God Became a Man

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There is no shortage of churches, of entire religions even, that will be glad to give you instructions on how to become God. Whether that means to become a God yourself, whether that means to unlock some kind of spiritual power where you get absorbed into the universal mind of God, they’ll be glad to give you instructions on that. That is not what I’m going to tell you this morning if you’re wondering where in the world is this going.

I’m not going to tell you how to become God because I don’t believe it works that way. As a matter of fact, I chuckle when I hear things like that, not because I’m making fun of anybody, but because I don’t think I want to live in a world that I would be God of. I look at everything God has created here and then I look at my garden and the last two plants are just hanging on but it’s any day now right I have not harvested a thing from my garden this year it’s been so bad I look at any number of things I look at the checkbook I’m in charge of and think no can’t run a whole universe nope I it is all I can do to be in charge of my little tribe of seven people over here okay some days it’s all I can do to just be in charge of me, right?

I don’t want to be in charge of a whole universe. And most of you, if you’re honest, you’re going to say, yeah, I’m not cut out for that gig either. And no amount of opening my mind to spiritual reality is going to make me capable of doing that.

If you know yourself at all, we’re just not, I’ve never met anybody that’s that capable. The message of Christianity is not how men can become gods. The message of Christianity is how God became a man.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning. We started a couple weeks ago a series answering the question, who is Jesus? And not just answering it in one message, but we’re going to take some time to unpack who He is.

And no matter how many weeks we spend on this, we will not even begin to scratch the surface. But it’s an incredibly important question that Jesus asked his own disciples, who do men say that I am? And they answered all sorts of things.

Some people think you’re John the Baptist. Some people think you’re Jeremiah. You’re one of the prophets. Jesus said, but who do you say that I am?

And waited for their answer. And Peter’s answer was, you are the Christ. You’re the Messiah, the son of the living God. And Jesus said was right.

But it was one of the most important questions that Jesus ever asked. It’s one of the most important questions we can ever wrestle with for ourselves. And I don’t want to tell you somebody’s opinion because that’s all it is.

I don’t want to come and preach my opinion. I want us to go to God’s Word and say, what does it say about who Jesus is? Because some of you may be new to Christianity, and so all of this may be new to you, it’s important for you to understand who Jesus is.

Some of us have been believers for years, but again, who Jesus is is one of those topics we can study for years and years and years and feel like we have barely scratched the surface of. There is so much to know about who He is, and the more we know, to know Jesus more is to love Jesus more because I see things in his word that make me fall in love with him all over again. So we’re in this study on who Jesus is.

Last week, we talked about how Jesus is God and always has been. How the gospel writers, the men who knew him best, said, this guy is God. And by the way, the people that wrote this, if Jesus was not God, then they just committed the worst sin they could possibly think of to commit in their religion and culture.

They had just blasphemed God. They had to be convinced beyond all doubt of who Jesus is to make the claim that he was God, and that’s exactly what they did. And they said, not only that, but he always has been.

But Jesus is not just God, and that’s what I want us to look at this morning. The Bible teaches that Jesus was God, and that he was a man, and we’re going to look at what the Bible says about how he started out as God, and then became a man without ceasing to be God. So we’re going to be in John chapter 1 this morning.

John chapter 1. If you’ll turn there in your Bibles with me. If you don’t have a Bible or can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen for you as well.

But once you find it there, if you’ll stand with me as we read from God’s Word, if you’re able to stand without too much difficulty. And we’re going to be in John chapter 1, starting in verse 14 and going through verse 18 this morning. It says, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, And we beheld his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

And just to be clear, who he’s talking about when he says the word, he’s talking about Jesus. This is a title that he’s applying to Jesus that we’re going to unpack a little bit in a while. The word became flesh.

Verse 15 says, John bore witness of him. This is talking about John the Baptist. John bore witness of him and cried out saying, This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me. And of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace, for the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him. And you may be seated. We’re going to see in this text that there are three comparisons that John the Apostle makes in order to demonstrate what he knew about Jesus.

Now, it can get a little confusing here. There are two different Johns that we see in this passage. John who wrote this is John the Apostle, one of the twelve followers of Jesus Christ, one of the twelve original followers of Jesus Christ. When he refers to John in one of those verses, he’s referring to John the Baptist, who was a prophet, who was a cousin of Jesus, who announced the coming of Jesus.

