Latest / Bible stories / Why John Called Jesus _THE WORD__ The Hidden Meaning Behind John 1_1

Transcript

Why John Called Jesus _THE WORD__ The Hidden Meaning Behind John 1_1 · Bible stories

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Bible Stories. You may notice there
0:03
Speaker 1: are no ads on this video because YouTube has demonetized
0:07
Speaker 1: our channel. To support us, you can scan the first
0:10
Speaker 1: QR code to join the Bible Stories podcast app, where
0:15
Speaker 1: you can listen offline and access exclusive episodes. Or, if
0:19
Speaker 1: you simply want to give, you can scan the second
0:22
Speaker 1: QR code to donate directly. Thank you for helping us
0:27
Speaker 1: keep these Bible Stories going. John called Jesus the Word
0:32
Speaker 1: for two reasons, and both of them are very simple.
0:37
Speaker 1: The first is that a word is the only thing
0:40
Speaker 1: in all of human experience that comes out of a
0:43
Speaker 1: person and still carries that person completely. When you speak,
0:48
Speaker 1: what leaves your mouth came from you, and it is
0:51
Speaker 1: also you, made small enough for someone else to receive.
0:54
Speaker 1: That is exactly what John is claiming about Jesus. He
0:59
Speaker 1: came from God. He is God. And he arrived in
1:03
Speaker 1: a form a human being could actually take in. The
1:07
Speaker 1: second reason reaches back further than most people expect. Everything
1:13
Speaker 1: God ever did in the history of his people, he
1:16
Speaker 1: did by speaking. He made the world by speaking. He
1:20
Speaker 1: found Abraham by speaking. He raised up prophets, kept promises,
1:25
Speaker 1: warned kings, and steadied broken people by speaking. For centuries
1:31
Speaker 1: before John was born, the ordinary way of describing God
1:34
Speaker 1: at work was simply this, the word of the Lord came.
1:39
Speaker 1: So when John needed a title for Jesus, he chose
1:43
Speaker 1: the one title that gathered all of it into a
1:46
Speaker 1: single life. He was telling his readers that the God
1:49
Speaker 1: who has been speaking since the first page of the
1:52
Speaker 1: Bible has now said the last and clearest thing he
1:56
Speaker 1: has to say, and what he said was a person
2:00
Speaker 1: Matthew begins his gospel with a family tree. Luke begins
2:05
Speaker 1: with an old priest in the temple and a young
2:07
Speaker 1: woman in Nazareth. Mark begins with a man in the wilderness,
2:11
Speaker 1: shouting by a river. Every one of them starts somewhere
2:15
Speaker 1: on the map, at some point on the calendar. John
2:19
Speaker 1: starts before the calendar exists. In the beginning was the Word,
2:24
Speaker 1: and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2:28
Speaker 1: John chapter 1 verse 1. In the beginning. That is
2:33
Speaker 1: how the Bible itself begins. John has reached past Bethlehem,
2:37
Speaker 1: past Abraham, past Adam, all the way back to the
2:41
Speaker 1: first line of Genesis, and he has put Jesus there.
2:45
Speaker 1: Then he says three things in a row, and each
2:48
Speaker 1: one is doing careful work. The word was. Not came
2:54
Speaker 1: into being, not began, not appeared. When the beginning began,
2:59
Speaker 1: the Word was already there. Whatever the word is, he
3:03
Speaker 1: does not belong to the list of created things. He
3:06
Speaker 1: belongs to the other side of that line. The word
3:10
Speaker 1: was with God. That small preposition is carrying a relationship.
3:16
Speaker 1: You cannot be with yourself. There is company here, closeness,
3:21
Speaker 1: someone facing someone. Before there was a world to be watched,
3:25
Speaker 1: there was fellowship inside God, and the word was God.
3:30
Speaker 1: Not near God, not sent by God, not the finest
3:34
Speaker 1: thing God made, God. John holds both halves in the
3:38
Speaker 1: same breath, and he never tries to soften either one.
3:42
Speaker 1: The word is distinct enough to be with God and
3:45
Speaker 1: fully God at the same time. People have spent centuries
3:50
Speaker 1: trying to escape that third statement, usually by cutting it
3:54
Speaker 1: down to something more manageable, as though John meant that
3:57
Speaker 1: the word was godlike or divine in some smaller sense.
