Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Read John 1:1-3 together. What questions do you have?
2. Why do the authors of the gospel want to evoke the story of Genesis?
3. Ultimate Reality is rational, in that there is a design and a disclosure. Consider for a moment what reality would be like if there were no design, if there were no Person behind the world seeking to make Himself known. What would be different about life?
4. Ultimate Reality is relational. Why does this matter? What would be different about reality if God were not Triune?
5. A life committed to love is a life in line with Ultimate Reality. What part of your own life feels most out of step with that design? Who is hard for you to love? Where are most tempted to tell yourself "I need to put myself first."
Bah-humbug!
The everlasting words of the most famous curmudgeon in the English language, Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character of Charles Dickens beloved Christmas Carol, always spat out with a distaste and contempt. Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge!
Bah-humbug!
My wife is currently reading this story to our children, and this week I was listening to her read and thought: where did that word come from? So, I looked it up. A “humbug”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “hoax” or “trick” or any “thing which is not really what it pretends to be.”
Why does Scrooge hate Christmas? Because it is just nonsense; he despises that he has to pay his clerk a day’s wages on Christmas, even though he takes the day off. When men visit him asking him to give to charity in the name of Christmas, he chases them out. He thinks he is being robbed because, of course, in his mind “Christmas” is just a hoax, a bit of nonsense. Anything that doesn’t improve his financial position is all humbug; clever ruses to pull a man away from what is real. And for Scrooge, what is real, what really matters, of course, is money. Because money in modern life is power. Money is how you maintain control, get what you want, and guard yourself against the unforeseen. Thus, everything else, be it religion, or charity, or friendship, or romance…all is just a fantasy to distract you from reality.
Nobody likes being tricked. Imagine you try to play a board game with your family, but someone swapped the rule book out with a different game. You are trying to play Monopoly, but you only have the rules for the game of Sorry!. Eventually, as you tried to play the game, you’d come to realize that the rule book you have been reading doesn’t make sense of the game. That is what Scrooge thinks everyone else is doing as they go around, giving money to charity, spreading cheer, and believing that Christmas represents something sacred and divine. You’re playing the game wrong, Scrooge thinks, you have misunderstood how the real world works.
What is “the real world”? Clear aside all the customs, all the cultural clutter, all the periphery, push the debris and decorations aside till you get to the solid, bedrock of reality…and what do you find?
What is Ultimate Reality? It is Rational, Relational, and Right Here.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1:1-3
Introduction to John
What is this book? The author tells us his purpose in writing this book much later:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. - John 20:30-31
John has written his gospel so that you may be convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, and that He is the divine Son of God. And he holds out this promise to us all: if you believe this, you’ll find life in his name. Life, eternal life—a kind of life that is not only desirable because of its duration (as in, it does not end), but also because of its quality (”I have come that they may have life and have it to the full”).
And John begins his account of Jesus by going back not only to His birth, but back to the very beginning of the world.
In the beginning…
John is obviously wanting to echo Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In fact, the gospel of Mark starts similarly, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And, Matthew’s gospel (literally translated) begins, “The book of Genesis of Jesus Christ.” Luke, after recording the birth of Christ, charts out His genealogy all the way back to Adam, who he calls “the son of God.” (Luke 3:38)
All four gospel authors are wanting to tie their story to the opening words of the first book of the Bible. Why? Because the arrival of Jesus Christ is like a new creation, a new age. Through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, God is re-creating this world into the New Creation. Jesus is the new Adam, the new Israel, the new Moses, and He is leading us to the New Promised Land. Where the old story failed because of humanity’s sin, Jesus comes as the new humanity, free from sin, and therefore free from failure. He has not come to repeat the fall; He has come to do something new!
But, that doesn’t mean that He is new. In fact, John’s gospel wants to make it abundantly clear to you that the person of Jesus Christ is, quite literally, timeless. Here, John isn’t just trying to evoke the story of Genesis—He is actually pulling us back to it.
Why?
Because John is trying to disclose to us what Ultimate Reality is like, and he shows us that Ultimate Reality is (1) rational, (2) relational, and (3) right here.
Rational
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1:1
What is “the Word”? If we knew nothing else, just from this verse alone, we would see that John believes the “Word” isn’t just something, but someone. And this Someone is both with God and is God. We will come to that complexity in our next point.
