40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2022 Christmas Special

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

In this special Christmas episode, Chad Bird, Erick Sorensen, Daniel Emery Price, and Scott Keith discuss the first 18 verses of the Gospel According to John. Have a listen and Merry Christmas! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate  

Welcome to the 30 Minutes in the New Testament, 40 Minutes in the Old Testament mash-up Christmas special. We do this every year, featuring different people. It occurred to myself and then Chad and Eric as well that we had never had, and I think this is true, I don't think we'd ever had the executive director, Scott Keith, as a guest on the program. We don't do a lot of guests. This isn't like a guest-heavy show, so we don't have a lot of guests, but the Christmas special is when we do. I don't think we'd ever had Scott on. And it turns out that Scott actually likes to talk about the Bible. I discovered this while hosting a show with him called Tough Text.

you know we thought he just wanted to talk about like confessional documents and like history and you know just like real theology not just like the bible but turns out that scott is a guy that also uh really enjoys the bible in fact mate is it safe to say scott that as you've been doing like bible studies and sunday school classes more that you like have uh maybe got to the point where you would prefer to do like a study on the book of the bible than just some document yeah It's certainly more to the core of what I think is important, so yeah. Well, so there it is. There's Scott.

So welcome to the show, Scott. We were trying to figure out what we were going to do. We decided that we were going to go try to do the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John. Now, you might be like, hey, haven't Dan and Eric done the Gospel of John? We have, but of course Chad's going to bring something that we didn't bring, because that's what Chad does, and of course Scott's going to bring something that we didn't bring. And besides, it's Christmas, and Christmas, if nothing else, is a time where you re-hear texts, right? I mean, we know this is what's going to happen in church.

They're good texts. So we're going to talk a little bit about John chapter 1. Should we just jump into it? Who's leading this thing? Am I leading this thing? I don't do the reading on either of the podcasts except for the one I do with Scott. So I will do— Wow.

Yeah. Eric's the reader on 30 minutes. Chad's the reader on 40 minutes. And so on the Christmas special, I'll be the reader. Here we go. We're doing John 1, starting in verse 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Okay, stop there, Dan.

Stop right there. I thought you were going to read it in Greek, just English. Yeah, kind of disappointing, right, Chad? Yeah, I guess we can go with that. That's why I don't do it. That's why I don't usually read it. uh so chad i i be in the old testament guy at 15 17 i this sounds familiar to me uh sounds like a very early portion of the bible like maybe the earliest portion of the bible yeah it's funny

the way that's funny the way that strikes you and let's okay let's suppose that you are one of the original readers of the gospel of john chances are uh greek is either your second or maybe even your primary language. So let's just pretend that it is. Let's just say that it is your primary language, right? That means that you're reading, when you read the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, you're reading it in the Greek version, which today we call the Septuagint. Well, you're hearing the Gospel of John read to you in Greek, and you know the Greek Old Testament. So no sooner do you get the first couple of words in John's Gospel before you have bells and whistles is going off and the first thing in your mind is yeah all the way back to the beginning because

the way that john begins his gospel in greek is in rk in the beginning and that is precisely the way that genesis 1-1 begins as well in rk in the septuagint so what your mind is going to do hopefully is it's going to hear genesis 1 and john 1 in concert and kind of putting these two together you're going to you're going to be able to better understand john 1-1 but you're also going to be able to better understand genesis 1-1 as you kind of compare both of these and then by comparing them you're going to have a fuller understanding of how creation began and you're also going to have a full understanding of what john is getting across when he begins in this way by talking about the word with god and the word being god it is interesting if you go back to

genesis chapter one and you just read it you know divorced from sort of this context in john it wouldn't necessarily jump out at you you know this idea of the word being uh uh you know as john will flesh out later a person it wouldn't necessarily jump out at you when you read in in verse three of genesis chapter one and god said and that said is the reference point for what John is talking about in John 1.1, that the Word is something distinct from the Father, and yet that's precisely what's going on here. And so then when you do go back to Genesis chapter 1, it radically transforms sort of the way that you see the text unraveling or being unveiled to you. And in fact, you do go back to the very first chapter of Genesis, and you see all three persons

of the Trinity right there at the very beginning, the Word, the Spirit, and of course the Father. So it is something that is pretty phenomenal to behold when you read Genesis through the lens of John. I think too, what John does here is he completely clarifies what is going on when you hear God say, let us make man in our image, and John tells you exactly what that means. Who's he talking to? What's happening right here? And he says, well, there's at least one other person—now, of course, the Spirit's there, too—but John is telling you, there's at least one other person, this person, the Word, that is present, that God can be speaking to—and by God, we mean the Father—but what's the communication going on here? And the answer is that God is communicating