4:02
Speaker 1: But the rest of the gospel refuses that reading. This
4:06
Speaker 1: is the same book where Thomas looks at the risen
4:08
Speaker 1: Jesus and calls him his Lord and his God, and
4:11
Speaker 1: Jesus accepts it. John is not easing his readers into
4:16
Speaker 1: an idea. He is planting a flag in his first sentence.
4:20
Speaker 1: And notice what he has not done yet. He has
4:23
Speaker 1: not said Jesus. He has not said Christ. He has
4:26
Speaker 1: not said Son. For 18 verses, he holds back the
4:30
Speaker 1: name and calls him the Word, and only after the
4:33
Speaker 1: whole picture is built does he say the name out loud.
4:38
Speaker 1: He wants you to understand what this person is before
4:41
Speaker 1: you attach the face you already know. To feel the
4:45
Speaker 1: weight of the title, you have to go where John
4:47
Speaker 1: is pointing, which is the first chapter of the Bible.
4:51
Speaker 1: Read Genesis 1 carefully, and you notice something almost strange
4:55
Speaker 1: about how God makes things. There is no workshop, there
4:59
Speaker 1: is no clay, no hammer, no long labor. There is
5:04
Speaker 1: a voice. And God said, Let there be light. And
5:08
Speaker 1: there was light. Genesis 1, verse 3. That pattern repeats
5:15
Speaker 1: through the whole chapter. Ten times in Genesis 1, the
5:18
Speaker 1: text says that God said, Light, sky, sea, dry ground, plants,
5:24
Speaker 1: sun and moon, fish, birds, animals, people. Each one arrives
5:29
Speaker 1: the moment God opens his mouth. Creation is not assembled,
5:34
Speaker 1: it is addressed. God speaks into empty darkness, and the
5:38
Speaker 1: darkness answers by becoming a world. A psalm looks back
5:43
Speaker 1: on that and puts it as plainly as it can
5:45
Speaker 1: be put. By the word of the Lord the heavens
5:50
Speaker 1: were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.
5:55
Speaker 1: Psalm chapter 33 verse 6. Stand outside tonight and look up.
6:01
Speaker 1: Every point of light you can see, and the countless
6:05
Speaker 1: ones you cannot, came out of the mouth of God.
6:08
Speaker 1: That is what the psalm is claiming. Here is where
6:11
Speaker 1: the Hebrew language adds something English loses. The Hebrew word
6:16
Speaker 1: for word also means a thing, a matter, an event,
6:21
Speaker 1: a deed. One word covers both the saying and the happening.
6:26
Speaker 1: That is not a translation problem. It tells you how
6:30
Speaker 1: these people understood God's speech. A word from God was
6:35
Speaker 1: never a sound that faded into the air and left
6:38
Speaker 1: the world unchanged. A word from God was an event.
6:43
Speaker 1: When he spoke, something occurred. Let me be clear about
6:47
Speaker 1: one thing, because this is the point where people start
6:50
Speaker 1: treating God's Word like a magic spell. None of this
6:55
Speaker 1: is about powerful syllables or holy sounds. There is nothing
6:59
Speaker 1: in the letters. The power sits entirely in the one
7:03
Speaker 1: who is speaking. A word is only ever as strong
7:06
Speaker 1: as the person behind it, and the person behind this
7:10
Speaker 1: one made the stars. When your neighbor says, let there
7:14
Speaker 1: be light, he is asking someone to find the switch.
7:18
Speaker 1: When God says it, photons appear where there were none.
7:22
Speaker 1: John will not leave the connection for you to guess
7:25
Speaker 1: at either. Two verses after his opening line, he says
7:29
Speaker 1: it outright. Everything that exists was made through him, and
7:34
Speaker 1: nothing that exists was made without him. Every mountain range,
7:39
Speaker 1: every sparrow, the oxygen in your lungs at this second,
7:43
Speaker 1: the hands you are holding this device with, all of
7:46
Speaker 1: it came into being through the one who would later
7:49
Speaker 1: be laid in a feeding trough in Bethlehem, because there
7:52
Speaker 1: was no room anywhere better. Follow that through, and it
7:56
Speaker 1: becomes almost unbearable. The carpenter's calloused hands had made the tree.
8:02
Speaker 1: The wood he shaped in Nazareth grew, because he said, Grow.
8:07
Speaker 1: And when men eventually drove iron through those hands, the
8:11
Speaker 1: iron in the nails existed, because he had spoken it
8:14
Speaker 1: into the ground of the earth long before there was
8:17
Speaker 1: anyone to mine it. That is not a poetic flourish
8:21
Speaker 1: added by a later generation of Christians. It is the
8:24
Speaker 1: plain content of John's first paragraph. God's speech did not
8:30
Speaker 1: go quiet once the world was finished. Open almost any
8:35
Speaker 1: prophetic book in the Old Testament and you meet a
8:37
Speaker 1: phrase so familiar that most readers skate right over it.
