The following is a sermon preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi. On Sunday mornings throughout Advent we have been looking together at the prologue to John's gospel and we come today to John chapter 1 verses 14 and through 18, the concluding section of the prologue, which contains arguably the highest theology found anywhere in Holy Scripture. And yet for all its profundity, I think we can unpack the teaching here under three simple headings. Three things that John tells us that Jesus did that first Christmas. First, Jesus comes. He comes among us as one of us. Secondly, Jesus shows. He shows us the nature and the character of the invisible God. And third, Jesus gives. He is full of grace and truth, and He gives grace upon grace to all who trust in Him. Jesus comes, Jesus shows, and Jesus gives. Before we read the passage, let's bow our heads and pray together and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us all pray. Lord our God, would You come now, please, and grant that Jesus, the light of the world, might shine His light into all our hearts, even from this portion of Your holy Word, for Jesus' sake. Amen. John chapter 1 at the 14th verse, this is the Word of God. 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 bore witness about Him and cried out, "'This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because He was before me.'" For from His fullness we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the Father's side. He has made him known. Amen. Jesus comes, first of all. I read a story this week about an English mother who tucked her little girl in bed and read her a bedtime story. It was storming outside, and so she kissed her daughter goodnight, turned off the light, closed the bedroom door, But as the thunder shook the house, eventually the little girl could stand it no longer and ran downstairs into her mother's arms. Mommy, I'm scared, she said. And so her mother comforted her, assured her there was nothing to be afraid of, took her back to bed. Five minutes later, a few more thunder claps rattling the windows, and of course the little girl was back downstairs again. Mommy, I'm still scared. And so she said, sweetheart, I've told you that you have to get your sleep. You are perfectly safe. God loves you, and He will take care of you." But her daughter replied, "'I know that God loves me, but mummy, when it's thundering and lightning outside, I want someone with skin on to love me.'" Well, John wants us to know that with the coming of Jesus Christ, someone with skin on has come to love us. Look at the first part of verse 14, please. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Every part of that statement is laden with the colossal weight of wonder, isn't it? The Word, remember John 1.1? is God and with God. He is the eternal Son of God, second Person of the blessed Trinity. By Him all things were made, and without Him was not anything made that has been made. And John says this word, who is God, became. God is unchanging. With Him there is no variation or shadow due to change, James 1.17. God is He doesn't become. And so when John says here, the Word became, he's saying something that stretches the human capacity to understand, really, to its breaking point. God the Son, the unchanging, eternal, creative Word, the great I Am, became what He was not, without ceasing to be what He had always been. Now, how is that possible? How can he become without changing? John explains, the Word became flesh, and he doesn't mean the Word turned into flesh and ceased to be the Word. He's not saying that the divine Son became a man and so ceased to be God. John, if you keep reading, will immediately go on to explain that he saw in the enfleshed Word the glory of the only begotten Son of God shining. And so Jesus remained what He had always been, the immutable Son, the unchanging Word, and yet He became flesh. Lo, within a manger lies He who built the starry skies. thus to come from highest bliss down to such a world as this. It's astonishing. But the expression that John uses next, the word became flesh, takes it to another level and packs a particular punch. It's actually quite shocking if you think about it. John could have said, the word became a man, or the word took a body. There were Greek words he could have used to say all of that, but he says, no, no, the word became sarx, the Greek word for flesh. He's highlighting for us the meaty solidity and furrow-going creatureliness of the incarnate Christ. John is telling us that in the womb of the Virgin, God was joined to fetal cells multiplying and growing. God was born in blood and pain like any other baby. God had an umbilical cord that had to be cut. God grew through adolescence into adulthood. His voice broke. His brain developed. He needed to eat and drink, to rest and sleep. He wept. He bled. He died. Now, to be clear, John isn't saying that the Word put on a meat suit. as if all Jesus is is a human body with His divinity in place of a human mind and a human soul. No, Jesus is the unchangeable Word in all the uncompromised integrity of His deity, and simultaneously, He is a true human being in all the ways integral to ordinary human nature. Just like you and me, he has, as Shorter Catechism 22 puts it, a true body and a reasonable soul. Neither is John teaching us that the divine Word was somehow mixed with humanity, to make a demigod, a superman, a third thing, neither divine nor human, but an intermingled touch of both. Nor is he saying the Word merely appeared, as if He had a human nature, like angels who appear temporarily in the Old Testament Scriptures as though they were men. Each of those options, actually, is an ancient heresy. that clearly all fall short of the teaching of our text, don't they? No, no, John says the Word became flesh, and so He was and continues to be, short of Catechism 21, both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever. But John isn't done yet with the wonder of verse 14. Keep looking at verse 14. The Word became—that's astonishing—the Word became flesh. That takes us into realms beyond comprehension. But then he goes even further. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John's term translated dwelt means to pitch a tent. I love that that's the word that he uses here, don't you? Of course, it has a special connection to God's presence shining in the midst of His people Israel in the Old Testament. It's the word for the tabernacle, the precursor to the temple in which God was said to dwell. In Isaiah chapter 7, you'll remember, we've read it in our Advent readings, God promised that Messiah would be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. And so when he came into the world at last, he came joining himself to human nature. in the person of Jesus Christ in order to bring to fulfillment and final climactic expression the dwelling of God in the midst of His people, in His very person. He would be God with us. Every other place where God made His presence and His glory known and accessible to His people in the Old Testament all pointed to this moment, this reality. The glory of the tabernacle, the glory of the temple, they were dim shadows. The Son of God incarnate is the real thing. We meet God now and forever, only here in Him. That's part of the meaning of John's language when he says that the Word pitched His tent among us. But I can't help thinking that the image of God tenting among us is also meant to convey something of the frailty and the fragility that marked His arrival in Jesus Christ. A temple is a grand, imposing edifice of stone and marble. towering over us, unmoved by the tides of history and the ebb and flow of time, but a tent. That's vulnerable, flimsy. You could tear it down with your hands. And John says when Jesus was born, God was pitching His tent among us. He dwelled among us. Now, I'm not ashamed to tell you that I do not like to camp. I'm done sleeping on the ground. Those days are over. It's just not fun for me anymore. Some of you are into it, and you get your children into it. You take them camping, you go on camping trips. Some of you have your kids camping in your backyard, which is fine. But you wouldn't, there are places in this city you would never take them camping. Right? You won't bundle them into your car after dark, drive them to the scene of the last drug-fueled murder, and pitch their tent there in the forecourt of the nearest derelict gas station before you wave your kids nighty-night and head for home. You just wouldn't do it. But when John says, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, pitched his tent among us, he's saying, He came into the worst danger to live in canvas-tent frailty, in the canvas-tent frailty of our nature, in the midst of a world that had turned against God in terrible rage and cosmic rebellion. The incarnation, writes Dorothy Sayers, means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall, to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death, He has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He Himself has gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money, to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. He was born in poverty and suffered infinite pain, all for us, and thought it well worth his while, because he came You have uniquely in Jesus Christ the unchanging God who enters into the frailties and losses of human experience, one to whom you can go, to whom you can turn, in whom you will find understanding and sympathy and love. We have in Jesus Christ a God who loves us with skin on, who gets it, who gets you. Jesus comes. And secondly, notice John says, Jesus shows. He shows. The reason Jesus comes, according to John, is to show us God. Look at the second half of verse 14. We have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. John's own eyes saw his glory. Glory, as you know, is the great mark of deity. And John saw it shining in the face of Jesus Christ. Specifically, John says, he saw the glory as of the only Son from the Father. This is one place where I think the old King James Bible is actually superior. to the ESV that we are using. The King James translates this phrase in verse 14 not as the only son from the Father, but as the only begotten Son from the Father. And recent scholarship, I think, has demonstrated decisively that that's what the Greek really means. After all, Jesus is not the Father's only Son. The Father has many sons and daughters by adoption, as we believe the gospel. We are His adoptive sons and daughters by faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus is not the Father's only Son, but He is the Father's only begotten Son. That is to say, the Lord Jesus stands in a unique, organic, if we can put it that way, organic relationship to God the Father that none of us share. He