John 1.1-5

Not far from here, on the rue Saint-Denis, there’s a cool little place called the Musée des illusions. Basically it’s a museum filled with nothing but optical and auditory illusions, and it’s endlessly fun to see how easily your mind plays tricks on you and convinces you that you’re seeing one thing when in fact you’re seeing another.

It’s fun, but it’s also a little unsettling, to see how inaccurate our perception often is. And if that’s true for something as clear and objective as vision, how true must it be for things that are less tangible, like our way of looking at the world around us and really understanding what’s happening?

It might be surprising to know that this is one of the reasons why we celebrate Advent. We celebrate Advent because we want to celebrate seeing the world rightly.

Advent is a Latin word that means “coming”. It’s the period in the year when we reflect on Christ’s coming, but before that, on what it was to wait for his coming. God’s people waited for centuries to see the fulfillment of his promise to send them a Savior—and we’re waiting too. We’re waiting for that same Savior to return. So we need to learn how to wait.

But our waiting is much easier than that of the people of Israel, because he’s already come once, so we know what to look forward to. And for all the joys of heaven that are promised to us, the main joy we look forward to isn’t the joy of perfect health, or eternal life, or perfect peace. The main joy we’re waiting for—the source of every other joy we will enjoy forever—isn’t a thing at all, but a person.

So we’re going to spend the next few weeks thinking about the person whom we celebrate at Christmas: Jesus Christ. We’ll be doing this in the first chapter of John’s gospel, the prologue in which John explains in great depth exactly who Jesus Christ is, and why he is worthy of being celebrated.

And very simply, in today’s passage, John 1.1-5, we see four things: Jesus is God, Jesus is Creator, Jesus is Life, and Jesus is Light.

Jesus Is God (v. 1-2)

When John writes his gospel, he’s writing to a mixed audience. It’s clear that he’s writing both to Jews and Gentiles, because he often takes time to explain Jewish customs, or translates terms from Aramaic to Greek. He intentionally begins his gospel by speaking to his readers in a way they will all understand—although for different reasons, depending on who they are.

V. 1:

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.

So let’s think about how Jews would read this for a minute. The Old Testament was the Bible the Jews had at this point in time, and if you know the Old Testament at all, you might be familiar with its very first verse, Genesis 1.1, which says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So this is an obvious callback to the very first verse in the Bible: In the beginning, God did something—and we’ll get to that in a second.

But first: why “the Word”? In the beginning was “the Word”.

John is doing more than one thing at the same time, which he will do over and over in this gospel. If you’ve never read the gospel of John, it’s a fascinating book, because on the surface it’s not a difficult book to understand. Jesus says some hard things, but usually what he’s saying and what he’s doing is clear. But with almost every passage in this book, if you take a harder look, and study it a bit more deeply, you realize that there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface. John’s often doing several different things at once when he writes.

And that’s what he’s doing here.

He speaks of “The Word”, first of all, because the Jews would have been familiar with this idea. The main way God always spoke to his people in the Old Testament was that he spoke to them. He spoke to Abraham, he spoke to Moses, he spoke through the prophets. Speaking of “God’s Word” was a way of referring to the message God wanted to send to his people: what God wanted them to see and know about him.

But this term wasn’t only significant for the Jews.

For the Greeks, it meant something too, though it was something different. At the time, there was a concept in Greek philosophy called the “logos”, which translated is, “the Word.” For them, “the Word” was an impersonal principle of Reason that gave order to the universe. It was the force driving everything in existence, the animating energy behind all things.

Now of course John doesn’t mean it in this way— “the Word”, for John, isn’t impersonal at all, but very personal—but since he’s writing to a mixed audience which would include both Jews and Greeks, he decides to reappropriate these ideas, common to both groups and summed up in the same word, and deepen it.

To the Jews, he says, “God’s Word isn’t just an expression of God’s wisdom or his will; God’s Word, as I’m using the term, is God himself.”

