Sermon Transcript
Thank you, Nate. Good morning. Today we’re gonna pivot from Romans to the first 5 verses in John. 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 was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Thanks, Danny. About 20 years ago, there was a movement that called itself the New Atheists. That movement reached its peak about 2004 to 2012. It was led primarily by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Dawkins. You may remember them.
They each wrote bestsellers during those years really aimed at disproving God’s existence and then by extension disproving the possibility of miracles. They argued things like the physical world is all that there is, everything that exists can be found on the periodic table, Everything that happens must have a natural cause, even things like love or beauty. What those really are is just chemical reactions inside of our brains, so it can be measured. Even though— even love and beauty have a natural cause. Everything has a natural cause, meaning there cannot be a supernatural anything.
I mean, there’s nothing outside of nature, so no supra-nature, no supernatural. And they asked questions like, why would any education— educated person believe in miracles in the first place? And they predicted that as science discovered more and more about our world, eventually it would be able to explain everything or nearly everything, and when that day came, no one would believe in miracles anymore. They presumed their view of the world would become the dominant view. Do you remember all that from 20 years ago?
Depending on how close you were to those conversations, there was a lot of heat at the time. The New Atheists and the people who followed them, they were really on like a crusade to get people to believe what they believed. And here’s the interesting thing. Surveys of the American public, so for instance there’s the General Social Survey, it’s conducted by a group out of the University of Chicago. There’s other surveys that show the same thing, but the General Social Survey found that between the years 1991 and the latest one they did in 2018, belief in miracles increased.
Respondents were asked simply, do you believe in religious miracles? They didn’t specify what religion, just can miracles happen? And the percentage of people who said yes, definitely, or yes, probably, if you combine those 2 groups, it went from 73% of people that said yes in some way in ’91 to 76% in 2018. In between those years, there’s a few dips and a few rises, but overall it goes up. And perhaps the most interesting thing is the rise of belief in miracles among educated persons.
In 1991, only 30% of people with graduate degrees definitely believed in miracles. I’m certain they can happen. That was 30% in ’91. But in 2018, that number jumped to 61%. It doubled among the educated in those years.
So it seems belief in miracles hasn’t gone out of style, even though science keeps finding out more about the world, and we celebrate science. I mean, stay at it, science. I can’t wait for my teleporter. Please have it to me soon.
But the New Atheist prediction that as science discovers more, belief in miracles will decrease, that prediction didn’t turn out, at least so far, because as science has discovered more, belief in miracles has gone up, not down. Now that doesn’t mean that more people are connected to a faith tradition today than they were in 1991. Church attendance, for instance, has decreased in the same period, and people’s religious commitments outside of church, that’s mixed data, but as a society as a culture, we seem to be open to the possibility, maybe we’re even expecting certain times when something from outside of nature breaks into nature and does something miraculous. As Nate said, we’re beginning a new series today in the book of John which will take us all the way through Christmas, but more than studying the book of John in general, we’re studying the miracles recorded in the book of John which are all over the place. There are so many miracles in John that by the time we’re done, we will have studied pretty much the entire book.
The only section that we won’t study are the chapters that we did an in-depth series in about a year and a half ago. That was the account of Jesus in the upper room with his disciples the night before his death, leading up to his arrest. We studied those chapters like a year and a half ago, so we’re going to skip that section, but other than that, we will cover the whole book. From the perspective of miracles. And what we will find is that Jesus’ miraculous signs and wonders, of which there are many, they weren’t just a display of power, although they were that.
They were displays of power. People stood in awe of him, but that’s not the only reason Jesus did them. Similarly, the miracles were not just simply supporting evidence of Jesus’ divine claims, even though they were also that. I mean, his signs and wonders were absolutely a validation of who he said he was. Jesus even tells the religious leaders who were upset with him, you know, because Jesus keeps referring to himself as God and that’s a little problematic.
They were upset and Jesus says, well, if you don’t believe my words when I say that I’m God, then believe these miracles. You know, the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised back to life. Who else could do what I’m doing except God, right? So certainly, absolutely miracles helped his credibility with his divine claims. But they were also something else.