So I’ll try to specify whether I’m talking about the Apostle John or John the Baptist. But the Apostle John makes three comparisons here. Because he’s writing to people years later, at the time John is writing this, he is very likely the last surviving of the twelve apostles. And he’s writing to people to make sure they really understand who Jesus was.

From the perspective of an eyewitness, of somebody who saw every bit of Jesus’ ministry, He wants to make sure everybody understands. And so he’s writing this and to convey what he knows about who Jesus is. He makes three comparisons here.

And the first one is he makes a comparison between Jesus and John the Baptist. And he points out that Jesus preceded John the Baptist. It says there in verse 15 that we just read, John bore witness of him and cried out saying, This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me. And so when John the Baptist bore witness of Jesus, when he came and pointed people to Jesus, as a matter of fact, when he said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, he was pointing people to Jesus. That was the whole purpose of his ministry.

But he says he had already spoken about Jesus before. Before Jesus ever stepped into any kind of public ministry, John was preaching about the Lamb of God, about the Son of God, about the Messiah who was going to come into the world. And then when Jesus shows up, John says, this is the one I’ve been talking about, the one I’ve told you about.

And it means that Jesus was the one John came to prepare the way for. And if John the Baptist said, he’s the one I came to prepare the way for, well, he’s been saying all this time that he was coming to prepare the way for the Messiah, that he was coming to prepare the way for God’s anointed one, this special envoy from God, if you want to put it that way. And so by saying this is the one that I’ve told you about, he’s the answer to all of these promises that God has made.

And he says there in verse 15 that Jesus is preferred before me. Now that doesn’t just mean that people like Jesus better. I think it was kind of a toss-up.

They killed both of them, right? They both were pretty unpopular with the religious leaders and with the mobs of the crowds of people at times. So I think it’s kind of a toss-up in their day who was more unpopular.

But that’s not what he’s talking about when he says he’s preferred before me. The Greek word there means that he outranks him. That John the Baptist, this prophet that compelled people to repent and people responded, he looks at Jesus who’s just coming on the scene and said, yeah, he outranks me.

He’s higher than I am. That’s what it means that Jesus was preferred before me. But then he says something that’s really confusing on first glance.

he says at the end of verse 15 that Jesus was before me. Now, the reason why that’s confusing at first glance is that Luke 1. 36 tells us that John the Baptist was six months older than Jesus.

I wouldn’t look at Benjamin and say he was before me or that he was before me, that he came before me because, no, I’ve got a good 20 some odd years on him, right? So we can’t be talking about purely human chronological terms here. It only makes sense in the context of John’s overall argument that he makes throughout chapter 1, John the Apostle, the argument that he makes all throughout chapter 1 that Jesus is God from eternity past. That he says in verses 1 through 3, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with He says Jesus from the very beginning, before the world began, Jesus was already there and He was already God and He was already with God. He was co-equal with the Father before any of this ever started. That’s the only context where John the Baptist’s statement that He came before me makes sense.

Is if John the Baptist recognized that Jesus didn’t simply come into existence at conception, he’s not just the cousin who’s six months younger, but he’s God who’s been there from eternity past. And so when John the Apostle, excuse me, I’m confusing myself up here. I don’t know why. Here’s another evidence that these gospel stories are not made up.

They would have used a bigger variety of names, right? How many sitcoms do you see where you have a bunch of people that all have the same name, right? Because they made it up and they made it less confusing.

They gave them a variety. No, we’ve got John’s and Simon’s and Mary’s up to our ears because they’re recording what really happened, okay? So John the Baptist has said Jesus was before me.

And John the Apostle points this out to make this comparison that we look at this man who was identified as the greatest of all the prophets. And John the Apostle says, well, John the Baptist agrees, says he’s even greater than the greatest of all the prophets. You look at all the human prophets that have ever spoken for God, and the Word says that Jesus is greater than all of them.

But he makes another comparison here, a comparison between Jesus and Moses, and he says that Jesus surpassed Moses. Verse 17 tells us, For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Just for starters, which would you rather have, the law or grace and truth? Would you rather have the list of rules, and thou must do this, Or would you rather have the grace and truth of God?

Quick show of hands, who wants the rules? Anybody? Okay, some really religious person might say, no, I want the rules.

Okay, most of us, most normal people, we’d rather have the grace and the truth of God, right? So he’s already saying that Jesus brought something better. Now, but we have to understand though, that for them, the law was the highest expression of how man could know God.

