The Power of Grace and Truth

We are in a new series on the gospel of John entitled “The Story of Amazing Love.” Last week we introduced the book from John 1:1-5.And we saw from this text two things. First, Jesus Christ did not have a beginning. In the beginning, was the Word. God had no beginning. In the beginning, God was wasing. In the beginning, God was already there and had always been there. Second, Jesus Christ was the creator. All things were made through him. All the energy in the universe, 10^70th joules of power were not made by Jesus, they were made through Jesus. You’ve perhaps heard the creative act of God being described as ex nihilo (out of nothing). Well, if we want to get technical about it, that’s not quite true. The universe was not created ex nihilo. It was created ex Christus. Or more accurately still, propter Christo. The universe was created through Jesus Christ.So the first five verses begin by making this point. Why? There’s a definite reason. In the pages that are to follow, we will befriend this real flesh and blood Jesus who eats and gets tired. A man who is filled with the emotions we are familiar with - sorrow, joy, anger, and empathy. We will meet a man who is beset with human weakness. And John intends us to connect the man who is described in these pages to the omnipotent, all-powerful, creative, life-giving God of the pre-created world. John is going to argue that the man Jesus is in fact, God. Nobody would be expected to come to that conclusion by merely looking at him. Why? Because he looked so normal. The prophet Isaiah predicted this:Jesus wasn’t born with superpowers. John knows that you are going to make a snap judgment concerning the nature of this man. We stereotype and you are not to be blamed. Who in the world would believe that this guy you are looking at, this guy who looks like a man, and an average one at that, is in fact God himself, the creator of the entire universe?John was written for this very purpose - that you might believe that this man, this Jesus, is the Christ (Messiah) the son of the living God and that by believing you might experience life in his name (spiritual life and physical life). Or you could put it this way: John 1:1-5 is the claim that Jesus is God. The rest of the book is going to try and defend the claim.The Prologue of RevelationJohn 1:1-18 is considered the prologue. It’s the word given before the word. It’s the 20,000 foot view of what’s to come. And the prologue begins with the concept of revelation. This revelation is the claim. The claim of John 1:1-5 is that Jesus is God. Revelation, according to the Christian tradition, is God choosing to disclose himself. In order for us to know anything about God, he’s got to make the first move. Without God initiating, we could never know him and we could never fully know ourselves.Perhaps it’s obvious but it’s worth noting that divine revelation is by no means a given. There’s nothing that says God had to reveal himself. He could have just as easily created the world, walked away, and left us to our own demise. A deist believes that there is evidence of a God but he is unknowable because he has not chosen to reveal himself. God wound up the world like a clock and then left it on a shelf and he has simply gone elsewhere, wherever Gods go. But that is not the claim made here. God has chosen to reveal himself. And he did that through his Son, Jesus Christ. That self-revelation was preceded by a messenger named John and that’s where our text today begins.Revelation here is pictured as a light that slices through darkness. Imagine being in that dark cave we described last week. Am I in a chamber 8 feet high or 800 feet high? What colors are in the rocks? Is there water? Are there crystals or stalactites or are the walls smooth? It’s all there, it just can’t be known because we don’t have light to reveal it. Without a source of light or a revelation, we are blind men groping in a dark world. Without light and a revelation, our observational abilities can only get us so far.Consider what is knowable about God from mere observation of the created order. No revelation, just observation. Let’s assume you deduce from looking at creation that there must be a God. There is too much complexity to explain it away by chance. But let me ask you just one simple question about this creator: is he merciful or merciless? What evidence could you begin acquiring? Maybe the fact that zebras get taken out by tigers. That’s pretty violent. That doesn’t seem too merciful. Innocent people get murdered, women are oppressed and defrauded. God does not seem merciful at all by that metric.On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that we are not destroyed instantly by our evil actions. It seems like we are given a second chance. That seems merciful. The wicked and the righteous alike are given gifts of a beautiful day, the opportunity to love, wonderful food. That seems merciful. It’s inconclusive. We can’t know. But here’s an even more fundamental question. Is being merciful good or bad? Without God revealing himself, we can’t even answer which is more noble. If there’s no revelation, if there’s no place where God has spoken and told us what is right and wrong, then all morality can be nothing more than a matter of opinion. It can’t be absolute.If there is no revelation, then a woman might rise up and object to being treated