with himself because there are three persons who make up god which which means that for christians we can't read genesis 1 apart from both a trinitarian and a christological perspective we can't pretend as if what genesis 1 is describing is just kind of some sort of uh unitarian god who's doing this work this is father son and holy spirit right from the beginning Christ is the Word by which God the Father brings all things into being. And so what that does is that it opens up the creation account to the full Christian reading that was always there, but maybe not was perceived with as great a clarity as it was before the Incarnation. Scott, being the real deal theologian in the mix here,

how important is this text for Christology? As far as—so in the Church, you have debates over this begotten or made controversy, right? So this is a Nicene kind of controversy, like, well, what do we do with Jesus? He's God's Son, did God create Him at some point? He's just like the first thing that God created. How important is this text for that? It's central. um there are plenty of texts uh in i think both the old testament when it's speaking about the

messiah who is to come and then the new testament when it's referring to jesus that will give you an indication that jesus is not just close to god not just a prophet of god not just sort of one of god's high servants but that he is god but this text is the one that we would call the the sedes doctrine i or the seat of that doctrine so if we're going to we're going to start talking about the doctrine of christ we'll go here first um and then to those other texts as well and we ran into this this week dan when we were recording on john chapter three um when nicodemus approaches jesus right and nicodemus says to jesus you know basically just paraphrasing i can see from all the wondrous things that you've done um that you're close to god right or that god is the power of

god is with you somehow but nicodemus doesn't know that he is god um and i think that the that this text clarifies that question when we ask the same question that nicodemus does yeah and not just that that jesus is god but that he has always been god right from the beginning you didn't this this will get to be more as we go on to verses two three and you know beyond you get a deeper explanation of how i mean it it's funny i i really like listening to you and chad teach on this because more than any time in my theological training you get a clear exposition from both of you that when you see god in the old testament when god is pictured to you in the old testament that's that's jesus um and this makes that pretty clear from the first sort of indication you get

that there is from you know genesis chapter one that there is god um this makes it clear that that's christ and i really like your your sort of addition that when we're created in god's image what are we looking at you know you're looking at jesus yeah yeah absolutely yeah why do we look the way we looked our very image is designed after christ this is what christ looks like this is god knowing what jesus looks like and we all look like him literally as in our form going back to what you said scott about this being the sort of seat of the doctrine um it is interesting one of the indications of that is how often those who deny the trinity have tried to rework the understanding of this text because you have to deal with it they recognize that you it just

in its plain reading is in fact giving jesus this divine uh title they recognize that it's really hard to escape from so if you were to talk to a jehovah's witness or something like that they're going to go here with you uh you know i've had a number of conversations with people that deny that Jesus is God, and they're going to go here, but they're going to try and rework it so that it fits into their doctrinal presuppositions already. Of course, the text is what it is, and that's one of the things that, you know, one of the great things we have on our side. We can just go right to the text and say, like it or not, this is what it says, and we have to deal with it as it is. And then from there, we read the rest of the scriptures with that understanding.

Yeah, and John is one of the more difficult books of the New Testament to sort of just dismiss too. And so, you know, even talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, you can talk about sort of intellectual unbelievers who have objections to, you know, what people claim Jesus said about himself and what the text says about Jesus. it's hard to dismiss john um as an authoritative text and it's and it's pretty clear what john is saying uh in these first verses of his book and it's all throughout his gospel i mean his gospel is the most explicit uh in talking about the deity of christ in making that very well known to us in case there's any question all right let's uh let's let's see what else we got through one verse good job uh one verse down 12 minutes one verse for this one do you guys add the 40 minutes and the 30 minutes for 70 minutes the good thing about the christmas special is that the minutes are

doesn't matter they don't matter we just go okay we can go as long as you want it could be all his gift at christmas yes right that's right you get you get the bonus uh verse two john says he this is the word this is jesus was in the beginning with god all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. Now, something that's important about this, and I'll keep reading, not only is Jesus not made, which is a theological debate that happens in the church, not created, but actually nothing that was created was created except through him. So all things were created through Christ. And this is, I think, something that we don't think about a lot i think you think about god up there like spinning the you know his power and and he's

creating everything and stuff but in reality he's speaking everything to existence but he's doing this through jesus in other words if god has a mouth it belongs to christ there's a lot of in this chapter and chad can correct me if i'm wrong but i've noticed this that there's a lot of double entendres double meanings of everything going on in this chapter and it starts right at the beginning, you know, in the beginning was the word and that in itself, you know, um, talking about the, the word that John is preaching being, you know, handing over Christ and it being Christ also. Um, you get that later on with the, the, you know, dwelt among us. Um, and I think you're getting it here too. Um, not only does this mean that nothing made Jesus, but then also nothing

