Jesus, the Incarnation of God

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My favorite kind of hot sauce has gotten harder to find in some of the stores here. And as I tell you this, sometimes when I make comments like that, things will appear in my office. Nobody needs to go buy anything because I was able to order hot sauce online.

It was great. And so I ordered some big bottles so that I wouldn’t run out. Ordered a couple of those, and they came right before Christmas.

Now, what’s funny about this, and why it matters to what I’m talking to you about this morning, is that when I opened the box that it came in, I’m in the living room, I’m cutting the box open, Carly Jo is just right there, because she’s learned, Charla has taught her about going out and getting the mail, and getting packages off the porch, because it happens all the time. And so, Carly Jo’s just right there wanting to see what’s in the box. I cut the box open, I open it, she looks in and her face lights up.

and she grabs one of the bottles and hugs it close and says, sauce, sauce, I need that out. She was so excited and then she ran. I had to grab her because she’s running off through the house with the glass bottle of sauce and I really didn’t want any of it to break even though I had backups.

But Charla came out of the kitchen and said, did she just yell, yay, sauce? I said, yeah, and she hugged the bottle. And she said, well, that’s it.

She’s definitely yours. Not that that was in doubt, mind you, but we say things like that all the time. I’ll say things like that to her.

One of the kids will do something. I’ll say, that one’s yours right there. She’ll say it to me.

That one’s yours. They’re acting just like you. And to some extent, each of my children, for better or worse, act just like me at times.

They give a little glimpse into my personality. Now, don’t look at everything they do and assume that they’re being just like me. A lot of it comes from Charla’s side.

Not her specifically, but her side. But they do things that give a glimpse of what their father is like, just like I do. I’ve told you before that it’s so weird to me how many times I open my mouth and Bart Byrns’ voice comes out of it, especially when I’m dealing with the children.

it’s uh it’s amazing how we turn into our parents a lot of times but a lot of us give a glimpse in our behaviors and our preferences and the things we like to eat we give a glimpse of who our fathers are john wrote about that very thing with regard to jesus except with jesus he didn’t just give us a glimpse where we could look at him and say oh this part of who he is illustrates something about the Father. Oh yeah, that part tells us a little something about the Father. We look at Jesus and everything about Jesus and who He is and what He’s done shows us the truth of who the Father is.

The word that we use in theology is the incarnation for God to become a man. And that’s exactly what happened when Jesus Christ came to earth. Jesus Christ became a man and showed us by everything He is and everything He’s done, exactly what the Father is like.

We’re not just glimpsing little visions of who the Father is. We see what we would call, in our terms, the spitting image of His Father. And John writes about that.

If you would, turn with me to John chapter 1 this morning. John chapter 1. We’re not going to end up going through the entirety of John chapter 1 as I bring this series to a close probably next week.

But I do have today and next week a few more things I want to share with you about the coming of Christ in this series that we started back at Christmas time. John chapter 1, if you turn there in your Bibles, if you don’t have a Bible, it’ll be on your screen, or if you’re using a device, there’s a link in our bulletin that’ll get you right there. But we’re going to look at John chapter 1, and we’re going to start in verse 12.

We’re really going to focus in on verse 14 this morning, but we’re going to look at verses 12 through 14, just for some context. And if you would stand with me, I don’t think I said that, but y’all know the drill. Starting in verse 12, it says, But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And you may be seated.

That really is the focus of what we’re going to look at this morning is verse 14. The Word became flesh. If you go back to the earliest verses of this chapter that we started looking at back in early December, this idea of the Word, he’s talking about Jesus Christ, and that becomes clearer when we get to verse 14, the Word becoming flesh, because there’s nobody else in the history of creation, and certainly not in the history of Scripture, that we could look at and credibly say that was the Word, as the Word is described in the first three verses, who became flesh.

So what he’s saying here in verse 14, the point he’s trying to make that’s made several other places in the New Testament, is that Jesus came and gave us in His incarnation, which means His birth, His coming in human form. When Jesus came, He gave us this incredibly clear picture of who God is. He was God in human flesh right in front of us where we could see exactly who our God is.

And so how did Jesus give us such a clear picture of who God is? It tells us, first of all, that when Jesus came here, God became a man. That’s how Jesus was able to display this because He wasn’t showing us anything that He wasn’t.

He wasn’t just a man trying to explain to us truth about God. He was God who became a man to show us who God is. You understand the difference.

And there are certain things I can explain to you that are not me. For example, Wednesday night we talked about, I answered the question, what does it mean if a church is woke? And I prefaced all of that by saying, I don’t espouse any of those ideas.

I don’t hold any of these ideas. I’m just explaining them to you. So you’re really getting it secondhand.