like a slave. But from the perspective of the one enslaving, it’s a good thing. He gets a free servant. There is no way you can consider one inferior to another. You have no basis for saying so. Does not the natural world operate according to the principle of survival of the fittest?When it comes to our sexual ethic, our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong, there cannot be absolute answers to these questions without revelation. We need the creator to intervene and say, “I did not intend for you to behave like this. I intended instead for you to behave like this. This is acting according to design. This is acting against my design.” Only a creator can say that. Do you see how lost we are without revelation? We need intellectual light. We need moral light. And Jesus Christ comes bringing both. Jesus is the light.Now we are going to save the story of John the Baptist for next week but suffice it to say that God used John not as the light, but as the man who would announce that the light was coming. John was to Jesus as a map of Disneyland is to Disneyland. John was to Jesus as a sign to McCall is to McCall. Jesus was the light of the world. John handed you the flashlight and told you where the on switch was.So the prologue begins by telling us that light came into the world. Again, the prologue is the overview of the entire thing. So John’s going to show us people’s reaction to the light. John essentially says, “I am about to tell you a story. I am going to tell you about that period of history when the Messiah, Jesus the Christ, the Light of the world, was revealed.”But before I tell you the beginning, let me first tell you the end. Here’s the summary of how people reacted to that revelatory claim. The claim itself divided. The claim itself was a wedge. Some loved him. Some hated. Some worshiped. Others cursed. Some gave everything they had for him. Others gave everything they had to destroy him. Some believed. Others disbelieved. So John begins with the end. He starts with how the revelation itself was ultimately and finally received. Now let’s look at the response that people had to this light.Let’s start with rejection.At first he points out the irony. How could the creator, the one who owns everything, made everything, is the source of life for everything, be rejected? How could the owner and creator be rejected by the creatures?Several years ago, I remember reading about the CEO of Mozilla. He was an entrepreneur and built the Firefox browser and this giant company from the ground up. And even though he was the founder, developer, and CEO of the company, his board fired him for being unwilling to support a political agenda. How can it be that the man who built the company be fired by the company he built? That’s what’s being described here. Jesus Christ is the creator of all things, and specifically the human machine. Jesus Christ is the inventor of DNA with its 3 million base pairs.He didn’t even need a patent because it’s so complex nobody could copy it. He is also the inventor of the eye with its ability to differentiate between 10 million colors.The inventor of the ear, complete with its ability to magnify sound and provide feedback for balance.The inventor of neurons that chemically transmit information at 120 meters per second.The inventor of the brain with it’s 100 billion neuronsSo God invented, gifted all this, graced the world with all this, and then here’s what happened. We used the eye given by Jesus to see Jesus. We used the ear given by Jesus to hear Jesus. We used the neurons given by Jesus to transfer that sensory information to the brain given by Jesus to evaluate Jesus. And then we used the mouth given by Jesus to reject Jesus. The world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. It can’t get any more ironic and can’t get any more tragic.But this is not merely the summary of the response of men to Jesus’ ministry. This is the summary of men to God all through the Bible. I heard someone recently say that the Bible is basically a summary of man’s search for God. I laughed out loud when I heard that. You could not possibly do a worse job of describing the Bible than that. That one sentence undoes the entire Bible. Quite efficient. If you read the Scripture, you will see the Bible is one story piled on top of another story of God revealing himself to men and women who were not looking for him. God revealed himself through prophets. What did they do with them? They stoned them. Jonah ran. Samson was a womanizer. Saul hid. Gideon cowered.Time and time again you have men and women trying to get away from God as far as they can. Are men searching? Well they are searching! They are searching, searching, searching for every possible way to get out of his presence. Yet God has kept his hands out all day to a disobedient people. He has spoken to those who did not seek him. He has answered those who did call out to him. Jesus Christ is the climax of divine revelation. And the climactic revelation is attended with climactic rejection.The response to the revelation of Jesus Christ is not surprising. Most people rejected him. But others accepted him. Others received him.ReceptionSome received him. Some accepted the claim. Some believed that Jesus was God. And he describes the result of that belief as those who become children of God. What’s the significance of becoming children of God? Why that