was made without Jesus. This echoes what, uh, you know, the apostles write in their letters as well. If you go to Colossians chapter 1, verse 15, the apostle Paul writes, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And so, you know, sometimes I think people can isolate John's text and say, okay, well, that seems to be explicit, but I'm not sure that that echoes what is said throughout the rest of the New Testament. And that's just plainly false. The rest of the New Testament also talks about Jesus in this precise way, even though they're written, in some cases,

many years or decades apart from one another. One thing we know for sure is that this goes back to the earliest days of the church, that Jesus was sort of seen as this divine person. Even if they didn't know quite how to formulate the language of it, and there was debates about that, there was no doubt that this was being taught. One of the things kind of in the background here, too, is that what John is doing in the opening chapter is he's drawing upon, of course, the language of creation, as we've already talked about with Genesis 1, but he's also drawing upon the standard approach of wisdom literature in the old testament so if you go to the book of proverbs for instance what you're going to hear in a multitude of different ways that it is through wisdom that

god made all things proverbs 8 is the most famous example of that where wisdom is personified you have this solitically by wisdom as wisdom talks about was there with god and god made all things through me so one of the things that john is doing is he's drawing up on the creation account to be sure genesis 1 but he's also drawing upon wisdom literature and he's kind of he's wetting these two together word and wisdom in in one so that when you're talking about the son of god you're talking about the wisdom of god but you're also talking about the word of god and if we get there verse 14 uh is picking up on this same kind of language that's reflected in some other some intertestamental jewish literature uh such as uh ecclesiasticus or sirach where that same kind

of connection between god and creation and wisdom is is talked about so you're for me anyway what what's amazing about the opening chapter of john or one of the things amazing about is how he he picks various parts of the old testament and he and he blends them together in this one chapter in order to kind of summarize the various ways that the second person of the trinity has talked about in the old testament awesome all right let's let's try to get past verse 14 i mean not in this particular section I'm going to read, but we'll see if we can make some headway. John is so dense up front. He doesn't start slow. He just throws you in the deep end of the theological pool immediately in the opening lines here. So, in verse 4, you have,

"...in him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Now, I'm going to stop right there, because we're about to have some words about john do you guys got any thoughts on on these two verses here yeah i do i have one thing so scott mentioned earlier the double entendre and you have you have one here with that verb but esv translate as as overcome so in greek it's kata lambano and uh that can mean the darkness hasn't overcome the light but it can also mean at the same time the darkness has not grasped or understood the light so that verb has both of those both those connotations and that's fairly common in the gospel of john where he has these

double entendres where you kind of get a double-sided double-sided meaning they don't contradict each other whether they complement each other so the light is shining the darkness but the darkness can't grasp it and also the darkness can't overcome it either either one of those and then just one more thing uh notice too how much of the language of the creation account has been woven into this of course in the beginning and the word and god making all things through the Word, but right away we hear of life, and we hear of light, and we hear of darkness, all these themes that are lifted from the creation account. And now they're explained in terms of who the Son of God is, so that you can no longer read Genesis 1 apart from saying,

okay, what does this have to do with Jesus? How is this not just about Jesus, but about His entire saving work on on our behalf yeah in some ways john would the beginning of john john says that actually the bible as we know it the scriptures have actually always been about this person and this is part of the reason he goes starts this way right so he's uh this isn't like a new thing like oh there's this guy jesus and like you're gonna be thrilled i'm gonna tell you about it's a brand new thing he actually starts by saying actually you're the sacred text that we have always been about this person. All right, let's continue on. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. That is not this John, but John the Baptist, or John the Baptizer, because he

obviously was a Lutheran, so John the Baptizer. He came as a witness to bear witness about the light that all may believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light, the true light which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own people did not receive him, but to all who did receive him and who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Well, boy, there's a whole lot there that we could spend a whole lot of time digging into and dissecting. I mean, Dan, you and I did when we went through this text in 30

minutes in the New Testament. The first thing that jumps out at me, and we can certainly, if you guys have anything else, you can go back even before this, but in verse 11, when it says he came to his own and his own people did not receive him, again, there is a sort of double way of understanding that. On the one hand, you know, when you read it in the ESV translation, it gives the sense that it might be specifically talking about the Jewish people, because that indeed did happen. He came to the Jewish people and his own people did not receive him, generally speaking. And we know this is the case certainly with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the sort of religious establishment in Jerusalem, that's true. But the way we can understand the words

his own and his own people could also be like domain or, you know, and so this could be a more general statement about just the creation that he is responsible for creating. He came to them as their creator and was rejected by the creation that he began. And of course, both are applicable. Both are in fact true. It was not simply the Jewish people of the time that rejected Jesus, but it was people from every background and people from all different walks of life. In fact, All human beings naturally reject him, and that's why he has to go on, John has to go on, and say that the reality is no one would receive him unless God gave them the ability to receive him. Well, a big thing that's going on here, I think, is that Jesus, he comes to the people of Israel, but he also comes into a land that the vast majority of the Scriptures are about, right? If you read the Old Testament, he comes as a promised king to a people that he had made promises to,

had made a nation out of, who had delivered from slavery, had driven out enemies, given them a land. There's a combination here of coming to your own thing, your own kingdom, your own people. If you're reading this and you have the Old Testament in your mind, this is it, man. Like, the promised king is coming to the place that he gave his people, and he has come. And they said, no, thank you, right? And that's—I mean, if I get in that right chat, that's what this seems like to me. It's not simply that God had some people, and he came to them, and they turned them down. It's a huge narrative that's been building up to this for this massive rejection.