But if we move our eyes down to John 1:14, we read this: “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 tells us clearly that the “Word” is the Son of God who takes on flesh, becomes the man Christ Jesus.
But why use that title for Jesus? A “word” is an abstraction; Jesus is a person.
Obviously, John is wanting to tell us something significant about God, Himself, and about the Son of God more particularly. Consider God’s affinity for words.
In the beginning, how does God create all things? By words: Let there be light…
Immediately after creating Adam, how does God initiate their relationship? By words: Be fruitful and multiply.
But consider what this tells us about Ultimate Reality. From the very beginning God has been a God who uses words. The Greek word for “Word” here is logos. It is where we get our word “logic” from, and could also mean “argument, reason, or meaning.” This means that Ultimate Reality is inherently rational. Life is rational in two senses of the word: (1) design and (2) disclosure.
Design
Meaning, life is not meaningless, random, or chaotic. There is a Mind behind this universe. If you dropped a bucket of marbles onto a typewriter and read what was written afterwards, the sheer chaos would convince you that there was no pattern or design there. This is the perspective of Macbeth: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But, were you to sit down and read Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, you would not think: someone must have dumped a bunch of marbles randomly on a typewrite to make this. The design and intelligence behind the design would be self-evident. **In the beginning there was a Logos, and “3 All things were made through him,” (John 1:3a).
And here it might good to consider why John uses this specific term Logos. At the time of John’s writing, the word Logos was a loaded-term. In the Greek speaking world, for hundreds of years philosophers had debated whether or not there was a meaning to life, a reason for living, a design—a Logos. And different philosophical schools had different perspectives. Some believed that the meaning of life was found in pleasure and experiences (Epicureans). Others believed that it was found in controlling your passions and embracing responsibility (Stoics). Some believed that a god or the gods gave us a Logos, and some denied that there even was a Logos. And some today feel the same way. When they read the story of their life, it doesn’t feel like an ordered story, it feels like a bucket of marbles. If you sit down to play a board game, and others insist that there is a point to the game and there are rules, but it seems like the game doesn’t work, seems like the rules keep changing, there are two options: (1) there are no rules, there is no point, (and if that is true, the “winner” of the game is just whoever is willing to realize that there are no rules to pursue whatever end they find most enjoyable) or (2) the design of the game is being violated. People aren’t playing by the rules, by the Logos of the game, and that’s why it is going so poorly.
And the term for this violation in the Bible is “sin.” When we deviate from the design that has been given, we are sinning. And this problem comes from three sources: the society we inhabit which normalizes the disorder (the world); our own selfish appetites and bent thinking (the flesh); and spiritual intelligence bent on maligning the game (the devil). This unholy trinity wants to destroy the Logos, the design.
But John comes along and makes a radical claim: there is a Logos, but it isn’t found in your own experiences, it isn’t found in your moral efforts, it isn’t found in a set of principles or laws; it is found in a Person—God Himself, and He has not remained distant, but He has come to make Himself known to you.
Disclosure
In the beginning was the Word tells us not only that God has a design to the world, and desires to be made known to us through communication, evidence, and reason.
Through His words, God can act, can relate, can accomplish His will. And you, made in God’s image by God’s words, are similar. Think of what you can do with your words: you can make promises, you can give orders, you can tell someone you love them, or you can reveal what you are like—you can disclose your mind, your heart, your likes and dislikes, all by your words. You can go to the ice cream shop and say: “I’ll take two scoops of rocky road, please.” And then you can sit down with another person and use your words to commune with them—our word “communicate”, to share or exchange information, is derived from the word “commune.” For us to have a relationship with another—even if we are mute—we must find a way to communicate, because words are how we commune.
But our words are imperfect and imprecise. Sometimes we muddle our words. And sometimes our words prove weak or untrue. We could say, “Two scoops of rocky road, please,” and they may reply: “Sorry, we don’t have that.” What do you do then? Unless you’d like to make everyone very uncomfortable, you can’t reply: “Let there be rocky road.” We may have every intention of sitting down with our friend and explaining something very important to us, but we may do a poor job of using words to bring our thoughts out, and so your listener has a false impression of what you are like, or your words may do the opposite of what you intend. Wife: “Do you like this dress?” Husband: “It’s not that bad.”
But what if your words were not limited by their lack of power, and what if they always perfectly reflected what was in your mind? What if your words were a precise picture, a flawless revelation of your truest self? Well, then your words would be like God’s words.
