Who Is Jesus?

Last week, we spoke about God’s offer and our response to either walk in darkness or walk in His light.

Today in John 1 we see some questions posed to who Jesus is in reality.

So who is Jesus? According to the Bible, Jesus is God, the second Person of the Trinity - He always was and is. He never changes. As God, He is the creator of the universe and holds everything together by the Word of His power. He is so different from His creation, infinitely so, because He cannot be contained by anything or anyone, He is outside of His creation but wholly present in it. He is the Logos - the Living Word, He is the logic, the ultimate truth and reason for why every and anything exists at all, the reason you and I exist.

This all-powerful, everywhere present God came to this broken world and offered us salvation and all we need to do is to respond to His offer.

What is interesting in today's society is that people are aware that something is definitely wrong in this world, there are a lot of protests for change, we can see people are desperately seeking for someone to make things right. That is why society tends to put powerful people on pedestals and why there is such a fascination with Hollywood figures such as superheroes. Yet today’s superheroes, like the mythological Greek gods of old, have their own issues to deal with, they have limitations and their own weaknesses.

We see that people today are looking for someone they can identify with and will identify with them. Someone they feel can make the world a better place. This is why today’s passage is so relevant. John is pointing us to the only Person who has identified with us, who is infinitely superior to us and absolutely perfect in every way and who will completely transform this World. He makes it very clear “The eternal One I have been speaking about, the One everyone was waiting for, the Messiah, the Savior of the world stepped into time and lived among us.”

Turn in your Bibles with me to John 1:14-18 (SL 2)

14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 John testified about Him and called out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who is coming after me has proved to be my superior, because He existed before me.’”(SL 3) 16 For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. 17 For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at any time; God the only Son, who is in the arms of the Father, He has explained Him (John 1:16-18).

When we read this passage it raises 3 questions:

Who do we see?

What do we follow?

Where does it lead?

Who do we see?

John testified that the Word became flesh. This is what we call the incarnation. God took on human flesh. He didn’t just appear like He had flesh and bones as the Gnostics believed. God did not merely dwell in a man or endow some person with superpowers to represent the Messiah. Paul tells us under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that the divine Savior left the glory of heaven and became a human, becoming like us in all things, except for a sin nature. Like ourselves, he developed and grew inside a woman’s womb and was born, however, in a miraculous, supernatural way. Even though Jesus was 100% man, He was also 100% God. As CS Lewis put it, "Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world."

Yet like ourselves, He grew from infancy to boyhood and from boyhood to man’s estate, both in wisdom and in stature (Luke 2:52). Like ourselves, He experienced hunger, thirst, tiredness, and so ate, drank, and slept. He felt pain, and experienced human emotions such as sadness, grief, joy, amazement, anger, and compassion. He prayed, read the Scriptures, suffered temptation, both loved and was loved by people but also experienced rejection and shame. He could identify with us in everything. As a man, He totally depended on God and in the midst of all His earthly experiences yet in every situation He never sinned (Heb 4:15) but rather submitted His human will to the will of God the Father.

And, finally, in the same body, He really suffered, shed His blood, really died, was really buried, really rose again, and really ascended up into heaven. He did all of this in order to take our sin and judgment. Jesus became wholly human so that He could redeem the whole of who we are. Never at any point in time was He ever less than fully human and or less than fully God. Some saw him as only a good man, a good example or a prophet.