yeah and unfortunately it falls within the the long list of rejections that that the people that the the messengers of god experience i mean you can profit after profit when god sent sent his own prophet we might say to his own people well what do they do well most of the time they didn't they didn't receive him it's interesting too it doesn't say his own people didn't know him it says they didn't receive him so they may have even known intellectually who this was, but they didn't receive him. Why? Because it didn't fit exactly what they wanted, or they knew that his coming was going to so disrupt everything that they had grown to love in an idolater sort of way that they would rather reject him than receive him. So unfortunately,

what you're reading here in the beginning of John's gospel is in concert with all the other projections that we see throughout the Old Testament, everybody from Moses on through the rest of the prophets. I've always thought that this was kind of interesting, and you guys alluded to it i'm going to say it pretty uh explicitly john comes as the one that would come before a king and this would be a very normal practice you know you'd never have a king walk into a room and not be announced um and just like show up and be like oh there's king hey king how you doing um the king would come and he'd be announced and john is sent and he comes and he announces the arrival of the king and like you said chad they should know this king um and one

of the ways that they should recognize their king is that there was one that came before to announce his arrival both of these end up being rejected which would be common right for a rebellious jesus even tells parables about this for rebellious people that um want to reject the lord at the end you know even the son is rejected just like you guys said that this is telling sort of the story of genesis in the first what five verses i think i really liked what chad said that you're kind of telling the summary of the Old Testament and sort of the struggles and the trials with the Israelites and the prophets in these verses. Well, Jesus makes that explicit when he weeps over Jerusalem, right, and says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city that kills the prophets, right? And he says this

knowing that he, of course, is going to be lumped in there with them. He is going to have the same fate that they had. One of the things that is striking about it is that you do have this contrast where it says that, okay, it says people rejected, but it says that all who did receive him and who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. But at the same time, he pauses, like, he doesn't want you to think that there were some people that were dumb and rejected him, and some people that were smart and received him, but instead said that God had to do something. Like, these children, these children of God, were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. So your flesh, your will, your blood has

nothing to do with it. So your lineage, intellect, the will of man, none of that has anything to do with it. This is somebody who has to be born of God. And this is the interesting thing about faith, right? Is that, as Chad was saying, they didn't receive him, it wasn't that they didn't know him, right? And this rejection is simply a lack of faith, and faith is a trusting, and this is what people can't do and won't do. You see this, like, I think one of the craziest parts in John's Gospel is when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and you would think, like, it's all the time people would say,

if I could just see something, if God just show me something, you know, then I could believe. This is obviously not true. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. The religious leader's response to that is, great, now we have two people we have to kill. hey chad i have a question i've always thought this is a little bit of a weird formulation where it goes um not of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man um because oftentimes in

the scripture when scriptures refer to the flesh they're they're sort of referring to the fact that you're fleshly human right you're you are a man um you are a person the greek on there is just Andros, right? Yes. Yes. For the will of man. Yes. Is there a more specific way? Now I know that can be translated as man or specifically sometimes even this husband, right? It's been a while since I've done some Greek. So just bear with me a little bit here. Is that a good translation of that just to say a man, or is it sort of more specific, like not of the will of the flesh or the will of a particular man? In other words, you're not being sort of convinced into this by somebody else's will sort of being imposed upon you because it seems like you have

not of your will and then not of your will again and i'm kind of like okay that's weird is it not of your will and nor of somebody else's will but of the will of god yeah i think it can certainly carry that carry that nuance i mean it can be translated in the sense of it's not the will of a husband right or or not just kind of the will of uh humanity but i think it's because of its you because you have kind of a build-up here so not the will of the not of blood not a little flesh a little of man that john is trying to be as inclusive as possible he's trying to include every single possible reason here that is excluded so you don't have anything from blood you don't have kind of this just the regular fleshly sense but also you don't have anything from the will of