I can do my best to explain to you what all that terminology means, but not being someone who believes any of that stuff, it’s really hard to explain it with the same passion as somebody who does, right? But there are things that because of who I am, I can demonstrate these to you. I’m bad at fishing.

I enjoy it, but I’m bad at fishing, so I can demonstrate to you how to fish badly. I can demonstrate to you how I take care of my children, because that’s part of who I am. That’s at the core of who I am.

You get this idea, I hope. There are things that are part of our nature, that are second nature to us, and so we can demonstrate them, as opposed to just telling somebody about them. Every other human teacher that has come to earth, including me, is telling you something about God, that we’ve learned.

But Jesus Christ, rather than just being a man who was telling us some things about God, was actually demonstrating by who He is, who God is. And so that alone makes Him unique. And this word, word, that we see there.

I realize that’s confusing. This word, word, that we see all throughout chapter 1. I mentioned to you before when we were looking at the first few verses, is the word logos in Greek, logos or logos?

I hear it pronounced two different ways. And it’s a word that John picked on purpose when he was describing Jesus because it’s a word that meant something to everybody that heard it at that time. To the Greeks who would read this, it described the ultimate reason behind the universe.

To the Jews, it was a reference to the activities of God when He showed up and showed out and demonstrated to people who He was in a mighty way. So everybody that heard this word, this logos, would understand that he’s talking about somebody who’s more than just a person. It’s more than just a spoken word.

He’s talking about the power of God and the reason behind the universe. He’s very clearly from the beginning explaining that Jesus Christ is more than just an ordinary person. And it tells us in the first three verses of this chapter, if you go back to those, that the word that Jesus Christ was and is God.

John is not confused about this. By the way, John, one of the people who knew Jesus Christ, the best of any body on earth, was convinced that this man was God in human flesh. And for him to say flesh, we’re not just talking about in the abstract here.

A lot of times we will see that word used in the New Testament. It’s describing our sinful nature, sometimes our sinful desires. We might say that that person is walking in the flesh if they’re behaving in certain ways.

John’s not using that word in this way here. This word means actual skin, actual human tissue. And the way he’s using it, comparing it to the logos, the word, He’s saying that this reason, this power, this intelligence behind the universe, this unseeable God, this Spirit who created everything, at this point in verse 14, entered human flesh and became a literal human being.

So John argued that when Jesus came at Bethlehem, remember John chapter 1 differs from Matthew and Luke. He doesn’t really go into detail about what happened in Bethlehem. He explains why it’s important.

So John is telling us that when this child was born at Bethlehem, it was the God of the entire universe becoming a human being. Now there’s so much of this that’s still mysterious, but we need to understand fully God and fully man means He was completely God in every single way before Bethlehem. And then He came and took on a human nature so that He was human in every single way at Bethlehem or at conception without ever giving up part of being God.

How all that works, that’s beyond any of our pay grade. But the Bible teaches that he was fully God and became fully man without ceasing to be fully God. And a lot of religions and philosophies concern themselves with the idea of men becoming gods or becoming one with God.

Christianity is the only one that teaches that God became a man. And the reason why this is so important is because God became a man because there was no other option. This reinforces what Christianity teaches that says we couldn’t reach God on our own.

So many of the religions of the world as part of trying to become gods or trying to reach God, it’s all about what you have to work and accomplish and do and earn. And Christianity, in contrast, says that we are fallen and we are sinful. And on our best day, given our best effort, we can’t do anything to reach God and reconcile ourselves to Him.

For me, in my sin, to be reconciled to God required God to do all the work. I couldn’t get to Him. He had to come to me.

And He had to come to you. Not had to in the sense that He was obligated to, but had to in the sense that that was the only way it was going to happen. It was for God to become flesh.

Jesus came to us because we could not get to God. That’s why it’s so important to understand that when Jesus Christ came to earth, God became a human being, became a man. But it doesn’t stop there, because the very next thing he says after the Word became flesh was he says, and dwelt among us.

And what this tells us is that when Jesus came, when Jesus came to earth, God made his home among his people. God was willing to come and spend time with us. God was willing to act like he likes us.

I tell my wife from time to time, I like you. I say it sometimes to my kids too. And the first little bit of our relationship when I’d tell Charla, I like you.

I thought you loved me. I do, but I also like you. And they’re both important, right?

God was willing to come and spend time with us. It’s not just that He became a man so that He could accomplish what He needed to accomplish. Although Jesus had to become a man to come and die on the cross.

But He also became human to come and be among us. And this word dwelt is tied to the idea of the tabernacle in the Old Testament. Kathy, we were just talking about the tabernacle before church and I totally forgot I was talking about this this morning.

She’s telling me she’s got a model of the tabernacle. If I ever wanted to use it in a lesson, I kind of wish I had it here this morning. The tabernacle, if you’re unfamiliar, was a tent, basically.