If the only thing Jesus was going for was to prove that he was powerful, or prove that he was God. If that’s all he was going for, man, he could have shown off a lot more. I mean, he could have made people levitate. He could have flown through the sky himself. He could have leapt tall buildings in a single bound.
He could have turned sand into gold. He could have shot lasers out of his eyes. He could have breathed underwater for a whole week. He could have lifted the entire temple with his pinky. But he didn’t do any of that.
Why not? It certainly would have gotten him some attention, but he was after more than attention. He was after more than supporting proof that he was divine. He was putting the world back together, restoring the brokenness. Why make the blind see?
Why make the deaf hear? Why raise the dead back to life? Because pain, suffering, and death is not the way the world is supposed to be. It’s not the way the world was at the beginning. It’s not what God wants for us.
So his miracles are strategic, they fix something. In small ways they restore us to the goodness that we had at the beginning, which, you know, flying through the sky or shooting lasers out of his eyes, those wouldn’t have repaired anything. Jesus aims to repair, redeem, restore. So today as we start this series, we begin at the beginning, the very beginning, before the dawn of time really, when nothing was broken. So why start there?
Well, first of all, that’s where John starts, okay, so that’s where we’ll start, but also if Jesus’ miracles were intended to restore the original goodness, like in small ways, then it would be helpful to have an idea of what that original goodness was. I mean, what does God want to return us to? What was it like then? What’s he trying to get back for us? That’s where John starts his biography of Jesus.
And so in today’s text, we won’t see a specific miracle really like we will every other week. Instead, today is a picture of the original goodness that we lost, that one day Jesus will fully restore, and in the meantime this original goodness is what miracles give us a small taste of. So we’re looking at John 1:1-5, the opening sentences of his biography of Jesus, and as we look at this text we will see, in the beginning there was the Word, love, light, and life. Word, love, light, and life. So first, in the beginning.
In the beginning there was the Word. Before John tells us what it was like before the beginning, he tells us who was at the beginning. He gives us Jesus’ origin story, just like a good biographer would do. I mean, if you read a biography of George Washington, it might start with his parents or grandparents. Well, you know, what kind of family was little Georgie from?
Give some context for this guy. So John does that for Jesus, and the context of Jesus is he has always been. John’s claim is that Jesus predates, you know, the stable in Bethlehem at Christmas. Born in a manger was not Jesus’ real beginning, even though yes, Jesus came into the world at a particular place and time, approximately 0 AD, in that stable in Bethlehem. Great!
He did enter the world then, but John’s claim is that Jesus, the Son of God, has existed from eternity past. He has no beginning. This is what’s referred to as the eternality of the Son. Just like God the Father has always been, God the Son has also always been. John refers to Jesus in this passage as the Word in the verse Nate read earlier.
It becomes obvious later in chapter 1 that the Word means Jesus. That’s not controversial, but John deliberately uses the same language in his description of Jesus, the same language as the Old Testament Jewish Bible used in the very first verse of their Bible. Genesis 1:1, the first words of the Bible. Genesis 1:1 opens with, in the beginning God, which shows in the beginning God was already there. And John says, in the beginning the Word, or the— what was the Word?
So neither Genesis nor John say, in the beginning God came forth, or the Word came forth. That is not the biblical creation story. That is the creation story of some other ancient religions. I mean, the Babylonians believed the gods arose out of waters. So in the Babylonian story, water was first, gods came second.
But in the biblical story, God was first. He didn’t emerge. He has always been. In the beginning God. It’s the preamble to the whole Bible.
And the first century people, especially John’s Jewish readers, they’re very familiar with that language. In the beginning God. Okay, they knew it. But John deliberately uses that same language to describe Jesus. He says, in the beginning was the Word.
He changes it. He changes this very familiar language. It’s meant to be provocative. It’s like if we walked into a movie and on the screen were the words written, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Right, we see those words, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
We have an expectation of what this movie is going to be because those words mean Star Wars. We anticipate we’ll see some lightsabers and laser battles. So if the movie opened with, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and then the plot of the movie was the American Civil War. It would jar us. We’d be provoked.