a particular man kind of forcing you into this or or a husband deciding this you're not being arm wrestled into this by another person right this is entirely god's god's doing god's act yeah and when he does it i think another uh the kind of subtle thing here that that john is indicating is that you know there we do we see this in the gospels where there's this kind of a salvation my pedigree idea. I'm Abraham's son or daughter. And because of that, of course, I'm not a slave to anybody. I'm part of the people of God because you can trace back my genealogical tree. One of the things that John is doing here, and it is a little bit subtle, is he's picking up on Old Testament language about the Israelites being the children of God. But now he's saying,

hey, listen, it has nothing to do with blood or flesh or the will of man or pedigree or anything like that you become part of the children of god by faith or you're not elected in abraham you're elected in christ yes yeah and it's thus it is in christ by faith that we become part of part of the children of god so it's it doesn't matter who your father is doesn't matter who your grandfather doesn't matter if you can trace it back to abraham what matters is are you in the word who becomes flesh who then gives you the faith whereby you are part now of the children of god yeah you know It really does a good job of excluding your own willpower, too. Yeah, it's very thorough.

Into the faith. This is one of those classic texts that we lean on to teach divine monergism. And John actually has quite a few of those nuggets in his gospel. You know, you think of John 644, where it says, No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me will draw him. and that word for draw is the the same word used to describe somebody drawing water up out of a well yeah how much water does to be a pole with laborious force that's correct that's right so god is doing all the verbs here my friends yeah yeah well you know you see john because it's

talking about john the baptizer says the same sort of thing to the pharisees right when the pharisees show up to the baptism he does this hey your blood doesn't matter thing real explicit when he says hey don't pursue don't presume because you are sons of abraham that you're not going to need this baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and then picks up a rock and says god can raise up children of abraham from these rocks that's one of my favorite lines in all the scripture which you think you're special yeah god could make somebody better than you out of this rock which yeah i was like and you might just read that as like a throwaway thing but that's like a how big an insult that was in the readings a couple weeks ago yeah yeah i mean it's a huge

insult right to a religious leader and that and it's a it's a huge insult for for two reasons i mean two potential reasons anyway on the one hand just as we hear it plainly it sounds like an insult but also if you look at some of the rabbinic literature i chad i'm actually stealing some of your thunder here right now for the first time ever but uh yeah i quote a greek and now you're talking rabbinical literature yeah you can uh you know you can see that oftentimes gentiles were referred to as nothing more valuable than a stone or a rock and so there could be this double meaning there where jesus is saying like you're nothing special god can make children of his out of these gentiles that you so loathe and so hate uh so either one they're not happy about it you know

but that it's a great point about how god is able to make children of his out of anybody i was going to say one of the great ironies about you know this hearkening back to descent from abraham is it well you go back to genesis 12 when you're introduced to abraham what's the whole purpose of god calling abraham saying you know go forth from your country your father's house and all of that so that he can make abraham through abraham a people and through these people a blessing to all the nations to all the gentiles so the very purpose of the calling of abraham was to be a blessing to the rest of the gentiles but what happened over time of course was this idea of erecting walls around Judaism to where, you know, you have to be part of this physical descent of

Abraham to really matter. The whole purpose of Abraham was for Abraham to face outward to the Gentile world, and then through him for God to bring more and more believers into the fold through him. So it's one of those unfortunate ironies of what happens over time, where people begin to think that it's all based upon your pedigree and not upon faith. Well, isn't it interesting that, by the way, God did just take a guy and make him, oh, well, we have Abraham as our father. Well, who's Abraham? He's just some guy that God made a nation out of. He didn't come from anywhere.

He was really surprised about God's decision to do so. Yeah. So it's like, what do you think? Yeah, he was raised in an idolater's house. I mean, we know from other scriptures, it wasn't like he was born in a church-going, Yahweh-worshiping family or something. the guy came out of idolatry yeah i mean there's there's plenty of uh jewish legends that that sprang up to kind of protect him from this like i think when he was a child he set fire to his father's house of idols to prove his piety no that's all just made up it's made up in a in a

way to try and demonstrate why god would have chosen abraham in the first place god chose abraham because god chose abraham because he you could look back and say um you know not of the will of not of blood not of the flesh not of the will of flesh not of the will of man like that's why did god choose abraham because god chose abraham we we've made it to verse 14 we're going to get through these for these 18 verses so uh we we're moving now uh verse 14 uh here's here's like the here's a here's a big one right here i mean this is one of the great verses in john and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory glory as the only son from the father full of grace and truth all right i'll let i'll let you uh take this chad for a second

because i know that this became flesh and dwelt i know that you've got stuff on this and i won't be like eric i won't steal it i'll let you have it we're gonna give him the greek yeah okay go for it yeah i think if you were to do a uh somehow i could like search all of my writings and determine which biblical verse has been quoted more often john 114 might be the one that pops up at least in the in the top three and one of the reasons well a couple of reasons um one reason is it's because it's so rooted in in the old testament uh as i'll explain in a minute and the other one is it just uh it's a beautiful illustration of how everything really does come to its its full fulfillment its complete fulfillment in in christ everything in the old

