayer.
Conclusion:
Like Jesus who made visible the invisible God, we should be also made God visible in our lives by sharing his love with those who have yet to know God as well as to live a godly life by the power of the Holy Spirit.
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