God’s Word always accomplishes its purpose (Isa 55:10-11). His Word never writes a check that His power cannot cash. And God’s word always perfectly reveals His own mind, who He is. This is why David, in Psalm 56, can praise God’s word (Ps 56:4, 10). To praise anything other than God is to commit idolatry. To say: God, I trust in your word, I love your word, I praise your word, is the same thing to say, God, I trust in you, I love you, I praise you. Why? Because God’s Word is a disclosure of Himself. Here He is.
So, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth the clearest Word, the most profound revelation of Himself. Jesus is the Word of God, the ultimate revelation of what God is like to us. The book of Colossians tells us that Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). John will later tell us in vs. 18 that no one has ever seen God, but Jesus has made him known to us. The life, deeds, and words of the man Jesus Christ is the clearest disclosure of the heart, nature, and will of God. He is the Word.
Have you ever considered how strange it is that God revealed Himself to us through a book? Through words? It seems relatively inefficient; to read God’s word, you must first be able to read, and to read, there must be books, and for there to be books, there must be a written language. So much of missionary work throughout history and up to this day has focused on translations, creating schools to teach basic education, and even creating written forms of language—the Russian language today, for example, came into its written form because of the Christian missionary Cyril invented the written language to give the Slavonic people the word of God. It is becoming increasingly popular for people to use psychedelic drugs to have a spiritual experience—Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in America right now, frequently recommends the use of mushrooms to bring about transcendent spiritual experiences. Why doesn’t God commune with us that way? Why can’t we have an immediate experience where we can bypass our rational minds—”turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Because God is a person, not a force. Christianity involves experience. And there is a danger of over-intellectualizing our faith and downplaying the heart. But, if you want to know a person, want to experience a person—what must you do? You must speak with them. You cannot sit with someone and ignore everything they say, but then tell them: I don’t want your words, I just want to experience you. The more you talk, the less I am interested in you.
In Christianity, experience is important, but experience is always controlled by the Word and subservient to the Word. God is not a force, He is not a feeling; He is a person.
Relational
Consider the complexity of precisely who this Word is once more: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” (John 1:1). This is one of the classic texts that Christians have used to defend not only the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, but also the larger concept of the Trinity. Of course, the Spirit isn’t mentioned here, but we see the idea that God can somehow exist with a plurality of persons while remaining a single being. The Word can be both with God—so, He is in some sense distinct from God. Yet also, He is God.
An early heretic in the church named Arius couldn’t figure out how to reconcile those two things, they seemed like a contradiction, so he argued that Jesus could not be divine, but was instead the first creation that God made, who then became the agent God used to created everything else. So God the Father created the Son of God, and then the Son created everything else. So, Arius argued, the Word here is like God, but not God. This is actually the exact same understanding that Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses have today. This was the principle issue for why the council of Nicaea was called, and the Nicene creed was the church’s response to Arius. The creed explains that Jesus is truly God, “of the same substance of the Father” and is not created. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses will deny that, they both believe that Jesus is a creature, not of the same substance of the Father. And you may wonder: How could they deny it? It says it right here, plain as day in John 1? They’ll try to argue about Greek translations, which moves the conversation into a realm that most of us don’t feel competent in, but let me point you to one simple argument that doesn’t require any knowledge of Greek.
All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1:3
This gives us a categorical statement about everything: All things are made through the Son of God. But the second phrase provides an even stronger categorical statement: without him was not any thing made that was made. This invites us to consider two classifications of existence: there are things that are made, created, and things that are not made, not created. Something that isn’t created either does not exist or has always existed, eternally. What is uncreated? What has existed from all eternity? God. He is the only being who qualifies for that classification.
But, all things that belong to the alternative category: All things that are made—that is, whatever had a beginning, a creation—would not exist apart from Him, has come into existence through His work.
Now, if the Son of God was created by the Father, then He would have had a beginning, would have been one of the subjects “that was made.” But if the Son is the agent responsible for creating all things that are made, then He himself cannot be a thing that was made. And if He is uncreated, has no beginning, then He is God.
Thus, the classic, historic understanding of God is that He is one God who exists as three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Why does this matter? First, because God is a person, how He reveals Himself to us matters.