To the Greeks, he says, “You’ve heard of the Word. But this ‘Word’ that you imagine gave order to the universe is in fact much deeper, much greater, than you think.”

Now I’m going to skip ahead a minute just to clarify where John is going, because we won’t get there for a couple weeks. In v. 14 and 17, John says this:

14 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… 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

In this prologue, John wants it to be clear that when he speaks about “the Word”, he’s not talking about a message, and he’s not talking about an impersonal force: he’s talking about Jesus Christ.

So when John says, “In the beginning was the Word,” he’s saying that beginning in the very first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1.1, when he says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Jesus was there. The Word was with God.

And he goes even further; not only was the Word with God; the Word was God.

Jesus Christ is God himself.

Now of course if you think about this even for a moment, you’ll run up against a logical problem: how can Jesus be both with God, and God? I don’t say “I’m with myself,” I say, “I am myself.” The Bible says that God sent Jesus Christ; how can Jesus Christ be sent by God, and yet still be God himself?

It’s a tricky question, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer.

Basically, it’s this. God is one God, and this one true God has for all eternity manifested himself in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Father; the Spirit is neither the Son, nor the Father. But at the same time, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God.

Do you follow me? Yeah, neither do I.

And that’s okay—we don’t need to understand how that’s possible, but the Bible clearly says that not only is it possible, it’s true.

That’s the concept that John is introducing here. This “Word” is eternal; in the beginning (that is, before the creation of the world), the Word was with God—and not only that, the Word was God. The Son has always been with God, and the Son has always been God. Jesus Christ is God. That’s the first thing we see here.

Jesus Is Creator (v. 3)

The second thing is an extension of the first, and it’s another callback to the creation story in Genesis 1. V. 3:

3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Every single thing that has ever existed or will ever exist owes its existence to Jesus Christ—why? Because he made it all.

To put it another way, when we read Genesis 1, and we see God say, “Let there be light,” Jesus is the one who turned the light on. When God says, “Let the dry land appear” out of the water, Jesus is the one who made the dry land appear. When God says, “Let there be animals of all kinds, on land and in the water,” Jesus is the one who made the animals. When God says, “Let us make man in our own image,” Jesus is the one who made the first man and the first woman.

Everything that exists—including you and me—was made by Jesus Christ.

One of the things we celebrate at Christmas is the fact that the Son of God came to earth in human form, as a human baby. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and the virgin Mary carried him in her womb for nine months.

Think about this for a minute. For nine months, Jesus is a fetus, growing in the womb of a young woman he himself created. When he’s born, he’s delivered by a young woman through a process he himself designed. When she changes him for the first time, the hands that change him are hands that he himself made.

The Creator God comes to live amongst his creation—even to be dependent on his creation to live. It’s the most incredible event in human history.

And not only did Jesus Christ make all things; he maintains all things. Hebrews 1.3 says,

[Christ] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

EVERYTHING. From the greatest to the smallest, from the most significant to the most mundane. The first time Mary nursed him, she could do it because Christ was telling her body to make milk.

If your heart is still beating in your chest (and I presume that it is), that heart beats because Jesus is telling it to beat. If the world is still turning on its axis, it’s because Jesus is telling it to turn. When the sun rose this morning, it’s because Jesus told it to rise.

Jesus Is Life (v. 4a)

The fact that all things were made through Christ brings us to an obvious truth—not only did he create all things, not only does he continue to maintain his creation, but he brings life to that creation. V. 4:

4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

Now there are obviously two aspects to this verse, and we’ll look at them separately. First: in him was life.

A minute ago we said that Christ sustains the world he created. And he does this indiscriminately: he sustains our lives, but he also sustains plants and animals and mountains and oceans. Every human being that has life has it through Christ, and Christ does not demand that we believe in him to keep our hearts beating.

But there is another life that he brings, and it is mainly this life John is referring to here. (It’s this life to which he will return over and over in this gospel.)