metaphor? Here’s the idea. When a ladybug lays eggs and new life comes out, what kind of life is it? It’s a ladybug life. Similarly, a grasshopper gives birth to grasshopper life, and a squirrel gives birth to squirrel life. The point is that whatever the parent life form, a moose, a salamander, or a human, a parent can only give its offspring the same type of life that he himself has.And here we are told that by believing in God we are given the right to become children of God which means that we will be given the same kind of life as God. Remember the purpose of John. These things are written that you might believe and that by believing you might have life in his name. You partake of the same type of life as the father because now you are his children. And what type of life is that? Eternal life. Perfect Life. That’s good stuff folks.Now if that is the case, why would anyone reject him? If all you have to do is believe in Jesus Christ to have perfect life, why in the world would anyone reject him? Let’s think.What the Light RevealedWhat was it about the light that caused such violently different reactions? What was this piercing, dividing quality of light? What did the light reveal? There must have been something about that light or something about what it revealed that was either attractive or offensive. We see that in the next verse.Now this is helpful. Here we get our interpretive key to verse one. In the beginning, was the Word. Who is the word? The word became flesh and dwelt among us. So the Word is Jesus Christ. Why not just say, “In the beginning was Jesus? And Jesus was with God and Jesus was God.” Why refer to Jesus as the Word? Just as words reveal what is in the mind of a man, so Jesus Christ reveals what is in the mind of God. Jesus Christ reveals God. And this is the most complete, most full revelation that could ever be given.Perhaps you have heroes of the faith. It’s one thing to read about someone in a biography. That gives you some idea of who they are. But wouldn’t you love to live among them? Wouldn’t you love to see how they respond to stress? How do they balance all the important priorities? What do they do when they get tired? How do they play? What kinds of things are funny to them? What does righteous anger look like? How do they respond to criticism? This is why Jesus coming to earth is so significant. It’s the ultimate revelation. Immanuel means God with us. God among us. It was God revealing himself in a way he had never done before.Jesus coming in the flesh was like revelation on steroids. It’s why the life of Christ is such a powerful, never-ending insight into the person of God. The way John describes the experience of that revelation is that we beheld his glory. Normally when we think of glory we tend to think in terms of splendor, light, perfection. We talk about a glorious sunset or a glorious melody.The Greek word for glory is δόξα which comes from the Greek root dokéō which means to think. What the word really means in its most core essence is to think in such a way as to develop a high opinion. What do I think of something? If I think very highly of you, you have lots of glory. If I think very low of you then you have very little glory. And so when we say, “That is a glorious sunset,” we are of the opinion that the sunset has reached a level of perfection. This sunset has the perfect combination of colors, the perfect contrasting hues, the perfect crisp lines and muted blurred clouds. When I look at it my mind identifies it as perfection. Here’s the point. When the Jews of the New Testament saw Jesus, they saw perfection. They saw in him something they instantly identified as completeness, unstained, undefiled, beauty. They saw glory.The Attraction of PerfectionNow I think it’s interesting that of all the things to call out in a prologue high-level overview, this is the aspect you’d highlight. I mean the guy walked on water. The guy could raise people from the dead. The miraculous isn’t even called out. Yes, he did miracles. Yes, he had power. But that’s not what John primarily identifies as the thing that makes him glorious. What makes him glorious is the perfect embodiment of grace and truth. Think about this. Life is full of balancing acts, isn’t it? And we never get that balance right. We see it’s important to be critical but it’s also important to accept. How do you get that right? We know it’s important to speak up but it’s also important to listen. We know it’s important to stand your ground but it’s also important to back down.What we see in Jesus is perfection. We see glory. We look at the balance of how Jesus lived his life and we say, “Wow, that is glorious.” We marvel. That’s perfect. It’s the perfect balancing act. It’s beauty in its most perfect form. Consider a painting. Too much black and the eyes don’t look good. Too much white and it’s washed out. There is a perfect balance. There is a mixture that is absolutely perfect. And that is what is being referenced here. We beheld Jesus, full of grace and truth. When the light came, it was perfect. It was so beautiful. White light is the combination of all the colors of the rainbow. We see in the white light of Jesus all good values contained and balanced perfectly. It’s so beautiful. You just gaze on it in wonder. The picture of perfect light. Look at how this perfect white light is further described:John begins his gospel with