testament now comes to its its head in him so uh as as most people have have heard at one time or another, that word that translated as dwelt is better, more literally translated as tabernacled, skenao in Greek. And another thing I love about what John is doing here, and I alluded to this earlier, is he's picking up also on thoughts that were fairly common in some other Jewish writings, some what might be called popular Jewish writings at the time. So if you go to the wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, which predates John by two or three centuries, if you go to, I believe it's chapter 24 in Sirach, there's a description of how wisdom was, as it were, on a hunt for where to dwell. So wisdom went here, wisdom went there. And finally, what God

said was, make your dwelling or pitch your tent in Jacob and in Israel. And that's the same verbal form that we find here in John 1.14. So in this Jewish literature that preceded the gospel, you have wisdom described as tabernacling among Israel. And now John is kind of picking up on that idea, but he's saying the Word, who is also wisdom, not only tabernacled, but actually became flesh, incarnated, and tabernacled, pitched his tent among us. And of course, you can't hear that without hearing it through Exodus ears about how God pitched his tent, he tabernacled among the people of Israel, so that the tabernacle was always an architectural prophecy of who Christ was to become. God wanted to dwell smack dab in the midst of his people. He wanted to be found

at a specific place. He wanted the Israelites to point to that tabernacle or later the temple and say, that's where God is. And now that God has taken on our flesh, he's still smack dab in the middle of his people. And there he tabernacles so that people know exactly where God can be found. It's specifically in the person of Christ. Yeah, I mean, this is what's awesome about Christmas, is that God has become very specifically located, right? And so you don't have to wonder where He is, right? He has taken on flesh. He has roamed the earth with us.

He has become what like us. And so this is this great thing where we are created in the image of God, and then the image of God comes and tabernacles with us, and no longer do we have to point to a tabernacle or a temple or anything and say, that's where God is. but we know that God and the fullness of God dwells in a person, and that is Jesus Christ, and that's what Christmas is, is the incarnation, is the God becoming flesh and actually residing in the midst of his creation. We've seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. Now, if John wrote in Hebrew, he would say that we have seen his kavod, which is the Hebrew word for glory. Well, where'd you see the glory of God? Well, the glory of God was manifested at the tabernacle so this is one one more way of him heaping up image upon image where he says

all of the stuff that you read about in the old testament from exodus onward about god tabernacling or templing among man and showing his glory that glory is not located in one place and in one place only it's in the flesh and blood of of the son of god so if you want to know what god looks like if you want to see god if you want to know what kind of god we have well look no further look nowhere else in fact than in the person of christ because he's the full revelation of who God is. Yeah. There also is, potentially anyway, I think, a connection to the transfiguration of Jesus here, where, in fact, I mean, the apostles reference this, Peter references this in his epistles, John references this in his epistles. It's a significant event for them to

see Jesus transfigured in his glory in front of them. It's sort of this affirming point of his ministry in which, you know, they see his divine essence, even as they also see him in the flesh dealing with the same limitations that human beings have in the flesh, though without sin. So there is a reference, I think, to that here, too. And one of the things I just love, which John is going to flesh out in the remaining verses here, is you would expect when you have a discussion about his glory to be talking about his holiness or his, you know, the fact that we can't approach him or something like that. But what is he full of? He's full of grace. He's full of grace and truth. And so right from the beginning, God in the flesh comes as a God of grace

and mercy for the people. And you see this all throughout John's narrative, all throughout the ministry of Jesus recorded for us in this Gospel. Yeah, I think that's huge. I mean, the idea that you would see the glory of God prior to Christ is like a terrifying proposition, but John from the jump says, in Christ, when you see the glory of God, you're okay, because in Christ, he's not just got—he doesn't have just like a little bit of grace and truth, he's full to the brim of grace and truth. You know, as Jesus will say in John chapter 3, that, you know, I have not come to the world to condemn it, but that through me the world might be saved. This is the objective here. He's like, you're already condemned. You don't need me to come and do that. You've done a great

job of condemning yourself. I've come to do something different, which is condemnation is not on my mind. What is on my mind is saving the world. I'm going to save the world through grace. right i'm gonna go that's that's the whole that's the whole thing here so that that part is good because yeah i mean if you if you're reading through the old testament and somebody encounters the glory of god they don't come up they don't come away being like there's a lot of grace there that's not that's not the reaction they have this is the first i mean i think it's worth noting that if you're sort of just introduced to the gospels and you're just starting maybe you're starting with the book of john which would not be a bad place to start i don't think if you're sort of