It was the basis for the entire relationship that man could have with God in that day. If you wanted to walk with God, you did so according to the law. And Moses is the one that God used to bring the law to the people.

And so Moses was revered by the Jewish people. And yet John says here, as a Jew, as someone who revered Moses, that Jesus was better. That again is unthinkable in their culture, unless you’re really sure of what you’re saying.

These are not just things that people would throw out as, I’m just talking here. These are things that you don’t say unless you’re really sure about what you’re talking about. He says here that Moses only brought the law and Jesus brought grace and truth.

Jesus provided a way of relating to God that was superior to the way of Moses. So not only is he saying that Jesus is more important than Moses, but he’s talking about the way they introduced how we relate to God. He said Moses brought this way where you relate to God through rules and regulations.

And by the way, it’s not that Jesus just changed all that. Jesus fulfilled all that. The whole purpose of those laws and regulations, according to the Apostle Paul, was just to show us how sinful we are, how impossible it is to keep it, so we would recognize that we need Jesus Christ in order to come to a holy God.

But he said Moses brought this way of relating to God through rules, through do’s and don’ts, and this is how you relate to God. And Jesus brought a way for us to actually have a relationship with the Father through His grace and truth. We can know God in truth, and we can experience His grace, and we can come boldly before the throne of grace because of Jesus Christ. And so he says not only is Jesus superior just in that He’s more important, but he said Jesus actually brought us a superior way to relate to God.

Jesus brought us the best of all possible ways to relate to a holy God. And verse 16 says, and of His fullness we have all received in grace for grace. So number one, He says that what Jesus brought us, this grace and truth, it just abounds.

It just overflows. There’s more of it than we could possibly imagine there is. But He also calls it His fullness.

From His fullness, we’ve received. This is not something that Jesus just has in limited supply, this grace and truth, and He’s just doling it out stingily. it’s part of who he is being this god of grace it’s part of who jesus is this fullness of grace and so jesus points to the I’m sorry john the apostle points to this great lawgiver this great lawgiver who had no equal in their minds and said jesus is greater than even he is and then he comes to the third comparison in how jesus compares to god the father and he says jesus reveals the father Now, this is not going to be a comparison in the sense that one is lesser than the other.

It’s going to be a comparison in the sense of one is how we know the other. He says in verse 18, no one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

So, John the Apostle says here in the same breath that God is both unseen and revealed in the Son. And that’s because the God he’s referring to in verse 18 when he says no one has seen God at any time. He’s talking about the Father.

and he’s saying no one has ever seen the father and in spite of the fact that no one has ever seen the father we know what the father is like because he calls jesus the only begotten son he says in verse 18 that jesus is in the bosom of the father that indicates that that points to an intimate experiential familiarity between jesus and the father that they knew each other they were close to each other. I mean, there’s a bond here. My oldest daughter, Madeline, will come sit down next to me and put her head right here on my chest and we’ll talk.

And it’s a very sweet time between father and daughter. I love y’all, but don’t come try to do that to me, okay? That’s going to weird me out.

Because as much as I love you, we don’t have that same bond. So when he says he’s in the bosom of the father, he’s pointing to this intimacy that father and son have. He’s pointing to a unique relationship that only Jesus has with the father.

And then he says he has declared him. And what that means is John the apostle is telling us here that by observing Jesus, by watching Jesus, what we’re witnessing is who God is and what he’s like. And we’re seeing it firsthand because Jesus isn’t just kind of like the Father.

He’s what we would call in our day and time the spitting image. As a matter of fact, there are other places in the New Testament where it talks about this principle that Jesus reveals the Father, that He shows just what He’s like. And there are some Greek terms there that they’re kind of problematic because we know what they mean, but there’s not really a good one-to-one English translation of those words.

And where I think it would have been fun if they just said Jesus is the spitting image of the Father, because that’s what they’re talking about. They are just alike. I mean, for better or worse, you can look at all five of my children and see how they each copy some of my mannerisms. Now, don’t just assume that when you see Charlie do something crazy that that means he got it from me.

Some of that stuff just is in the air. But they all have some of my mannerisms. They’re all a little like me. But that’s not the comparison here.

They’re not saying Jesus is a little like the Father. They’re saying when you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father. Not that they’re the same person, but they are so much alike.