the stunning revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. God has ‘made himself known’ through the perfection of Jesus. The fact that Jesus was utterly glorious, utterly reflective of the glory of God can be demonstrated by this simple question, “How in the world did Jesus get anyone to believe the claim that he was God?” Think about the difficulty of this problem. It can be summarized with four words. Jesus was a man. If Jesus was talking to a Greek well maybe you could convince him. Because after all, the gods to the Greeks were just men blown big. To the Greeks, the gods were just kind of like Marvel characters. They were more or less men, but men with amazing athleticism, incredible intellect, and strong reproductive prowess. And so you could conceive that if Jesus was especially talented in some area, he may be able to convince a Greek that he was a god.But Jesus was a Jew, and he was talking to Jews. Jews believed the Old Testament which revealed that God was a Spirit who existed outside the world. He was the creator of the world. How could God be in the world? He couldn’t be a man because a man was created. By contrast, God was a being of infinite power who created everything by the word of his power. He just whispers and the dust of galaxies obediently fling into existence, 10^70th joules of power strong. For a man to say, “I am God,” to a Jew? This was heresy of the most laughable form. Indeed, many tried to stone him for it. And yet many believed. How did he do it?Now, we aren’t done setting up the difficulty of the problem. Here’s the most problematic part. Think about this. It’s not like he got people to believe in him who lived far away and were simply mesmerized by this romantic idea of God come down in the form of a man. He got people to believe in him who actually lived with him and ate with him and laughed and cried with him. It’s one thing to love a comedian on stage. You think, “Man, he looks so natural, so warm, so welcoming, so likable.” Do you think he’s likable? Talk to his wife. It’s another thing entirely, to live with the guy.Think about this. Jesus had been living with the disciples for three years in close quarters. Day in day out. Hungry, tired, with opportunities to be irritable and grumpy. Before Jesus heads up to Jerusalem to be crucified, Jesus turns to Peter, and says, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter replies, “You are the Christ the Son of the living God.” Just think, what kind of life must Jesus have lived before them such that this was the answer that comes out of their lips? Can you imagine that? I know my wife and kids love me, but when I ask them that question, “Who do you say that I am?” I’m hearing different stuff.When the disciples looked at him, what did they see? They saw perfection. When they looked at him they saw a man who was glorious, brilliant, and full of grace and truth. He hurt their eyes. Normally, the longer you live with someone the more normal they become. With Jesus it was the opposite. The longer you lived with him, the more amazed you became. The more astonished you became. The more you get to know him, the better he became. He’s better than you expected. Why? Because you are beholding, not a great man, you are beholding God himself. You are staring right at God. Do you not think that would be an amazing experience? The disciples saw in him perfection embodied.Remember I began by asking the question is it good to be merciful or merciless. What is the answer to the question? What does God reveal? Is it good to be merciful or merciless? The answer is Jesus. It’s the perfect combination. There are times when he overthrows the tables of the money changers, showing no mercy, his eyes are fire, there is a whip in his hand, he is sharp, bitter, hard, and merciless. He calls them a brood of vipers and white-washed tombs. Yet there are other times when God shows absolute mercy. He says to go and sin no more. He washes the disciples’ feet. He’s dining with tax collectors and prostitutes.Here he is. Full of grace and full of truth. They saw in him virtues that had never been combined. You have here tenderness without any weakness, strength without any heavy-handedness, humility without any timidity, firm, unbending, unyielding convictions, and yet utter approachability, passion without prejudice, and power without insensitivity. Never a jarring note when you look at him. Never a false step. Never. What do you see here? You see the surprises of perfection.Do you want to know what the Jews saw that allowed them to rearrange their conception of the Messiah? They saw God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among them. Full of grace and full of truth. Perfection. The perfect combination. Who is this that the winds and the seas obey him? Never has a man spoke as this man spoke. Who is this? In the end, they had to come to this incredible conclusion. It must be God.The Problem with LightSo let’s come back to it. If you had perfect grace and truth, why would anyone reject him? If believing that he was God was the source of life why would anyone reject? Let me explain through an analogy. Who wants to join me in a sun staring contest? The person who can stare at the sun longest without blinking wins. Who’s in? Why not? Because when you look at the sun, it hurts your eyes. In fact, if you stare longer than just a couple of seconds it would