A sacred tent that the Israelites carried around with them from place to place in the Old Testament. God gave them very specific, very strict instructions on how to construct it and how to move it. And they would carry it around with them from place to place.

And they would set it up when they settled in a place, and they would take it down when they prepared to move. And when they set it up, it was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. It was the place where the holy place was said to be in the center of the tabernacle before the temple was built, where God’s presence dwelt there among His people.

And that’s the place where the priests would go in and they would offer sacrifices. And they would offer sprinklings of blood and they would do all of these things to intercede, to make peace between God and His people. But the tabernacle was said to be where the Spirit of God dwelt.

And for them to pack up that tabernacle and take it with them and put it up everywhere they went, it was a constant, visible, physical reminder of the presence of God among them. It was something they needed because Israel was already prone to forget that God cared about them. If you’ve been part of our Wednesday night class, you’ve seen that over and over that Israel would run into a bump in the road and say, oh, God just brought us out here to leave us and abandon us and let us die in the desert.

This was part of the reminder that, hey, God has not forgotten you. He’s still here with you. It was something they could look at.

Well, when Jesus came, the Spirit of God no longer needed to dwell in the tabernacle. or the temple, God dwelt among us because Jesus Christ was there. God the Son was there in human flesh.

Now, the Apostle Paul writes about the body being a tabernacle, being a tent basically, and looking forward to taking this tent off one day. In Scripture, this is an idea of a dwelling place. And Jesus’ body was the tabernacle where God the Son lived and dwelt among God’s people.

And I submit to you, Jesus was the ultimate reminder that God has not forgotten us. Jesus Christ was the ultimate reminder that God had not forgotten Israel, and He’s the ultimate reminder that God has not forgotten us. Just like Israel, I’m sure we all get into situations in life where we feel like God has forgotten about us, where our circumstances just wear us down and we think, you know, if you were paying attention, this wouldn’t be happening.

And we know that’s not true. But what we know to be true and what we feel to be true are not always the same thing. The Bible says our hearts will lie to us.

If we ever think that God has forgotten us, all we have to do is remember that He sent His Son. Jesus Christ, God the Son, came in human flesh to be among us. And not only that, He paid the ultimate price for our forgiveness, and He did not do that just so that you and I would be abandoned.

But just by His physical presence leading up to His physical death, Just His physical presence among us is a reminder that God was at home among His people. This was the greatest possible expression of God being with us because God was literally making Himself at home among us. That’s why at Christmas time we talk about His name being called Emmanuel, God with us.

It’s not just in an abstract sense, Hey, I’m with you, with you guys in spirit. No, He literally was with us. And this would have been so important for them to remember at this time, for them to understand this at this time.

Because when Jesus Christ showed up, it was a period in Israel’s history where they had not heard any special prophetic revelation from God to the entire nation of Israel for about 400 years. That’s not to say that God wasn’t at work, that God wasn’t speaking, but as far as messages like we find in the Old Testament where God is speaking and directing the nation as a whole, everything had been quiet for about 400 years. Imagine not hearing from somebody for 400 years.

Would you think they forgot about you? Yeah. Sometimes sitting in a restaurant, they don’t bring your order for 400 seconds.

We start to think that they’ve forgotten about us. So imagine how important this reminder was to the people of Israel that God had not forgotten them. And it’s true for us as well.

God is at home among His people. Now today it’s the Holy Spirit. We are the tabernacle.

We are the temple. And the Holy Spirit lives within us. But Jesus coming to be a man was a powerful reminder.

and He dwelt among us. It was a powerful reminder that God had not forgotten them, that God had not given up on them, that God was still at work among His people. And then we see at the end of this verse, when Jesus came, God displayed the fullness of His glory.

It says, We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. See, when Jesus came, by the way He lived, And the way He spoke and the miracles that He performed, perform is not the right word for it, but the miracles that He did by His death and His resurrection, by everything that Jesus did, He showed us the power of God. He showed us who He is.

And He didn’t just show us a glimpse of the power of God. He showed us the power of God in all of its glory. Jesus was not partly God.

Some people will teach that today. Jesus wasn’t a lesser God. By the way, there are some groups that have completely changed the meaning of this text by adding words where they don’t belong.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God, which comes directly from the New World Translation that’s produced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because they teach that Jesus is a lesser God. Jesus is not a lesser God.

Jesus is not a half God. I get so irritated when I hear some intellectuals spouting off, or pseudo-intellectuals, spouting off in the letters to the editor of the newspaper or in the YouTube comments section, and they refer to Jesus as a demigod. Well, your demigod, excuse me, no actual Christian has ever taught that Jesus was half a god, alright?

You’ve already lost some credibility with me because you’re trying to attack what we believe and you don’t even know. Jesus is not a half God. He’s not a partial God.