We’d say, you can’t do that. I mean, the antebellum South is not Star Wars. We’d have questions like, are you trying to make some kind of statement? Are you saying the Civil War and Star Wars are linked somehow? I mean, we’d wonder, do they even have the rights to that phrase?
Is Disney going to send them a cease and desist for opening a movie like that? I mean, they can’t say, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and then it not be about Star Wars, right? We’d be provoked. That’s the reaction John wants. He’s eliciting a response.
He’s making a point. When he changes, in the beginning God, 2, in the beginning was the Word. He’s saying Jesus is God. And then he makes that explicit still, verse 1, he says the Word was God. And if that weren’t enough, John also says, verse 3, all things were made through him, meaning Jesus.
All things were made through him, and without him was not anything that has been made. So who created all things? Jesus. He’s saying Jesus is the Creator that we see in Genesis 1. He’s the unmade maker.
That’s John’s claim. So if Jesus made everything, right, I mean, logically, then Jesus himself was not made. Because if Jesus was made and Jesus is the one who made everything, then he would have already needed to be there in order to make himself, at which point he would have already existed. It means he’s always existed. He’s the unmade maker, and there’s only one of those, which is God.
Without a doubt, John is claiming Jesus is God. John is saying if you want to understand who the Word is, nothing less than referring to him as God is a sufficient descriptor. So Jesus is God. But at the same time, and this is where we probably have many questions, John describes a nuance about Jesus and God. He says, and there’s so much packed into these 5 words, he says, the Word was with God.
The Word was God, Jesus is God, and simultaneously the Word was with God, meaning there’s some distinction between Jesus and whatever else God is. To say it another way, God is more complex than only being God the Son. The word Jesus. This is what’s called the doctrine of the Trinity. God isn’t only Jesus the Son, he is also God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
He is 3 persons in one. If you’re confused, you’re not alone. First century people struggled with it, especially first century Jewish people who were radically monotheists. I mean, one of their phrases that they repeated to each other all the time is called the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord God, the Lord is one.
I mean, the Lord is one is one of their most central beliefs. So for them to embrace, yes, the Lord is one, he’s still one God, we haven’t abandoned that, but also within that one being there’s 3 persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that was a huge leap for them. As complex as it seems for us, it was more of a hurdle for them.
But embrace it they did. Because Jesus kept referring to himself as God and they had to do something with that. We will see many of those claims as we study John and John isn’t the only biographer of Jesus. Jesus’ other biographers Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they also record Jesus making divine claims about himself. He did it all the time.
It’s why the religious leaders ultimately crucified him. So his followers had to decide, Do we believe Jesus was who he said he was? And if so, then we’re going to need to incorporate more than one person into the one God. Or alternatively, do we just reject Jesus like many of the religious leaders did? There really wasn’t any middle ground because you have a guy walking around claiming to be the unmade maker.
I mean, you either believe him or you don’t. That’s a pretty polarizing claim. And if you don’t believe him, I mean, if you think he’s some kind of crackpot lunatic, which would be natural to think if somebody’s claiming that, then you would steer clear of him. You wouldn’t say, well, this guy is certainly banana town crazy, but maybe he has some good ideas. Let’s hear him out.
No, we don’t say that. If someone claims to be God, right, that’s a dividing line. Either he was who he said he was, or he has lost his mind, and if he has lost his mind, then we wouldn’t sit at his feet and learn from him. We would try to get him help.
Those are the 2 choices: worship him or commit him.
And many of the people who knew Jesus, who walked around with him, they started to believe the one without beginning has come to be among us. So that’s who was at the beginning: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Now we’ll move to what was at the beginning. What was when there was only God? When Father, Son, and Holy Spirit hadn’t created anything yet, what did the members of the Trinity experience then?
Did they ever have conflict? Did they try to run power plays on each other? See who would wind up on top? Was there lying, deceiving, backstabbing? I mean, if you read mythology from other religions, commonly those other gods had, you know, they had malicious streaks in them.