proceeds from the Father. He is eternally begotten of the Father. The whole divine nature is eternally communicated from the Father to the Son. The Son is begotten of the Father before all worlds. He is God of God and light of light, who abhors not the virgin's womb. Very God, begotten, not created. He is the uncreated Son. And because He is, He can do what no one else can do. The only begotten Son who became flesh can show mere creatures of flesh the glory of the uncreated God. Verse 18 drives that point home even further. Look at verse 18, please. No one has ever seen God. The only God who is at the Father's side, He has made Him known. Again, the translation isn't great. A better reading would be, no one has ever seen God, the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father. He has made him known. The Scriptures teach us plainly that God is invisible. You can't see him. God is Spirit, John 4.24. He doesn't have a body like men, as the children's catechism puts it. You remember when Moses asked to see God's glory in Exodus 33? God told him, you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live. No one has ever seen God. God is, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 1, 17, the King Immortal, Invisible, the only wise God. He is, as he puts it in 1 Timothy 6, 15 and 16, the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. God is invisible. He is incapable of being seen by the eyes of flesh, unseeable. But, Paul says, Jesus Christ, Colossians 115, He is the image of the invisible God. John says, he is the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father. That is, he dwells in total, essential union with the Father and with the Holy Spirit as one God, blessed forever, and he makes this God known to us. That last phrase, he has made him known, is so important. You see there at the end of verse 18, he has made him known. John uses a Greek verb, exegesato, from which we get the English word exegesis. You sometimes hear pastors or seminary students talking about exegesis. It's the business of explanation and exposition. We're doing exegesis right now as we unpack John 1, 14 through 18. Well, John tells us Jesus, the eternal Word, exegetes the Father to us. The invisible God is expounded in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the exegesis of God. Jesus makes Him known. You can know God, see God, but only by looking here. at the person and work of Jesus Christ. You might actually think that God the Father is, as an idea, the fatherhood of God, renders Him distant, aloof, cold. Maybe that's how your earthly father was toward you, and now you actually struggle to conceive of God as Father without your own experience of an abusive dad coloring everything. Or maybe you felt you could never meet your earthly father's expectations. So no matter what you did, what you said, how well you performed, you were never able to measure up, never able to please him. You never heard him say how proud he was of you. And so you've lived with feelings of inferiority and shame all these years. And now when you think of God as Father, you shudder a little bit. If God is Father, Does that mean that He, too, is someone whose approval you must always strive to win, but whose affection and affirmation will always be out of reach? Or maybe you never really knew your earthly Father, and so the whole idea of God as Father is abstract and elusive. How can we know God the Father truly and not let our sinful, earthly fathers, however good or bad they were, color our relationship with Him? How can we see the invisible God? The answer of Scripture is that we must look at Jesus Christ. My old theology professor, you've heard me say this before, Donald MacLeod, was fond of quoting Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who said, God is Christlike, and in Him there is no un-Christlikeness at all. What is God the Father like? He's not like your earthly dad, however noble and worthy a man he is or was. or however harsh and unloving he may have been. No, no, you see the Father's heart, His love, His character, you see it writ large by looking at the life of Jesus Christ, who loved you and gave Himself for you. There was an incident, you remember it, in the upper room at the end of Jesus' life in John 14, 7-8, where Jesus said to His disciples, if you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him. And Philip, one of the disciples, perplexed, responds, Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us. And Jesus replies, "'Have I been with you so long, and still you do not know Me, Philip? Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.'" That's the point right here, isn't it? Did you catch it? God is Christlike, and in Him there is no un-Christlikeness at all. Look at Christ, look at Him. in his humiliation and his sufferings. Look at Christ dying instead of you, obeying that you might be accepted before God, bleeding for you. Look at Christ. See the Father's heart beating with tender love for sinners like me and you. He's not distant, is he? Cold, aloof, abstract, unloving? Now, look at Christ and see how He shows you the Father. You don't need to try to win His approval or secure His affections. He loved you before there was a you. He loved you without reference to anything that you have done. He has loved you eternally. And Jesus came in service of His love, in pursuit of the ends of His love. He was born that