8:42
Speaker 1: The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. The word
8:46
Speaker 1: of the Lord came to Ezekiel, to Hosea, to Jonah,
8:50
Speaker 1: to Zechariah, to Elijah in hiding by a brook. It
8:54
Speaker 1: reads like a person arriving, not an idea forming in
8:58
Speaker 1: a man's head, not a mood settling over him. The
9:01
Speaker 1: word came. It traveled. It showed up at the door
9:05
Speaker 1: of a farmer or a shepherd or a frightened young man,
9:09
Speaker 1: and history bent around what it said. The first time
9:13
Speaker 1: that phrase appears anywhere in the Bible is worth knowing,
9:17
Speaker 1: because almost nobody points it out. It is not in
9:20
Speaker 1: a prophet's book at all. It is in Genesis with Abram,
9:24
Speaker 1: an old man with no children and a promise that
9:27
Speaker 1: has gone nowhere for years. The word of the Lord
9:31
Speaker 1: comes to him in a vision, and the first thing
9:34
Speaker 1: it says is that he should stop being afraid. That
9:37
Speaker 1: is the debut of the phrase in Scripture. No thunder
9:41
Speaker 1: and no verdict, just comfort handed to a discouraged old
9:46
Speaker 1: man in the dark. and watch what happens to the
9:49
Speaker 1: men that word arrives to. Jeremiah is a young man
9:53
Speaker 1: who protests that he does not know how to speak,
9:56
Speaker 1: and God reaches out and touches his mouth and tells him,
10:00
Speaker 1: he has put his words there Ezekiel is handed a
10:04
Speaker 1: scroll and told to eat it and when he does
10:07
Speaker 1: he says it tasted as sweet as honey Elijah is
10:11
Speaker 1: fed by birds beside a stream because the word of
10:14
Speaker 1: the Lord told him where to hide In every case,
10:18
Speaker 1: the word does not stay outside the man. It gets
10:22
Speaker 1: into his mouth, into his stomach, into his week, into
10:25
Speaker 1: the place he sleeps at night. That is worth noticing
10:29
Speaker 1: because it is the shape of what God does later
10:32
Speaker 1: on a much larger scale. God's word has always come
10:36
Speaker 1: close and stayed personal, ending up inside somebody's ordinary life
10:41
Speaker 1: rather than hovering above it. And then there is a
10:45
Speaker 1: line hidden in the story of Samuel that I think
10:48
Speaker 1: is one of the most overlooked sentences in the Old Testament.
10:52
Speaker 1: Samuel is a boy serving in the tabernacle at Shiloh,
10:56
Speaker 1: a place where, the text says, the word of the
10:59
Speaker 1: Lord had become rare. God calls him by name in
11:03
Speaker 1: the night three times, and the boy keeps running to
11:07
Speaker 1: the wrong person. Once he finally understands who is speaking,
11:12
Speaker 1: the chapter closes like this. The Lord continued to appear
11:17
Speaker 1: at Shiloh, and there he revealed himself to Samuel through
11:21
Speaker 1: his word. 1 Samuel 3, verse 21. Read that again
11:28
Speaker 1: with John's opening in your mind. Centuries before any gospel existed,
11:33
Speaker 1: Scripture was already saying that God makes himself known by
11:37
Speaker 1: his word. The word is not a message God sends
11:41
Speaker 1: from a safe distance. The word is how God shows up.
11:45
Speaker 1: When his word comes into a room, he has come
11:48
Speaker 1: into the room. So by the time you reach the
11:50
Speaker 1: end of the Old Testament, the word of the Lord
11:53
Speaker 1: has become enormous. It flung the galaxies out. It went
11:57
Speaker 1: looking for a childless old man in Canaan. It toppled
12:02
Speaker 1: kings through the mouths of men with dirt under their fingernails.
12:06
Speaker 1: It arrived. It did what it was sent to do.
12:09
Speaker 1: And it never once came back empty. And still, something
12:13
Speaker 1: was missing. Something that all those centuries of speaking could
12:18
Speaker 1: not give. Israel heard God. That was their whole identity,
12:24
Speaker 1: the thing that made them different from every nation around them.
