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1. In Minnesota, you can find a huge statue of Paul Bunyan, but it’s not near big enough. Legend has him dragging the pick behind him, thus making the Grand Canyon! He combed his beard with a pine tree. A lake held the batter for his pancakes and a steamboat mixed the batter.
2. No statue of Paul Bunyan will do because the myth is bigger than life. Now moving from fiction to fact we have the same trouble with Jesus – He is bigger then life!
Tozer, “None of us can approach a serious study and consideration of the eternal nature and person of Jesus Christ without sensing and confessing our complete inadequacy in the face of the divine revelation…All we can hope to do it to toddle along on our short legs and gaze heavenward, like a goose whose wings have been clipped but whose heart is in the sky. Those wings just will not take her there!”
3. The One Bigger than Life!
John 1:1-3 (NKJV)
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
John 1:14 (NKJV)
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
I. First, the Concept. “the Word”
A. Greeks – understand logos [word] to be the rational principle by which everything exists.
B. Hebrews: The word was God in action, creating, revealing and delivering.
C. Essence – it is God expressing Himself.
“”Using a weak human analogy, we may say: as the spoken word of a man is the reflection of his inmost soul, so the Son is the “brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person.” Heb. 1:3 [Lenski]
“Words communicate, and that’s precisely what Jesus did. Jesus was the final spokesman for God (Heb. 1:1-2). From A to Z, Jesus was the divine alphabet spelling out God in such a way that even the most elementary of us could grasp His essence. Jesus was not simply the revealer of God but God Himself revealed.” [Swindoll]
“We must guard against two misinterpretations. The one is that of thinking of the revelation as static. It is more than the revelation of certain truth about God. To know God is life eternal (17:3). The knowledge of God that the word brings is not merely information. It is life! The word is creative. The other is that of thinking of the Word as nothing more than an activity of God. John thinks of the word as coming to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Picture me out cutting the grass. It’s hot, I’m sweaty and someone comes up and says “Would you like some chilled dihydrogen oxide?” I look confused, then a little boy tugs at my pant legs and says, “My Dad is a scientist, he wants to know it you would like a cold glass of water!”
When we look at God we are confused, we truly don’t understand but the Word expresses Him in a language that we can grasp.
II. Finally, the Content of that word. 1-3, 14
A. First, He is Before all Chronology.
In the beginning was the Word – an indic. imper. Tense, speaks of repeated existence with no beginning and no end.
Lit. “In the beginning the Word already was…”
Peter Lewis, “He wants us to stand at the dawn of time to discover Someone there already. In the beginning the Word already was…Creation came into being (v.3), John the Baptist came on to the scene (v.6), even the incarnation occurred at a point in time when the Word became flesh (v.14), but the Word did not at any point come into existence. There never was a time when the Word was not.:
Jn. 8:58; 17:5, 24; 1:15…
Lightner, “Jesus Christ is the only person who ever lived before he was conceived…The Second Person of the Godhead existed eternally. Mary’s conception of the Son of God has nothing to do with His origin. He always existed. There was never a time in eternity past when He was not. The Savior’s personal existence was not marked by a beginning.”
Mic. 5:2/Col. 1:17
Tozer, “The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the uncreated. To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, or submit to our curious inquiries: This requires a great deal of humility, so we try to save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us!”
We nod and say, “Oh yes, I understand His preexistence. We are sort of like the little girl who was walking with her mother. She said, “Oh look at the pretty rainbow that God painted for us!” Then she added, “And to think He did it all with his left hand.”
Her mother asked what she meant. She said, “Well, my Sunday school teacher said that Jesus is sitting on His right hand!”
We laugh but if truth be known we are just as ignorant as that little girl!
B. Furthermore, He is Beside Deity.
the Word was with God – “The assertion identifies the logos as a separate entity from God…The word “with” [pros] is used here in the sense of “in the presence of” (Mt. 13:56/Mk.6:3. The distinction was not one of essence, however, but of personality as the next clause makes clear.”
Note: It does not say with God the Father. This wording allows for both the Father and the Spirit.
Carson, “The preposition pros, which commonly means “to” or “toward.” On that basis John is trying to express a peculiar intimacy between the Word and God: The word is oriented toward God, like lovers perpetually running toward each other in a beach scene from a sentimental film.”
This is what makes God self-sufficient! If He were just One Person He would have no one to share His being with…
Chafer, “Reason indicates that if God did not exist in three Persons, there would have been no way by which God could have exercised some of these attributes before the Creation of the Universe. This leads to the conclusion that God is not dependent on creation as an object for the exercise of His qualities or attributes as He depends on nothing beyond Himself.”