first-time reader of the Gospels, this will be the first time you run into a couple of really important words, and it's probably important to know how they're being used, and that's grace and truth. Grace is used just a few verses afterwards, saying that we will receive grace for grace or grace upon grace. But what that means is, what those words mean are very important. I think it's harder in this verse again i'm really open to correction here chad it's harder in this verse when it says that glory is the only son from from the father full of grace and truth than it is later on when we're receiving grace upon grace but it still means the same thing it's a disposition or it's a god is favorable and we'd say because of christ but this is god's favor yeah and christ

is full of it. Christ is full of God's favor. Yeah, and unmerited, right? So this is God's favor that cannot be earned. Grace is, you've heard this said probably, but, you know, so mercy, which is not getting what you deserve, is one thing, but grace is getting something that you don't deserve, a good thing that you don't deserve, right? So God gives you mercy, and when He extends His mercy to you, He does not give you that thing that you have earned, which is not a good thing i mean mercy is a good thing but you haven't earned any good things uh but grace is where god actually then turns around and gives you and has a disposition that's favorable to you and you've and you've earned none of it right you have not earned this but he gives it to you anyway

yeah i mean if uh if you're caught for stealing bread to feed your family and you're taken before the magistrate mercy is you know that you're not put in jail or your hands and your hands not removed instead of being removed grace is then him actually awarding you the bakery right exactly you know and so it's um but i think it's interesting because we'll i mean we'll go on to say in our theology that god's favor god's grace these gifts these undeserved gifts that you get are on account of christ or because of christ or for the sake of christ but this is really neat because it's going to say that later um in the same chapter but this is really neat Because we would also say that you get those things on account of Christ because Christ

is giving you what's his, right? And so this starts out by saying, Christ is full of this. He's full of God's favor, so full of it. He's going to give it to you. And then he's going to give it to you upon giving it to you, right? You're going to not just receive it once, which is sort of a bad sort of evangelical model. You're going to receive it once, and then you're going to keep receiving it.

his grace is going to to keep flowing upon his undeserved favor on account of christ is going to keep flowing upon you yeah he's not going to run out of it either yeah he's because he's full of it yeah yeah i'm just looking uh here at the the two words which are translated full as in full of grace and truth and from his fullness we've all received grace upon grace uh they're basically the the same form of the of the greek words so there's a there's there's the fullness which he himself is filled with and then from that it overflows into us where you have grace upon grace upon grace. So it's this never-ending fullness from him that now flows into our lives. And getting that grace upon grace, and so you have this sort of parenthetical statement here

that John bore witness about him and cried out, this is he of whom I said, he who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me. It's like the statement that John puts in there, like, oh, by the way, John also knew that even though he's this big older cousin, that Jesus was before him. That's why he, in other words, he's saying he was there all along. John knew this. Look at what John said. He said he ranks higher because he was before, even though John, technically older. So John agrees, the baptizer agrees with this whole theology I'm laying down, and then says for this, from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. Or this could be translated grace in place of grace, which just means like grace on top of grace, right?

Yeah, grace for grace. Yeah, yeah. I don't mean to keep bringing us back, but grace and truth, truth is worth some mentioning here, too, just because in our sort of current world and worldview generally, it's such a non-objective word that's just sort of used to mean how I feel about something. um that's not what this means it doesn't mean that um christ is full of of you know god's favor and his own personal truth right this is this is truth this is um you know not merely just you know the an idea that's being spoken but this is like truth proclaimed this is actual reality this is actual sincerity this is sort of when you say something true he is the basis of that statement. That's how truth he is. Like, every truth you've ever uttered can be measured against the fact that he is truth. Yeah, he does this with Pilate, right? I mean, so Pilate's very

confused by all this, but Jesus, at the end of the day, is just saying, look, my words are truth. I am truth personified as much as anything else. So I'm God who is truth made flesh. So Jesus is also truth in a body. I think another reason this is really significant, too, is that I think a lot of the time grace is thought of at the expense of truth, that one sort of has to diminish or minimize truth in order to be gracious. That is not what happens with Jesus. Jesus confronts with, you know, people that need to be confronted with the truth. He doesn't minimize sin. He doesn't wink at sin. There's none of that. He calls it what it is. And yet, even calling things what they are still has grace upon grace. And, you know, grace really,

really means something to you when you actually recognize the truth about yourself, that you are not worthy of any of it. And so it makes it all the more phenomenal that grace upon grace is given to us in spite of the truth that is also proclaimed about us, that naturally we are unworthy sinners that deserve condemnation. Well, if Jesus didn't care about truth, he'd just give you grace and definitely wouldn't worry about dying for your sins, because that part's really inconvenient, right? So if he doesn't care about truth, he's like, all right, how about this? I'll just be a God of grace, and I'll just forgive everybody, and I won't worry about the wages of sin is death stuff i won't worry about that bit of truth like let's just not do that because that's gonna be