They are of the same substance. And so these comparisons point to Jesus as being an exceptionally great man who revealed God in a unique way. Who revealed God in a unique way because he’s God himself, because he’s God the Son.

But how is it possible that he’s both man and God? And the answer that the Bible gives us is that Jesus is God in human flesh. Verse 14, go back to the very beginning of the passage we just looked at.

It says, and the word, that means Jesus, 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. So we’ve got this comparison that goes on through verses 15 through 18 that really point us to the fact that Jesus can’t be anybody short of God. And verse 14 prefaces all that by saying he became flesh, he became a human being.

title that it gives him, the word, comes from the Greek word logos. And it means a word or a thought. It was a word that would have been familiar to them, to the Greeks.

It meant the ultimate mind or reason behind the universe. Some people who aren’t quite to the idea of God yet, they’ll say, well, I believe there is a higher intelligence in the universe and behind the universe. That’s what the Greeks were referring to by the word logos.

When the Jews used this word in Greek, they were referring to the God of the Old Testament and when He was active in our world, when He showed up and showed Himself mighty. And so it’s not by accident, it’s not by coincidence that John the Apostle chooses this word that was so packed with meaning to everybody that would listen because Jesus is both. If there is a higher intelligence behind the entire existence of the universe, Jesus is it.

If there’s a time that the God of the Old Testament has ever shown up and shown out in human and shown himself mighty. Jesus is it. And so it’s not by mistake that he calls him the Logos or the Word.

And as I already pointed to a few minutes ago, John 1, 1 through 3, the first few verses here say, 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 nothing was made that was made.

This tells us in the same chapter that the Word is God. Jesus is God. And here in verse 14, it says that God became flesh and dwelt among us.

God became a human being. And to be very clear on what the Bible teaches here and elsewhere, because some of the easiest times throughout Christian history, let me rephrase that, some of the times throughout Christian history that people have found it easiest to go astray has been on understanding the nature of Jesus. But what the Bible teaches is that Jesus is God, and He’s always been God.

We saw that last week. And by the way, this is not just something John says. There’s a modern skeptical idea that tries to pit the Gospels against each other.

If you’ve been here on Sunday nights, you’ve heard me talk about this a lot. This modern theory that says, well, the idea of Jesus being God, it developed over time. And so Mark, the earliest Gospel written, has the lowest view of Jesus, and John, the last one written, has the highest view of Jesus.

We’ve been going verse by verse through the book of Mark on Sunday nights, and that is not true. That is not true. Mark spends chapters hammering home the point that Jesus Christ is God.

He is not an ordinary man like you and me. And so I wouldn’t even say that John shouts about it and Mark whispers about it. I’d say Mark speaks at a normal volume about Jesus being God, and John hauls out the megaphone to make sure people get it before he exits this earth.

But they teach that Jesus is God, that he’s always been God, that he was the only begotten son of God from eternity past. What he is today, he always has been as far as being God. And yet there was a time when Jesus became a man. And that time was when he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, which again, people are puzzled by how that works.

Now, I can’t draw you a picture of how it works, But if he by the words of his mouth can speak the entire universe into existence, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that the Holy Spirit wiggles his nose or blinks his eyes and there’s a baby in a virgin’s womb. If you start from the premise that he’s God, I mean, this is not hard to figure out how he did it. But when Jesus was born on earth as a son of a virgin, he became a man.

But it’s not like he gave up one thing to become another. When Philippians talks about him emptying himself, it doesn’t mean he stopped being God. It means he gave up all the stuff he was entitled to, all the glory he was entitled to in heaven, and stepped down into earth and came with us.

And we’re not that great sometimes, right? But he came and was among us and did this. He came to earth and became a man without ceasing to be God.

Because as I explained last week, part of being God is being eternal. And if you can ever stop being God, you were never God to begin with. So he became a man without ceasing to be God. And so he’s fully God as much as the Father is, but He’s also fully man as much as you and I are, except without a sin nature.

This doesn’t mean that He’s 50% one and 50% the other. I was always puzzled by this as a kid. I’d hear in church, well, He’s 100% God and He’s 100% man, and I’d think, I’m not a math expert, but I’ve never seen something be 200% of itself.

A few years ago, it occurred to me, I started thinking about it like this. Attributes. If you were to make a list of all the things that make God, God, Jesus has all of those.

If you were to make a list of all the things that make a human, human, other than our sin nature, Jesus has those. And I don’t have the full list in front of me. I don’t, I don’t pretend to understand how all that works.