C. Thirdly, He belongs to the Trinity. [He is God]
Word of God – there is only one God, and He is a Triune Being: God the Father (Tit.1:4); God the Holy Spirit (Ac.5:3-4), and God the Son (Jn. 20:28/Ro.9:5/Col.2:2/Tit.2:13/Heb. 1:8-9/I Pet. 1:1).
Novatian, “God has no origin, and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes that which-is-God from what is not God. Origin is a word that can only apply to things created. When we think of anything that has origin we are not thinking of God.”
Jesus is God! Mt. 1:23/Mk.2:5-7/Ac.16:31,34/I Tim.4:10
What does it mean to be God? Beyond our comprehension, for example Isaiah 40 gives us some illustrations of what God is like: 1. The Oceans of the world contain more than 340 quintillion gallons of water, yet God holds them “in the hollow of His hand” (Isa. 40:12); 2. The earth weighs 6 sextillion metric tons, yet God says it is but “dust on the scale.” (v. 15). 3. The known universe stretches more than 30 billion light years [200 sextillion miles], but God measures it by the width of his hand (v.12).
4. Scientists claim there are at least 100 billion galaxies, and each galaxy is made up about 100 billion stars. Two such mind-boggling math Isaiah reminds us that God calls each star by name! (v.26).”
D. He Begot the Entirely. 3
1. First, only God creates – Father (Gen.1:1); Son (Col.1:16); and Spirit (Gen.1:2).
2. Furthermore, it reveals that God Himself is uncreated.
Heading, “Another way of implying that the Word was not created; if nothing was made without Him, then He is excluded from the totality of what was created.”
One wrote, “Consider the power and greatness of the One who created the universe and inhabits every square inch of it. Begin with our solar system. At the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, sun light takes 8 minutes to reach the earth. That same light takes five more hours to reach the farthest planet in our solar system, Pluto.
After leaving our solar system that same sunlight must travel for 4 years and 4 months to reach the next star in the universe. That there is a distance of 40 trillion kilometer – a mere shouting distance in the universe.
The sun resides in the Milky Way Galaxy…Our sun is roughly 3/4 of the way to the edge of the galaxy. To get a feel for that distance, if our solar system were one inch across, the distance to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy would be 379 miles. Our galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Yet the Milky Way is but one of roughly one trillion galaxies in the universe.
There are 20 galaxies in what is called our local group. The next sort of grouping in the universe is called a super cluster of galaxies, called Virgo, is 50 million light years away [A light year is the distance light travels in one year. To get a feel for the distance of one light year if you drove your car 55 mph, it would take you 12.2 million years to travel one light year!] Astronomers estimate that the distance across the universe is roughly 40 billion light years and that there are roughly 100 billion trillion stars. And the Lord Almighty is the Creator and sustainer of it all!”
E. Finally, He became Humanity. 14
We will look at this later…
“My best faith and my loftiest expectation do not allow me to believe that I can do justice to a text that begins: “And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us.”…Thoughtful men are quick to ask, “How could the deity cross the wide, yawning gulf that separates, what is God from what is not God? How is it possible that God could join the Creator to the creation?
We wonder how could the infinite ever become finite? And how could the limitless be deliberately impose limitations upon Himself ? Paul, declared to be one of the great intellect of all time, throws up hands and declares that “the mystery of godliness is great (I Tim.3:16), the mystery of God manifest in the flesh.”
Con:
1. He is Before all; Beside Deity; Belonging to Trinity; Begetting all, and yet Becoming humanity.
“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man, who goes about taking as if He was God…He says He has always existed. Now among the Pantheists anyone who might say he was part of God, or one with God, there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God.
God in their language meant a Being outside the world who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that, what this man said was, quite simply the most shocking thing that have ever been uttered by human lips.”
2. Bigger than life!
3. Andrew Greeley’s introduction to Lloyd C. Douglas book The Robe, wrote:
“The only real Jesus is one who is larger than life, who escapes our categories, who eludes our attempts to reduce him to manageable proportions. Any Jesus who has been made to fit our formula ceases to be appealing precisely because he is no longer wondrous, mysterious, and surprising. Categorize Jesus and He isn’t Jesus anymore!”
Johnny Palmer Jr.
www.strugglingthruscriptures.ning.com
www.blogtalkradio.com/strugglingthruscriptures