horrible for me uh personally i don't want to i'm not gonna do it uh but he doesn't do that i mean the cross tells you that god very much and jesus very much is concerned with truth and calling anything what it is so uh when when he's when he says the wages of sin is death uh they're in the garden of eden when he says oh you shall surely die someone's gonna have to to die and pay for the way to pay these wages and god's not lying no no and so he does this i got you got to love this line chad this is a great old we got to get through actually reading 16 through 18 because they're pretty freaking powerful yeah dude so from his fullness we've all received this grace upon grace and then here you go for the law was given through moses grace and truth came through

jesus christ bam you know that's a pretty big mic drop right there yeah and it's a you look at the look at the verbs that are used there too it says for the law was given through moses so this isn't something that moses came up with it was given through him and so the true subject of that is god so god gave the law so it's important the reason i'm accenting this i don't want to give the impression that the law was somehow beneath god no god gave the law god so you could translate this in in a more active way god gave the law through moses the law was given to him so certainly God gave that law. But where do we get grace and truth? Well, it's not through the law that God gave. It's through the son that God sent. That is where you're going to find grace. Because when it

comes to the law, if you're looking for grace, you're not going to find it in the law. The law simply says, do this and don't do that. And if you don't follow this law, you're going to be condemned. Period. End of story. There is no mercy. There's no grace, nothing like that when it comes of the law you're going to find that exclusively in the son the word that god sent and you're going to find it not just there but you can find it in in this fullness that john also talks don't you think it's interesting that he says the law was given through moses grace and truth came through jesus christ as i think some people might say like well the truth comes through the law but then like the grace comes through jesus but that's not what john says john says look god gave us the law

through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, which I take to mean this, that the law is insufficient to tell you everything about God. It doesn't actually tell you the whole truth about God, because if you only have the law, you are going to have a very, very incomplete view of who God is. So you couldn't say the law is the embodiment of truth? No. No. Our sinful inclination is when we hear that Christ is coming, is for Christ to become our next Moses. And this was their inclination as well. John knows this, right? The Spirit has revealed this about their hearts to John as he writes this, and he writes the sort of ultimate argument against it. And it doesn't mean that the law isn't true. That's not what this is saying. But think back to what I said

a few minutes ago if christ is the truth um he is the truth and every other true thing that's uttered is measured against him then so even then the law which of course is true but is not truth well it's kind of you see jesus do this all the time with the law right so the pharisees will try to be like hold on there jesus uh what about this law thing right here and jesus all the time does this sort of thing like i wrote that you know whose finger if god has a finger it's on the hand of jesus and if it and if the if god used a finger scratching it into tablets that was jesus and i imagine saying to jesus hey yeah uh what about this law this sabbath thing this other thing and he's like it was my finger dude that wrote that in stone don't talk to me about the

truth of the law, because the law is true. However, all over Scripture, the idea that God is love, God is holy, that sort of stuff, right? And you might get a little bit of the holiness of God from the law, but you're not going to get any of this God is love from the law. You're going to be your takeaway, and if you don't have that as part of it, you're missing a huge part of what the testimony of scripture says god is right so yeah god's grace even in the old testament was revealed in christ right it's revealed in the promise of the messiah who is to come and so this is this is just sort of putting the capstone on that again if christ was the one is truth and he his finger was the one scratching out ten commandments on the stone tablets they are true

right they are true because they are from the truth but at the same time if the you know the whole picture of god is revealed in christ and as john says here that picture is that he is full of grace and truth um then just through the one truth of the law handed to moses you're not getting the whole picture you only get the whole picture in the one god promised to save you from your sin and to give you the only hope that you'll actually ever have, and that is Christ Jesus our Lord. Think of how easy it would be to become a Christian just by reading these first 18 verses of one chapter of one book of the Bible. Yeah. Yeah, I think he kind of summarizes here, as we'll close with this verse, but he says that no one has ever seen God. In other words, you can't really, really see the fullness of God in the law, right?

So no one has ever seen God. The only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. And so the idea here is that if you want to know what God's like, there's only one place you can look to get a full picture. And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. Oh, good job, Eric. Thank you. And that really is what Christmas is about.

But before Christmas, before the Incarnation, with as much as, you know, and Chad and I have spent a lot of time in the Old Testament, but before the Incarnation, all views of God are incomplete. Like, there's shadows, and there's pictures, and there's types, and all that stuff, but if you want to know what God is like, you don't, yeah, you can look at Moses and be like, there's a type, and you can look at Joshua and say, there's a type, But it's not the same as what we have now in the Incarnation, where you say, what is God like? You must go to Jesus to know what He's like completely.

That's what He's like. I think we're good. I think that is it. That was pretty good. Merry Christmas. Yeah, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Let me just say, I want to thank everybody.

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