damage them. Whose fault is that? How foolish it would be to blame the sun. The problem is not the sun. The problem is my eyes. My weakness cannot take it in. I need the sun. But if our eyes were adjusted to see what’s really there we would see something like this:It is by the sun that you can see all things. It is because of the sun that all things live and exist and have their being. What we need is not to get rid of the sun. What we need is increased capacity to take it in. And when you suddenly filter it out so you aren’t so overwhelmed, you begin to see the layers and layers of beauty. “We beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.”The Problem with the SonSo the light came and revealed perfection but we were not capable of taking it in. It hurt our eyes. Yes, we were mesmerized by it, but it hurt us. But here’s another thing about light. Because of its nature, in and of itself, it is beautiful. But the nature of light is that it reveals. It illuminates things around it. And what it illuminated was not pretty. You see the glory of Jesus reveals that we are not glorious. The glory of God shames. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed. We are attracted to beauty and perfection but we are repulsed by what that beauty and perfection say about our sinful condition. And we want it to go away. We want to remove the revealing light. It was just better not knowing.A few years ago we painted our house white. My wife is a color fanatic. So she spent approximately 7300 hours picking out the particular white that she wanted. And we painted it white. And she just loved it. It was perfect, until it snowed. And then when the snow fell, the snow looked so beautiful, so clean, so fresh, and our house just looked dirty and grimy. All the imperfections were so obvious.People thought they were patient until they saw perfect patience. Then suddenly their best patience looked like violence. People thought they were loving until they saw true love. People thought they were compassionate and tender till they saw it in its perfect form. We didn’t know the first thing about it. Never did a man speak like this. When we see the glory of God we are compared and found inadequate. That is the precise reason why some want nothing to do with the light.A couple of years ago I watched a documentary called No Place On Earth that re-enacted the story of 36 Jews who hid in a Ukrainian cave for over 420 days to escape the Nazis. Can you imagine this? The men would leave the cave to get food and supplies but the women and children stayed there the entire time. What would it be like to live in a cave for over a year without seeing the sun? There was a period of time in which they went a month without light because they were out of candles and they were fearful of being detected. Night after night after night after night of darkness. There’s no information about your surroundings.Now for the adults, it was much harder than for the children. Parts of the movie were from the perspective of this little four-year-old girl who survived the experience. She entered when she was 3 and she had forgotten that there ever was such a thing as the sun. The darkness was her home. Most people her age would have felt scared in the dark but she felt safe. The Nazis were in the light so she felt safe in the darkness. When she finally exited, the light scared her. She was disoriented and confused. The light of the sun was so bright and so overpowering and it revealed so much of the world it just overloaded her senses and she wanted to go back into the dark. She had a conception of the world that was framed in by her darkness. She didn’t feel like she was in the dark. She felt like she understood reality. Darkness was all she had ever known. As soon as the light of the sun entered her world, everything was turned upside down.What this illustrates is that there are unique problems with people who are born in darkness. People who are born in darkness don’t know what they are missing. And interestingly, the Bible says we are all born in spiritual darkness. And when the light comes, initially the response is fear and terror. The father of light sends his Son and his glorious brilliance lights up your soul and it terrifies you to see how you’ve been living. Can you imagine how much filth would be in a cave that held 36 people and had not been cleaned for 420 days? Most of that filth would not be visible because there was so little light. But imagine how horrified you’d be if you threw a few thousand lumens into the mix.It’s a metaphor for our hearts. The Son of God comes and he throws light on invisible corners of the heart, places that have never seen the light of day and when that happens, you can’t even recognize your own heart. Your self-conception was framed in darkness. And what the light reveals terrifies you. But it’s a necessary step. You have to remember, it’s the heat of the presence of God that removes the roaches.How can we face the light if the light reveals so much of the ugliness of our soul? How can we bear it? Because we have grace upon grace in Jesus Christ. We have a friend in Jesus, the perfection of grace and truth, who will never leave us or forsake us. A friend who will take the ugliness, take the reproach and shame of sin upon himself. This is who is revealed to us in the book of John. And I can’t wait to glory in him! Are you excited?