first Christmas to make known the goodness and kindness of God the Father, whose love comes without preconditions in pursuit of unholy sinners like me and you. You can rest utterly secure in a love like that, can't you, when you come to know it in the Lord Jesus Christ? Jesus comes, Jesus shows, and finally Jesus gives. Look at verse 14 again. We're told there Jesus is full of grace and truth. And verses 16 and 17 develop that theme. Notice how the passage fits together for a moment. Verse 15 is a kind of parenthesis, an aside, about the testimony of John the Baptist. That means that the for, the because at the start of verse 16 actually resumes the thought broken off from verse 14. Right? So verse 15 is parenthetical. Verse 14 and verse 16 connect to each other. So read them together and see how this all works. Verse 14, we have seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten Son from the Father, full of grace and truth, for—here's how we came to see his glory—for, verse 16, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Verse 16 explains how verse 14 happens, how it's possible. We've seen His glory, how? For from His fullness we have received grace upon grace. The one who's full of grace and truth, He gives grace. to wretched sinners. That's how we see Him. That's how we know the Father, revealed in Jesus Christ, grace upon grace, received from His fullness. Jesus came to give grace. Now, that's wonderful. It means He isn't reluctant, reserved, miserly, hesitant, skeptical about you, tentative before He commits. He's lavish and prodigal with His grace. He has grace upon grace, grace overflowing with grace, and still more grace. There's no lack of supply, no danger of running out, no sinner so terrible that His grace is not utterly adequate to meet your need. and reconcile you to God. He has superabounding grace for the chief of sinners. He has grace for you. Grace for you. The Old Covenant, John says in verse 17, was characterized as the age of law given through Moses. But now the reality to which the law of Moses pointed has arrived. Now we live in the age, John says, of grace and truth. given through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself is full of grace and truth, and now that He's come, the shadows and types of the Old Testament that pointed to Him have given way to the real thing, the age of grace and truth. The coming of Jesus into the world that first Christmas is the hinge of history, the turning point of the ages. the pivot on which we move from promises made at last to promises kept, from old covenant types and shadows to new covenant grace and truth realities. This is the era in which we live, the era of grace and truth flowing from Christ who is full of grace and truth. That means it's an age of opportunity. for anyone and for everyone, for sinners like me and you, to come to Jesus Christ and receive freely from His fullness grace upon grace and in Him, to meet the Father and to see His heart. Well, how should we respond? What should our attitude be to this glorious Jesus? I think John the Baptist's testimony in verse 15 helps us. Look at verse 15, John bore witness about Him and cried out, this was He of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me because He was before me. John understands that Jesus' coming puts him in the subordinate position. Jesus was before John as the eternal Son of God, and so he ranks ahead of John as the Lord of all. John submits to Jesus, surrenders to Jesus, subordinates himself to Jesus. He topples himself from the throne of his heart. like an old dictator whose tyranny has finally been overthrown, and he enthrones Jesus Christ as Lord. He's not using Jesus like Christmas wrapping paper, you know, a superficial covering to make things look pretty. That's how we're often tempted, I think, to use Jesus, isn't it? As cover for the cracks in our lives. No, no, John the Baptist understands. If he is to receive grace upon grace from Christ's fullness, if he's to see God shining in the face of Jesus Christ, he can't use him. He must submit to him, surrender to Jesus entirely. That is what it takes, you know. You miss Christmas altogether if you don't get this. Jesus is not a bit of Christmas sparkle to beautify your life along the way. He is the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, and He has come and pitched His tent in the frail flesh of our humanity. And He has endured all the suffering and sorrows and liabilities to which we are naturally exposed, sin accepted. He has loved us and given Himself for us at the cross, and now He stands in glory as the only oasis and repository of grace and truth. He has grace upon grace for you. This is the age of grace and truth. You can come and take it. He has grace for you. But you must come to Him dethroning yourself and enthroning Christ. You must, you must surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. When you do, He will show you the heart of the Father that beats with everlasting love. Let's pray together. Our God and Father, how we adore You for the gift of Your Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus, Your only begotten Son. grant that we may all receive, as John says, He had of His fullness, grace upon grace. May we, each of us, perhaps for the first time or afresh, may we each surrender now, bend the knee now, dethrone self, and enthrone Christ. For we ask it in His matchless name. Amen.