We can see what he’s talking about by looking at its opposite, which we also see early in the book of Genesis. If you remember, in chapter 2, God creates human beings, and he tells them they can eat from any tree that he has created except for one. He says in Genesis 2.17: “…of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Now of course that’s not immediately true: Adam and Eve continued to live long after they ate from that tree. But in the moment when they disobeyed God by eating from the tree, they suffered a different kind of death: a spiritual death—a poison which changed everything about them, and everyone who would come after them.

Here’s what we need to see: Jesus’s coming is the antidote to that poison. It was the reversal of that spiritual death.

Paul said it this way in Ephesians 2.1-2a, 4-5:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked… 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…

Christ gives us life. He keeps our hearts beating, he keeps our lungs beating. But he was already doing that before he took on a human nature; he did that from the very beginning of creation.

When he came to this earth as a human being, he came to make us fully alive. Not just physically alive, but totally and eternally alive. Outside of faith in Christ there is temporary survival—but there is no true life outside of him.

Real life—the real, abundant life Jesus promises—is only found in him.

Part of that life is, simply put, salvation. It is the gift that Christ gave us, by living a perfect life and being punished in our place for our sins, and giving us his life so that we can be declared righteous by God and live eternally with him. That is the life he has promised us, for all eternity, when he returns: life in a world where there is no death, no sickness, no pain, no mourning, but only joy and peace in him, forever.

Jesus Is Light (v. 4b-5)

But that can seem awfully ethereal to us, can’t it? It’s hard to even imagine it, much less benefit from it today. And that’s why I said that this eternal life is only part of the life that we find in Christ.

The other part—the part John focuses on in this passage—is very much for today: it is the ability to see the world rightly, as God sees it.

V. 4 again:

4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So again, this is a callback to the creation narrative—the first thing God says at creation is, Let there be light. And Christ makes the light.

But again, that’s not all he is doing. This isn’t just a reminder that Jesus is God the Creator. There is a reason John uses the word “light” to describe Jesus, as we see again and again in his gospel, and the reason is obvious.

A couple years ago we were on vacation near Bordeaux, and one day we went to a corn maze with the whole family. It was great fun: we found our way through, there were some puzzles to solve, it was great. Now we also had tickets to come back later on and do the maze again at night. So Jack and I did that. It was a very different experience, doing that maze after the sun had set. It was pitch black—we were in the middle of nowhere—and all I had was the little flashlight on my phone. It was a little unsettling.

There’s a reason why kids are afraid of the dark: you never know what can be hiding in the shadows when it’s dark. But whatever scared us at night doesn’t usually scare us so badly in the day, because the sun illuminates everything, and shows us what’s there.

Or think of it this way. We’ve all had the experience of walking through the house in the middle of the night, and seeing something that looks exactly like a person standing near us. We jump, we spin around, we turn on the light, and with the light on we see that it was really just a coat hanging from the coat rack.

Light shows us the world as it actually is.

The Bible reminds us over and over again that we do not see well. And it’s not just because we have poor vision; we don’t see well, mainly, because left to ourselves we are walking in darkness (figuratively speaking). Ever since the first man and woman rebelled against God and sin entered into the world,  every human being that came after has had something like spiritual cataracts. We can see the world, but we don’t see it well; sin covers our eyes, keeping us from seeing the world as it is. Not only that, but the world itself has been corrupted by sin, plunged into darkness. On our own, we’re like people with cataracts trying to find our way through a corn maze in the middle of the night with no light.

And that is why the coming of Jesus Christ is so significant. The promise of a Savior is the promise of light. Eight centuries before Christ came, the prophet Isaiah wrote this prophecy (Isaiah 9.2, 6-7):

2   The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,

on them has light shone…

6  For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

7  Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time forth and forevermore.