12:28
Speaker 1: Other peoples had statues you could see, Israel had a voice,
12:32
Speaker 1: and the voice terrified them. At Sinai, the people stood
12:37
Speaker 1: at the base of a shaking mountain while God spoke,
12:41
Speaker 1: and the experience nearly undid them. They came to Moses
12:45
Speaker 1: afterward and begged him to be the one who listened
12:47
Speaker 1: from now on. Let God speak to you, they said,
12:52
Speaker 1: and you can tell us what he said, because if
12:54
Speaker 1: he keeps speaking to us directly, we are going to die.
12:58
Speaker 1: That is not poetry. That is a nation asking for
13:02
Speaker 1: a buffer between themselves and the holiness of God. Moses
13:06
Speaker 1: himself went further than anyone. He spoke with God as
13:11
Speaker 1: a man speaks with a friend, and it still was
13:13
Speaker 1: not enough for him. He asked for one thing more.
13:17
Speaker 1: Show me your glory. Let me see you. And God,
13:20
Speaker 1: who loved him, said no. You cannot see my face,
13:26
Speaker 1: for no one may see me and live. Exodus chapter
13:29
Speaker 1: 33 verse 20. What God did instead was almost tender.
13:36
Speaker 1: He hid Moses in a crack in the rock, covered
13:39
Speaker 1: him with his hand while he passed by, and let
13:41
Speaker 1: him look only at his back once the danger had
13:44
Speaker 1: gone by. The greatest prophet in Israel's history got a
13:49
Speaker 1: glimpse of glory already leaving. So think about what the
13:53
Speaker 1: Old Testament actually leaves you holding. Instruction, promises, warnings, comfort, poetry, prophecy,
14:01
Speaker 1: volumes of God's speech. And no face, not one person
14:06
Speaker 1: in all those centuries could look at God and live
14:09
Speaker 1: to describe Him. They knew what he had said. They
14:13
Speaker 1: did not know what he looked like when he said it.
14:15
Speaker 1: Every parent knows the difference. A letter from home is
14:20
Speaker 1: a real gift when you are far away. It carries
14:23
Speaker 1: actual love, actual words that mean something. But the child
14:28
Speaker 1: reading it is still looking at paper. What she wants
14:32
Speaker 1: is the person who wrote it, standing in the doorway.
14:35
Speaker 1: Israel had letters for 2,000 years. What they longed for
14:40
Speaker 1: was the doorway. Which brings us to the sentence John
14:44
Speaker 1: has been building toward from his very first line, and
14:48
Speaker 1: one of the most astonishing sentences ever written in any language.
14:53
Speaker 1: The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.
14:57
Speaker 1: We have seen His glory, the glory of the one
15:00
Speaker 1: and only Son, who came from the Father, full of
15:04
Speaker 1: grace and truth. John 1.14 Flesh, the ordinary Greek word
15:11
Speaker 1: for the stuff a body is made of. Skin that
15:14
Speaker 1: could be scratched. Feet that got dirty on the road
15:18
Speaker 1: to Jericho. Lungs that pulled in the same dusty air
15:22
Speaker 1: everyone else in Galilee breathed. The voice that said, let
15:26
Speaker 1: there be light, grew up learning a trade in a
15:29
Speaker 1: small hill town where nothing important ever happened. The phrase translated,
15:35
Speaker 1: made his dwelling is built on the word for a tent,
15:39
Speaker 1: and for anyone raised on the Hebrew scriptures, that is
15:42
Speaker 1: not a random image. In the wilderness, God had told
15:46
Speaker 1: his people to build him a tent, so his glory
15:50
Speaker 1: could settle down in the middle of the camp. The
15:53
Speaker 1: presence too holy to approach came and lived in fabric
15:57
Speaker 1: and poles in the centre of their ordinary lives. John
16:01
Speaker 1: reaches for that picture on purpose. It happened again, he
16:05
Speaker 1: is saying, and this time the tent was a human body.
16:09
Speaker 1: Then he adds five words that answer the ache we
16:12
Speaker 1: just walked through. We have seen his glory, Moses asked
16:17
Speaker 1: and was refused. John says he saw it, not in lightning,
16:21
Speaker 1: not from a distance, not through his fingers from inside
16:25
Speaker 1: a rock. He saw it in a face he ate
16:28
Speaker 1: meals with. Whatever glory means, John claims he watched it
16:33
Speaker 1: eat bread and fall asleep in a boat. Years later,
16:38
Speaker 1: an old man writing a short letter to some worried
16:41
Speaker 1: Christians could not keep the wonder out of his sentences.