Second, this shows us that Ultimate Reality is inherently relational. What do I mean? Because God has eternally existed in a tri-personal communion, that means that He has always existed in relationship—and not any relationship, but a relationship of perfect love, delight, and joy. With no imperfections, no sin, no arrogance—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit all love one another perfectly, infinitely, eternally. And it is out of the overflow of that nuclear reactor of loving relationship, that God creates the universe. Which means that Ultimate Reality isn’t only rational, but relational.
Or to put it more simply, in his letter to his church, John can say: “God is love.” That statement would be impossible if God were not triune. To love requires someone or something else. This is why Islam would never claim that God is love—Allah is power, strength, but his love only comes after he creates. It is secondary to Him. Or consider in a secular worldview, where life arises out of time and chance, and the strong dominating the weak—”love” is just a bio-chemical reaction in your brain that serves the purpose of survival. Ultimate reality in that is power; violence; domination—whatever it takes to get ahead. Love in this perspective is secondary.
If love is not essential to Ultimate Reality, than all acts of Love—unless they serve the higher end of Power or Self-preservation, are actually cutting against reality. The person who devotes their life to serving others, who sacrifices money, time, opportunities, with no thought of how it may benefit themselves, they are actually fools.
In the first Harry Potter novel, the villain Voldemort tells the young Harry Potter: “There is no good or evil, there is only power and those to weak to seek it.” That’s Scrooge’s perspective.
Good and evil, those are humbugs, hoaxes, tricks to keep you docile and weak. Those are just made up rules that other people playing the board game have tricked you with so that they could get ahead. If you live a life of love, you’ll likely have to sacrifice and go without. And that’s true.
Yet the whole Harry Potter series and Dickens’ Christmas Carol are just a thinly veiled arguments for why a life of love, friendship and sacrifice is always superior to a life of power, isolation and selfishness.
Kids, there is one cookie left on the plate. You know it would be so good to have it for yourself. But you also know how happy it would make your sibling if they had the cookie. What do you do?
Or, you are with your friends. You notice another kid who has no friends. If you invite them over, they will feel included, you might even make a new friend, but it is also hard and scary and maybe it will kind of spoil the time you have with the friends you like?
Maybe you feel exhausted by showing love, patience, forgiveness to your spouse, to your friend, to your family, and there is this voice that tells you: you need to look out for yourself, put your own needs first, out in the real world no one else is going to take care of you.
Is that what the real world is like?
Christianity tells us that Love, not Power or domination, is Ultimate. Listen to John’s preamble to his “God is love” statement: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love,” (1 John 4:7-8).
If you fail to live a life of love, you have failed to understand how life works, what reality is! You don’t know God, the being upon whom all reality sits, the Designer, the Logos. God is love, and His love is not reserved only for Himself in his triune being, but His love extends to us. It makes sense for the Father to love the Son—they are perfect! But loving us came at quite the price. God made this world and made us with a purpose, with a design. We are supposed to be like Him, to know Him, to love Him, to be in communion with Him. So this world is meant to be a world of love! But, we have deviated from that design. We insist on our own way, we fight, we curse, we lie, we put ourselves ahead of others, we ignore God, we dishonor God. And that has caused this sense that our lives and this world feels so chaotic and haphazard. It isn’t because there is no design, it is because we have strayed so far from it.
But God is so loving that He chose not to leave us to ourselves, but He came down. The advent season is where we meditate on the miracle of the Incarnation and God’s heart to be with us. But the purpose of Christmas culminates in Easter. Jesus came to be a perfect example of God’s love to us, even when loving us meant it came at the price of His own life; Jesus came in order to die in our place. Love cost him. But love also overcomes; in Easter, Jesus resurrects from the dead and conquers Satan, forgives our sins, and overcomes the world! Jesus shows us that love—because it always aligns with Ultimate Reality—always wins, even if it costs us.
Right Here
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. - 1 John 4:10
But notice how personal John makes this…He loved us…for our sins. It is great to hear of stories of people learning this lesson of love abstractly, but the story of the gospel is not just another inspiring story of someone courageously sacrificing for a general group of people, but for you in particular.
Which means that God’s love is not shed abroad the created world in general. It is aimed specifically at persons. At you. God so loved you that He sent His only son to suffer and die in your place, to pay for your sins, so that you could be reconciled to Him.
Ultimate Reality is not out there, where you must earn it, must achieve it, must be worthy for it. It has come down in the person of Jesus Christ, obliterated the sins that have separated you from Him, and has drawn near. All you need to do is to receive it.