They could be a little backstabby with one another or deceitful, but the God of the Bible is not like that. In the beginning, when there was only God, there was love, there was light and life. Love, light, and life. We’ll cover love first. In the beginning was love.
We’re still focusing on this one phrase, the Word was with God. With doesn’t only mean they existed together, like you and I are with each other in this room right now. Instead, the way in which the Word was with God was love.
We know it was love because later in the book of John, Jesus explains— this is John 17:24— Jesus says before the creation of the world, pre-existent eternity, the Father loved the Son. When there was nothing else other than God, there was no conflict, there was no tension, there was no backstabbing each other, there was love. And I’ll tell you, as confusing as the doctrine of the Trinity can be sometimes, this is one of the major highlights of that doctrine. Because if God is Trinity, and there’s love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from eternity past, it means love existed before the foundation of the world. In fact, it means the world was created by a God who was already full of love.
Now if God weren’t Trinity, if he were only singular, let’s say, that means love could not predate the world because in order to love you need an object to love. So God could not have loved until he created something to love, which means in that case, if God’s only singular and it’s just him there, it means love came second after creation, or never. Now we could argue if it’s only God and he wanted to love, he could, you know, he could have just loved himself before he created the world. And yes, that’s true. When it was only him, he could have been full of himself.
But we don’t call that love. We call that vanity or ego or narcissism. Like being enthralled with you.
It’s not the best. It’s not the best foundation from which to make the world. We would much rather love be the foundation of everything else that exists. And if God is Trinity, then Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can love one another without being consumed with self. One of the traits of Trinitarian love that we see in Scripture, and we’ll sprinkle some other traits of their love as we go through the series, but one trait of their love is that no member of the Trinity ever, no member ever esteems, honors, or glorifies himself.
Each member is always praising or exalting the other ones. Always! Scripture is freakishly consistent that each member of the Trinity is outward focused on the other 2. Never inwardly focused. There are zero verses that depict the Father glorifying the Father within the inner Trinitarian dynamic.
God glorifies himself in reference to creation. That’s a different sermon. But within their inner Trinitarian dynamic, we’re talking about before the creation of the world, none of them ever glorify themselves. Jesus even explains that the Son wouldn’t glorify himself because if he did it would mean nothing. That’s John 8:54.
Yeah, of course, if you glorify yourself that’s not real praise, right? You’re just blowing up your own ego. That doesn’t really mean anything. It’s when somebody else praises you. I mean, Jesus says the reason the Son is glorified is because the Father glorified him.
The Son did not glorify himself. Their love is frankly what we would like to be part of. This outward-focused, self-forgetfulness, others-exalting, where each member is fully esteemed, fully affirmed, but no member ever worries about being shorted. I mean, one, because no member is thinking of himself at all, but also because with that much esteem coming in from others, you never think about if you have enough. You’re always full.
Like being part of something like that would be amazing, heaven on earth really. Now we’re skeptical and jaded and perhaps hurt and, you know, because we don’t think we could ever find a relationship like that. So we generally don’t fully give ourselves away because we assume the other side won’t do that for us. You know, we’re worried. That we’ll get taken advantage of.
If we put all our effort into making much of this other person without thinking about ourselves at all, we think we’ll get taken advantage of. So we normally hold parts of ourselves back, and then the other side does too, and then therefore we’ve never experienced this idyllic kind of love, at least not fully. Not like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit always have.
But that is what existed at the beginning of the world. This pure, selfless promotion of the other while simultaneously the other is doing the same. No one says, I gotta get mine. No one says, what about my needs? None of that.
It’s just selfless love. Without being tainted by sin. God wants to restore us to that. We know he wants to restore us to that because Jesus prayed for us to have that. Again, this is later on, John 17, Jesus prays, he prays for us, he prays that we all may be one just as Father and Son are one.
That’s John 17:21. So we know he’s praying for it, so we know he’s working to restore us to this untainted, pure, selfless, others-focused, love that we had at the beginning, that the Trinity has always enjoyed. So in the beginning there was love, but there wasn’t just love, there was also light and life. Light and life, major themes in John, both in John’s biography of Jesus that we’re going through and in John’s letters. Light and life, major themes.