16:45
Speaker 1: He piles up verbs like a man who cannot quite
16:48
Speaker 1: believe his own life. What we have heard, what we
16:52
Speaker 1: have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at
16:55
Speaker 1: and our hands have touched. And then he names it
16:59
Speaker 1: the word of life. Hands have touched, the word that
17:05
Speaker 1: made the world held. John wrote in Greek, and his
17:09
Speaker 1: choice of Greek word deserves a moment because English flattens it.
17:15
Speaker 1: The word he used was logos. In everyday Greek it
17:19
Speaker 1: simply meant a word, a saying, a statement. But it
17:23
Speaker 1: stretched wider than our English word does. Logos could also
17:28
Speaker 1: mean the reasoned account you give when someone asks you
17:31
Speaker 1: to explain yourself, the explanation, the making sense of a thing.
17:37
Speaker 1: Hold that beside how the prologue ends, because John finishes
17:42
Speaker 1: his opening by circling back to exactly the problem Moses
17:46
Speaker 1: ran into. No one has ever seen God, but the
17:50
Speaker 1: one and only Son, who is himself God and is
17:53
Speaker 1: in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
17:58
Speaker 1: John chapter 1 verse 18 The verb John uses there
18:03
Speaker 1: is the root of our English word exegesis, which is
18:06
Speaker 1: what a teacher does when he takes something dense and
18:09
Speaker 1: compressed and opens it out until you finally understand what
18:13
Speaker 1: was in it all along. That is the claim. Jesus
18:18
Speaker 1: is the opening out of God, the full explanation in
18:22
Speaker 1: a life you can watch from beginning to end. And
18:26
Speaker 1: once you see that, the Gospels start reading differently because
18:30
Speaker 1: Jesus spends three years doing the one thing God's Word
18:34
Speaker 1: has always done. He speaks and things happen. A storm
18:40
Speaker 1: is coming apart over the lake, water pouring over the
18:43
Speaker 1: sides of the boat, professional fishermen convinced they are about
18:47
Speaker 1: to drown. Jesus stands up and says a few words
18:51
Speaker 1: to the weather, and the wind stops and the water
18:54
Speaker 1: goes flat. The men in the boat are more frightened
18:58
Speaker 1: afterward than they were during the storm, and they ask
19:01
Speaker 1: each other the only question that fits. Who is this?
19:05
Speaker 1: Even the wind and the waves obey him. John's prologue
19:11
Speaker 1: has already handed you the answer. The sea has been
19:15
Speaker 1: obeying that voice since the day it was made. He
19:19
Speaker 1: speaks to a girl lying dead in her father's house,
19:22
Speaker 1: and she opens her eyes. He speaks to a man
19:25
Speaker 1: four days in a tomb, and calls him out by name,
19:29
Speaker 1: and the man walks into the daylight still wrapped in
19:33
Speaker 1: the cloth they buried him in. He speaks to fever,
19:36
Speaker 1: to blindness, to bread that will not stretch far enough.
19:40
Speaker 1: and every one of them answers the way the light
19:43
Speaker 1: answered on the first day of the world. The word
19:47
Speaker 1: goes out. It is so. Same voice, same authority. Now
19:53
Speaker 1: with a face you could look at and eyes that
19:55
Speaker 1: could look back. Before we go further, there is one
19:59
Speaker 1: misunderstanding worth clearing up, because it is extremely common and
20:04
Speaker 1: it quietly shrinks the verse down to something much smaller
20:08
Speaker 1: than what John wrote. Many sincere Christians hear the phrase
20:13
Speaker 1: the Word of God and think immediately of a book.
20:17
Speaker 1: We use the phrase that way all the time, and
20:19
Speaker 1: rightly so. We say the Word of God when we
20:22
Speaker 1: mean Scripture, and we sing about it and carry it
20:25
Speaker 1: to church under our arm. So when someone reads John
20:29
Speaker 1: chapter 1 verse 1 for the first time, the natural
20:33
Speaker 1: assumption is that it is a verse about the Bible.
20:36
Speaker 1: In the beginning was the Bible, and the Bible was
20:39
Speaker 1: with God, and the Bible was God. Read the rest
20:44
Speaker 1: of the paragraph, and it will not hold. Two verses later,
20:49
Speaker 1: the Word is making the universe. Eleven verses later, the
20:53
Speaker 1: Word comes to a nation and gets rejected by them.
20:57
Speaker 1: Thirteen verses later, the Word takes on flesh and moves
21:02
Speaker 1: in among us. A book cannot be refused by its
21:05
Speaker 1: own people and cannot become a body. John is describing someone.