I’m not God. Maybe Jimmy Ann can put it in her book of questions to ask the Lord and we’ll all get it straightened out when we get there. That book is getting pretty thick by now.

But if you look at it in terms of attributes, whatever it means to be God, he’s got that. Whatever it means to be a man, he’s got that too. It’s not a matter of percentages.

But he says God, as much God as the Father is, and he became as much man as you and I are, as much human. And by the way, when I say man, I’m using it in the old-fashioned sense. I don’t mean to exclude you ladies from that.

He’s as much human as you and I are. He has both natures, and it’s not like they blended together to form a third thing. He’s not a half-God.

He’s not a demigod somewhere between us where He’s a little higher than us but a little lower than God. He didn’t morph into a third thing. They didn’t combine to make Him superhuman.

He’s not two persons or two personalities. He’s one person with two natures, and that is really hard to understand. I struggle with it.

And this is not a perfect analogy, but the closest explanation that I’ve been able to come up with, the best way I’ve come up with to this point to wrap my mind around who Jesus is, is to realize that for as long as I have existed, I have been somebody’s son. It’s been a role that I have had all my life. And then 11 years ago, I took on the role of father.

without ceasing to be a son. I will never stop being somebody’s son. Even when my parents have gone on to be with the Lord, and even when I’ve gone on to be with the Lord, I’ll still be their son.

And yet I took on that role of father without ceasing to be a son. Again, I know that’s not a perfect analogy because with me, it’s just roles. With Jesus, we’re talking about nature.

But again, it’s my finite human way of trying to come to grips with what happened with Jesus. And it says, we beheld his glory in verse 14. the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

The point is that when we see Jesus, we see who God is right here in all of his glory, wrapped up in human flesh. And now there is a reason why this is so important other than just theology. I think theology is incredibly important because bad theology leads to bad behavior.

What you believe about God will show up in other areas of life. But there’s a very practical reason why this is important. Why it is important that Jesus is both God and man.

And the reason is very simple, that Jesus has to be God in human flesh for the gospel to make sense. The gospel doesn’t make sense if he’s not God, and it doesn’t make sense if he’s not man. If he’s not man, how, if he did not come in human flesh, how was he nailed to the cross?

How did he shed his blood? How did he die? How did he die as a substitute for sinful men if he was not a man?

This is not my opinion. This is a theme that we see in the New Testament writers in their writings because they were battling something called Gnosticism that said he was just a spirit. And it undermines the whole gospel.

If he was not man, then how did he die for me? But if he was not God, how did it matter? Because let me tell you, I can tell you, I’m going to go out and get myself killed for your sake.

And me going out and getting myself killed is not going to do you a bit of good in eternity because I’m a sinful man just like the rest of you. And so Jesus had to be man to die, but he had to be God for it to matter. He had to be God to pull off what he said he was going to do.

When he said that he was going to die to pay for our sins, when he said he was going to rise again to prove it, when he said he was going to justify us or give us a clean slate before the Father, He had to be God to make that happen. And so why on earth does all this matter that He was God in human flesh? Because the gospel matters.

What we believe about what He did for salvation matters. And it only makes sense if He is who the Bible says He is. And the Bible does teach that you and I have sinned against a holy God, that we’ve disobeyed Him, and our sin separates us from Him because He is infinitely holy.

And so every wrong thing I’ve ever done, whether it was big or small, has separated me from that holy God. And I cannot do enough good to undo the wrong that I’ve done. Neither can you.

Coming to church, being a good person, giving money to the poor, all these good religious things that we think about doing, they’re good, but they will never be enough to erase the wrong that we’ve done. That sin had to be punished. And so Jesus came to earth as a man to be nailed to the cross, to shed His blood for us.

But He came as God in human flesh so that that sacrifice would be enough to pay for our sins. And so that He could rise again from the dead to give us hope of eternal life. And this morning, if you recognize that you need to be forgiven, if you recognize that you’ve got this sin in your life that has separated you from God, and you realize that you’ve been trying hard to do religious things, you’ve been running on that treadmill of religious activity, trying to get rid of that sin, and it’s just not working, you still know you’re separated from God.

It’s because you’re never going to be able to do enough. Jesus died to pay for your sins, and he rose again to prove it. The Bible tells us that all we have to do is turn to him and believe that.

And this morning, you can do that. You can put your trust in Jesus Christ.