In our passage, John says, verse 4, in Jesus was life and his life was the light Verse 5, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Later John says, 8:12, Jesus is the light of the world. Anyone who follows him will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life. John 10:10, Jesus came that people might have life and have it more abundantly. John 3:16, Jesus was given so that people might have everlasting life.
John 5:40, those who come to Jesus have life. John 1, or 1 John 1:5, God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
The idea is that Jesus is this eternal, unextinguishable source of light and life. He came into the dark world, but the darkness did not dim him. In fact, the opposite happened. He brought hope into hopeless places. His light drives away the darkness, and his life drives away death.
So for example, this is curious, the various times when Jesus’ biographers record an instance of Jesus being physically in the presence of death, you know, Jesus is in proximity to a dead body, what happens? The dead person comes back to life. Always. Every recorded instance. Jairus’ daughter, the widow’s son, and of course Lazarus.
There’s not a recorded account of Jesus being next to a dead person and the person staying dead. That’s curious, isn’t it?
Even more curious, there’s not one account of anyone dying when Jesus was physically present with that person. Now sometimes people would, you know, die a distance away and then Jesus would go visit them, but when he visited them then they came back to life, right? But they didn’t die in his presence.
Martha seems to have picked up on this, which from what she tells Jesus when her brother Lazarus died, because she told Jesus, Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. She knew people don’t die around you.
Even on the cross, the other prisoners, they were still alive when Jesus purposely laid down his life knowing that he would pick it back up again. Jesus’ life is depicted as having so much magnitude to it that it drives death away. He’s utterly life. There is no death in him, just like there is no darkness in him. He is the pure and spotless one.
There’s no deception in him, no hiddenness, no corruption, no evil lurking under the surface, no backstabby. Everything about him is true, everything about him is good, it’s all light all the time. And he’s bringing us back to that. It’s what we were made for. We were made for light, we were made for life, we were made for love.
This is why our hearts lift when we hear that he will restore us to that. You know, we say that’s exactly what the world needs, that’s exactly what I need. You know, the world and me is so messed up, we suffer from sickness and eventually death, and there’s darkness all over the place. We lie, we hide, we hurt each other, we betray one another. We know we ought not to, but we do it like we are participants of the problems.
We need someone from the outside to burst in to redeem us along with everything else. And the great news is Jesus does. The one who is life enters our death. The one who is light enters our darkness. The one who has always lived in perfect self-giving love gives himself away for us.
This is the cross. The cross is Jesus stepping into everything that’s wrong with this world— our guilt, our rebellion, our darkness, our death. He takes it on himself. Darkness falls over him. He descends into death.
But death could not keep him, because he is life! He is resurrection!
And when he rises, yes, that’s additional proof that he’s God, but it’s also a declaration about where history is going. It says darkness will not win, death will not win, sin will not win. It’s what his miracles show us, kind of in these small incremental ways. Jesus opens blind eyes, when he raises the dead, when he brings people back into community, like he brings outcasts back into loving fellowship. He’s given us little previews of the day when he will make all things new.
The miracles are these signs pointing forward to when there will be no more darkness or death or brokenness of any kind. Jesus’ restoration project is the answer to the deepest longings of our hearts.
Don’t you long for a love that never fails? Don’t you long for truth that is pure and incorruptible? Don’t you long for life that never ends? Don’t you long for a world that is finally as it should be? Don’t you long for those things?
We all do. Pay attention to those longings. They are telling you something. They are calling you to the one who was already there at the beginning, the one through whom all things were made, the one who is love, the one who is light, the one who is life. And the one who went to the cross to bring us back home.
Those longings are pointing you to him. Embrace him.
Let’s pray. Father, we are so grateful that Jesus came to this world of darkness and corruption and sin and brought love, life, and light. You are not a God who stands far off, you’re a God who comes near, and you don’t only come near, you come near to rescue. We look forward to the day, Lord, when your work is complete and all things are as they should be. In the meantime, Lord, may we embrace you as the answer for which our hearts long.
Pray those things in Jesus’ name, amen.