21:11
Speaker 1: But this is where it gets better, not smaller. Understanding
21:15
Speaker 1: that the Word is a person does not push Scripture aside.
21:19
Speaker 1: It explains why Scripture matters so much. The Bible is
21:23
Speaker 1: God speaking, and John is telling you what all of
21:26
Speaker 1: that speaking was aiming at. Every command, every psalm of grief,
21:31
Speaker 1: every promise to a wandering family, every warning through a prophet,
21:36
Speaker 1: was God working toward the moment he would say it
21:39
Speaker 1: all in a psalm. That is why Jesus could tell
21:43
Speaker 1: the religious experts of his day that they searched the
21:46
Speaker 1: Scriptures diligently and still missed the point, because the Scriptures
21:51
Speaker 1: were about him and they would not come to him.
21:53
Speaker 1: So Scripture is where you go to hear the Word.
21:56
Speaker 1: It is the reliable, God-given record of his voice. But
22:00
Speaker 1: the page is a door, and the person is the room.
22:05
Speaker 1: Plenty of people have known the words on the page
22:07
Speaker 1: inside out and never walked in. And once you see
22:10
Speaker 1: that the word is a person rather than a text,
22:14
Speaker 1: the next thing John says becomes almost startling. Here is
22:18
Speaker 1: the part most people never think about. Consider what a
22:22
Speaker 1: word actually requires in order to work. Fire does not
22:26
Speaker 1: need your permission to burn you. A stone falls on
22:30
Speaker 1: you whether or not you agree with it. Thunder does
22:33
Speaker 1: not wait to be welcomed. But a word only accomplishes
22:37
Speaker 1: its purpose in someone who receives it. You can hear
22:40
Speaker 1: a word and refuse it. You can stand there while
22:44
Speaker 1: the truest sentence in the world is spoken over you
22:48
Speaker 1: and walk away unchanged. Speech is the one form of
22:52
Speaker 1: power that hands the outcome to the listener. God knew that,
22:57
Speaker 1: and he came as a word anyway. John says it
23:00
Speaker 1: three verses before the famous one, and he does not
23:03
Speaker 1: soften it. He came to that which was his own,
23:07
Speaker 1: but his own did not receive him. Yet to all
23:11
Speaker 1: who did receive him, to those who believed in his name,
23:15
Speaker 1: he gave the right to become children of God. John
23:19
Speaker 1: chapter 1, verses 11 and 12. Read the first half
23:24
Speaker 1: of that and feel how much room God left for
23:27
Speaker 1: people to say no. He came to his own home,
23:31
Speaker 1: his own people, the ones who had been hearing about
23:34
Speaker 1: the word of the Lord in synagogue every Sabbath of
23:37
Speaker 1: their lives, and many of them looked at him and shrugged.
23:41
Speaker 1: He did not override them. He did not flatten the
23:44
Speaker 1: objections with fire from heaven the way he could have.
23:48
Speaker 1: He had come as thunder once at Sinai, and the
23:51
Speaker 1: people who heard it begged him to stop. So when
23:55
Speaker 1: God chose the way he would say the truest thing
23:57
Speaker 1: about himself, he came small, a baby who needed his
24:01
Speaker 1: mother to feed him, a boy in a carpenter's shop,
24:05
Speaker 1: a man who got tired, who was hungry, who cried
24:08
Speaker 1: at his friend's grave. The word God spoke about himself
24:12
Speaker 1: was gentle enough to come close without crushing anybody. That
24:17
Speaker 1: is not weakness on God's part. That is the mercy
24:20
Speaker 1: underneath the whole plan, because it means the door was
24:25
Speaker 1: left open, and it means what happens next depends on
24:29
Speaker 1: receiving rather than achieving. Look at the second half of
24:33
Speaker 1: that verse again, to all who did receive him, not
24:38
Speaker 1: to all who understood him, not to all who deserved him,
24:41
Speaker 1: not to all who had lived cleanly enough to qualify,
24:45
Speaker 1: to all who received him. That is the language of
24:48
Speaker 1: an open hand, and an open hand is something a
24:52
Speaker 1: weak person can manage, a dying person can manage it,
24:57
Speaker 1: a frightened person, an old person, a person who has
25:00
Speaker 1: failed in ways she has never told anyone can manage it.
25:05
Speaker 1: This is why the New Testament says, faith comes from hearing.