He’s not a lesser God. It says that we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Jesus Christ. When we look at Jesus Christ, we are seeing exactly who God is, nothing less.

Unless you think it’s just one verse taken out of context and I’m making too much of it. This is all throughout the New Testament. John says just four verses later, For no one has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

Nobody has seen and experienced the fullness of who the Father is. Only by looking at the Son do we see all of that. It says Jesus is a reflection in full of who the Father is.

Hebrews chapter 1 says, God has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds, who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person and upholding all things by the word of His power. Now that idea of the express image, sort of like holding up a mirror, that He reflects the character of God just like a trustworthy mirror. I’m not talking about a funhouse mirror.

I’m not talking about one of those lighted mirrors in the cosmetic section that’s supposed to make you look better than you really are. I’m talking about a real mirror that we hold up and see exactly who we are. Jesus Christ is a faithful reflection of who the Father is.

The express image of His person, Hebrews says. Colossians 1. 15 says He is the image of the invisible God.

When so much of the world wants to worship idols, physical idols that reflect these unseen gods, the Apostle Paul said you don’t need an idol, you don’t need an image, you don’t need a statue or a painting to worship God or to know what He’s like because you’ve seen Him in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. And then in 2 Corinthians 4, it says, God commanded light to shine out of darkness and has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. Where?

In the face of Jesus Christ. God shone out of the darkness and shone His light and showed us exactly who He is. And where did He show us exactly who He is? In Jesus Christ. The Son is exactly like His Father.

Now, He’s not His Father. Don’t get confused. The Father and the Son.

This is not a, what do they call it, modalism, where there’s just one God who shows up in three different ways at different times. That’s not how this works. There is a Father, and there is a Son, and there is a Holy Spirit.

And they are all three God. There’s one God. They are all three persons of God.

Again, knowing the exact mechanics of it is above what I’m capable of. And just when I think I’ve grasped the Trinity, there it is out of my grasp again. But I understand the basic truths that are taught in Scripture, that these things are true.

And it’s no contradiction to say there’s one God and three persons. Jesus Christ is the Son, and He shows us exactly what the Father is like. So what we need to understand is that by Jesus Christ coming to earth, He made it possible in a way that it never had been possible before, and in a way that it is still not possible otherwise, to know God, to know what He’s like, and to have a relationship with Him.

Because Jesus showed us exactly what the Father’s like, and He dwelt among us. He made His home among us. Because of Jesus Christ, we can know God, and we can have a relationship with Him.

So much of the world treats God as a big mystery, and certainly there are things about God that will always be mysterious, because He’s the Creator. We’re creatures. We can’t fully understand God any better than my dog can fully understand every aspect of my decision-making, right?

There will always be things that are mysterious about God, but God Himself is not hiding from us. He’s made it known to us exactly who He is and exactly what He’s like. And He did that in Jesus Christ. And He did that because He desires to have a relationship with us.

He desires for us to know Him. He desires for us to walk with Him and have fellowship with Him. He desires for us to be at peace with Him.

By default, we are not at peace with Him. We are separated from Him by our sin. Our sin is anything that we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God.

Any form of disobedience whatsoever. And you and I are all guilty. Our sin separates us from Him.

Because He’s holy, He can’t just let it go. He can’t just ignore it. That sin has to be punished.

It has to be paid for. And we could try to pay for it by spending eternity separated from Him in hell. Yet it wouldn’t move us one day closer to being reconciled to Him.

So Jesus Christ came, took on human flesh so that He could live a perfect sinless life, so that He could be nailed to the cross, so that He could shed His blood, and so that He could die, taking responsibility for my sin and for yours. God in human flesh died for us. See, that’s another thing.

Most of the religions of the world talk about giving up your life for your God. Our God gave up His life for us. Jesus Christ took responsibility for our sins and died in our place so they could be paid for.

God in human flesh died for you and me. And this morning, you can have forgiveness. You can have your sins forgiven.

You can have the slate wiped clean. You can have a relationship with God. You can know Him if you come to Him through Jesus Christ. And that is as simple as believing that you’ve sinned against God and that your sin has separated you from Him.

Believing that Jesus Christ suffered, bled, and died in your place to pay for your sins in full. It’s not that Jesus paid for some of it and now you have to work off the rest. Jesus paid for it in full and He rose again to prove it. And if you believe all that, if you understand all that and you know that Jesus Christ is your only hope, then this morning you can ask for God’s forgiveness and you’ll have it.

It’s a free gift, not something to earn or deserve, but something God gives just because He is kind enough and loving enough and gracious enough. Our God was kind enough to become a man and die for us so that we could be forgiven. And now he’s kind enough to offer that forgiveness.

He will simply believe and ask for it.