God promised light in the darkness. Light to show us the world as it really is. And he said that when this light came, it would not come in the form of mysticism; it wouldn’t come in the form of vague philosophy; it wouldn’t come in the form of an intense feeling or an emotional experience or intellectual rigor. He said that when the light came, it would come in the form of a King. A King whose goal is not to amass wealth and power for himself, but to establish justice and peace, to care for the people under his reign. A King both good enough to show his people the right way to live, the way he created them to live, and a King who is powerful enough to keep the darkness at bay.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

(The word translated “overcome” in the ESV is most often used to convey understanding or acceptance, as in the French: les ténèbres ne l’ont pas accueillie, or in an alternative note in the NIV: the darkness has not understood it.)

This is a truth many of us have a hard time with. We like the idea of illumination. We like the thought that we are able to see things as they are. But we don’t like the truth of the Bible, that in order to see things as they are, in order to be “illuminated,” we have to submit to a King. Jesus will later say (in John 3.19) that left to their own devices, people love the darkness rather than the light, because their works are evil, and the light exposes that evil. The light that allows us to see the world as it is also forces us to see ourselves as we are.

So we have a choice—a choice not dissimilar to that given to many characters in many stories throughout history. Seeing things as they are might be frightening, because we may not like what we see, at least at first.

But we still want to see, because we all know deep down that seeing things as they are is better than continuing in the darkness of ignorance. So if we want to see things as we are, there is only one place we can go.

If you want to see things as they really are, look at Jesus. He is the light that shines in the darkness. Much of Jesus’s teaching in the gospels consists of Jesus correcting misconceptions about the world. We remember the Sermon on the Mount, the number of times he said, “You’ve heard it said that… But I say to you, the problem is even deeper than that. You think one thing is going on, when in fact there’s a lot more to it.” If you want to see the world rightly, look at Jesus.

If you want to see yourselves rightly, look at Jesus. The image that always comes to mind when I think of this is a bit crude, but I think it’s appropriate; it’s the idea of quality control. When you’re making something, you need to take stock of how well the work is going; that’s quality control. The foundation of all quality control is the established standard of what the thing you’re making should be. There is a norm you are meant to adhere to, and it’s by comparing the thing to that norm that you can know how it’s going.

Well, the standard of humanity’s quality control is Jesus Christ. The standard we had to follow was first given by God in his law, and then Jesus came and showed us that the Law was even more demanding than the people of Israel had imagined.

He is the only human being who has never sinned, who is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature (Hebrews 1.3). So it is only in comparison to Christ that we can see what we are truly like. We might think we’re “good people”—but how does that idea stack up next to the perfect standard Jesus sets? Not very well: no human being who has ever lived will pass that quality control. We need something else. We need a Savior to right our wrongs.

And a Savior is exactly what God sent, in the person of Jesus Christ. Which tells us what kind of a God he is. If you want to see the world rightly, look at Jesus. If you want to see yourselves rightly, look at Jesus. And if you want to see God rightly, look at Jesus.

This God is a God of perfect righteousness and perfect justice. He would have been right to punish every human being throughout history for our rebellion against him, for all eternity. But that’s not what he did. He sent his Son, the light into the darkness, holiness into sin, life into death, so that he might take the punishment instead of his people.

The reason we talk about sin so much in the church is not to make us feel bad; it’s not to show us how horribly wicked we all are. The reason we talk about sin so much is to remind us how incredibly good God is. He didn’t have to show us this grace. He didn’t have to redeem and reclaim and forgive people he created.

But he did, because he is good. He is life, and he is light. Light cannot do anything but shine.

So the fundamental call on each and every one of us today is to turn our eyes toward Jesus.

Maybe this morning you’re doubting whether you can come to him or not. You can; that’s why Jesus came. Look to him.

Maybe you’re reading this text and realizing you have taken his grace horribly for granted, treating it as normal when it is anything but. Look to Jesus; remember the gift he is.

Maybe you’re reading this text and you’re simply overwhelmed by God’s goodness to us in Christ. If that’s you, you’re where you need to be. Keep looking.

No matter where we are, no matter what’s happening in our lives, this is our call. Look to Jesus—God himself, our Creator, our life, and our light.