25:10
Speaker 1: God made himself into a word so that the only
25:13
Speaker 1: thing required of you is the thing a listener does.
25:17
Speaker 1: There is one more passage that has to come in here,
25:20
Speaker 1: because it says out loud what John's title implies. It
25:24
Speaker 1: sits at the top of the letter to the Hebrews.
25:27
Speaker 1: In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the
25:31
Speaker 1: prophets at many times and in various ways, but in
25:35
Speaker 1: these last days he has spoken to us by his Son,
25:39
Speaker 1: Hebrews 1.1.2, at many times and in various ways. That
25:46
Speaker 1: is a good description of the Old Testament. A voice
25:49
Speaker 1: in a garden, a fire in a bush, a dream
25:53
Speaker 1: about a ladder, a still small sound after a windstorm,
25:58
Speaker 1: writing on a wall, dozens of prophets, each one handed
26:03
Speaker 1: a piece. And then the writer says, God spoke by
26:07
Speaker 1: his son. One voice. Everything at once. Not another installment
26:14
Speaker 1: in the series, but the finished statement the whole series
26:17
Speaker 1: was moving toward. Think about what that means for your
26:21
Speaker 1: ordinary Tuesday. God is not upstairs still working out what
26:26
Speaker 1: to say about you. He is not weighing whether to speak,
26:29
Speaker 1: keeping his real opinion back until you have improved. He
26:33
Speaker 1: has already given his fullest and clearest word on the
26:36
Speaker 1: subject of how he feels about human beings. And that
26:40
Speaker 1: word walked to a cross for people who were nailing
26:43
Speaker 1: him to it. Whatever God has to say about you,
26:46
Speaker 1: he has already said it in his Son, and the
26:49
Speaker 1: tone of it was not what most of us assume.
26:53
Speaker 1: That is why the silence you feel is not the
26:56
Speaker 1: last word on God's character. Real silence hurts, and there
27:01
Speaker 1: is no use pretending otherwise. There are seasons when heaven
27:05
Speaker 1: feels shut, and prayer feels like talking into a wall,
27:10
Speaker 1: and any Christian who says otherwise has not lived long enough.
27:14
Speaker 1: But if you take the whole Bible as one story,
27:17
Speaker 1: God's instinct from the first page is to speak, to reach,
27:22
Speaker 1: to take what is hidden and make it known. He
27:25
Speaker 1: has been doing it since the darkness. He did it
27:28
Speaker 1: most completely in a person. A quiet week does not
27:32
Speaker 1: undo that. You do not have to guess what is
27:35
Speaker 1: inside the heart of God. He told you. He told
27:39
Speaker 1: you in a life, in a face, in a word
27:42
Speaker 1: made flesh. One last thing, and it surprises almost everyone
27:47
Speaker 1: who hears it. Jesus is called the Word of God
27:50
Speaker 1: in exactly two places in the entire Bible. The first
27:54
Speaker 1: is the opening of John's Gospel, which we have been
27:57
Speaker 1: walking through. The second is not in a Gospel at all.
28:01
Speaker 1: It is near the end of Revelation, in a vision
28:04
Speaker 1: of Christ returning, riding a white horse, wearing a robe
28:08
Speaker 1: stained with blood, and the text stops to tell you
28:12
Speaker 1: his name. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood,
28:17
Speaker 1: and his name is the Word of God. Revelation 19.13
28:24
Speaker 1: The title bookends everything. He is the word before the
28:28
Speaker 1: world begins, and he is still the word when history ends.
28:32
Speaker 1: Before there was light, he was the word. In a
28:35
Speaker 1: manger in Bethlehem, he was the word. Speaking to a
28:39
Speaker 1: storm on a lake, he was the word. Hanging silent
28:43
Speaker 1: in front of Pilate, he was the word. Riding out
28:47
Speaker 1: at the end of all things, he is the word still.
28:51
Speaker 1: Nothing about him changed when he took on flesh, and
28:54
Speaker 1: nothing about him is left behind when he comes back.
28:58
Speaker 1: The same person, the same name, all the way through
29:02
Speaker 1: the story from the first sentence to the last. So
29:05
Speaker 1: we come back to where we started, and the answer
29:08
Speaker 1: stands up on its own. John called Jesus the Word
29:12
Speaker 1: because he had run out of smaller ways to say
29:15
Speaker 1: what he had seen. Light shows you a room but
29:18
Speaker 1: cannot tell you the mind behind it. A lamb can
29:22
Speaker 1: be offered, but cannot explain why. A king can rule
29:26
Speaker 1: you from a throne you will never be allowed to approach.
29:30
Speaker 1: Only a word does the particular thing John needed done,
29:35
Speaker 1: which is to take what is hidden inside one person
29:38
Speaker 1: and carry it across the gap in another. Jesus is
29:42
Speaker 1: the thought of God, finally said out loud, in a
29:45
Speaker 1: form small enough for us to receive without dying. And now,
29:50
Speaker 1: let me speak to whoever is actually listening to this.
29:54
Speaker 1: If you are tired, and the tiredness has gone on
29:56
Speaker 1: long enough that you have stopped expecting it to lift,
30:00
Speaker 1: Hear this. The word God spoke about himself came as
30:04
Speaker 1: a man who fell asleep in a boat because he
30:07
Speaker 1: was worn out. He knows what your body costs you.
30:11
Speaker 1: If you are alone, and the days are long and quiet,
30:14
Speaker 1: and there are stretches where nobody says your name, remember
30:18
Speaker 1: that God's habit is to come near, not to keep
30:21
Speaker 1: his distance. He pitched his tent in the middle of
30:24
Speaker 1: the mess. He is not repelled by a small life
30:28
Speaker 1: or a quiet house. If you are getting older and
30:31
Speaker 1: you feel your usefulness slipping, remember that the only thing
30:35
Speaker 1: the Word of God requires of you is a listener.'
30:38
Speaker 1: You have not aged out of the one thing that matters.
30:42
Speaker 1: Receiving him is something a person can do from a chair,
30:46
Speaker 1: from a bed, from the end of her strength. If
30:49
Speaker 1: you are ashamed, and there is something in your past
30:52
Speaker 1: you would not want, read out loud, look again at
30:55
Speaker 1: who did not receive him. It was the respectable and
30:58
Speaker 1: the religious, and look at who did.' fishermen, tax collectors,
31:03
Speaker 1: a woman at a well in the middle of the
31:05
Speaker 1: day with a history she was hiding, a thief with
31:08
Speaker 1: hours left to live. The word landed in soil nobody
31:13
Speaker 1: thought would grow anything. And if God feels far away
31:17
Speaker 1: right now, hold on to the first sentence of John's
31:20
Speaker 1: Gospel like a rope. In the beginning was the Word.
31:24
Speaker 1: Before there was anything to speak to, God was the
31:27
Speaker 1: kind of God who speaks. He has never once stopped.
31:31
Speaker 1: He spoke a world into existence. He spoke to shepherds
31:34
Speaker 1: and prisoners and frightened old men. And when he had
31:37
Speaker 1: said everything else, he said the clearest thing of all.
31:41
Speaker 1: A person you can know who came to his own
31:45
Speaker 1: and gave the right to become children of God to
31:48
Speaker 1: everyone who would simply take him. That is why John
31:52
Speaker 1: could not begin anywhere else, not with a manger, not
31:56
Speaker 1: with a family tree. He had to tell you first
31:59
Speaker 1: that the man he followed for three years was the
32:02
Speaker 1: voice that made the light, and that the voice had
32:05
Speaker 1: a face, and that the face was full of grace.
32:09
Speaker 1: The God who has never stopped speaking has spoken to
32:12
Speaker 1: you most clearly of all in His Son. He is
32:15
Speaker 1: not finished with you. He is not silent about you.
32:18
Speaker 1: Come in and listen, and keep going. And may the
32:22
Speaker 1: God who spoke light into the darkness speak peace over
32:27
Speaker 1: your weak. If this video helped you grow deeper in
32:32
Speaker 1: God's Word, I want to personally invite you to be
32:35
Speaker 1: part of what we are building here. Every video on
32:39
Speaker 1: this channel takes many hours of study and careful research
32:43
Speaker 1: to make sure we bring you content that is faithful
32:46
Speaker 1: to Scripture and worthy of your time. If you would
32:50
Speaker 1: like to support this mission and help us keep making
32:53
Speaker 1: these videos, you can find a link in the description
32:56
Speaker 1: below to give a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.
33:01
Speaker 1: Every gift, no matter the size, goes directly toward creating
33:06
Speaker 1: more content like this. And if you are not in
33:10
Speaker 1: a position to give right now, that is completely fine.
33:14
Speaker 1: The best thing you can do is subscribe, share this
33:17
Speaker 1: video with someone who needs to hear it, and keep
33:20
Speaker 1: studying God's Word with us. Thank you for being here,
33:25
Speaker 1: and may God bless you richly.