The Divine Glory in Flesh

John 1:14-18

John 1:14-18.

He performs and gives us this wonderful story all the way to the cross and the resurrection. But in the opening prologue, he makes his thesis statement that Jesus is God in human flesh. He is the Creator of the universe who has become a part of His creation.

He is pure, eternal being who has become a man. That is John’s message. Jesus is not a created man. Jesus is God in human flesh. The most essential doctrine in the Christian faith. Ther are so many heresies concerning Jesus Christ, concerning the essence or the nature or the person of Jesus Christ.

This is the important doctrine in the Christian faith. It must be known, it must be believed, for someone to escape hell and enter heaven, that Jesus is God. V 14, “The Word became flesh.” The central truth of Christianity, that is the theme of John’s gospel.

The infinite One became finite, the eternal One entered time, that the omnipresent One became confined in the space of a human body. The invisible One became visible. The true church of Jesus Christ has always believed and proclaimed.

Any other view of Christ is unacceptable. It is a damning heresy. The only view of Christ by which someone can escape hell and enter heaven. This is the reason John makes such a case out of the deity of Jesus Christ.

John 20:31, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

The only way to have eternal life is by believing in Him. Believing who He is and what He has done. John talks about the nature of Jesus Christ in the prologue. He introduces Him as “the Word.” Jesus already existed when everything that began.

He is eternal. He was with God, which means though He was God, He was at the same time distinct from God.

He was with God and was God. That is Trinitarian. There is one God and yet three persons. Jesus is God and yet He is with God. The theology here is profound. He has life in Himself. He is the Creator. V 5, And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

John was legitimately obsessed with this great foundational doctrine. John wrote in his epistle to believers to identify for them the marks of true salvation.

1 John 1:1-4, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— 2 the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. 4 And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.

John is absolutely blown away by the fact that he has heard, seen, looked deeply into the face of, and touched the Creator of the universe in human form. John never got over it. John, he calls himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved” or “the disciple who leaned on Jesus” because he never, ever could fathom the reality that this is the eternal Creator God.

The one true God in human form loves me, and He walks with me, and He talks with me, and I touch Him, and I fellowship with Him. John can’t get over it. This is the obsession of all his writing.

1 John 2:22-24, Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. 23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also. 24 Therefore let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. If you tamper with who Christ is, you will alienate yourself from God.

1 John 4:1-4, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets

have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.

John is absolutely crystal clear that one’s view of Jesus Christ is determinative.

1 John 5:1, Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves him who is begotten of Him.

1 John 5:4-5, For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

We know that the Son of God has come. We have seen Him. We have heard Him. We have touched Him. He has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true. Jesus Christ, this is the true God and eternal life.

2 John 1:7, For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

We are not surprising that of all the Christian doctrines, there has no single doctrine been more assaulted and attacked than the truth concerning the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We are warned that as we get closer to the coming of Christ, false Christs will multiply, false Jesuses will multiply, and we must be discerning about whether people are speaking of the true Christ.

It is as damning to believe in the wrong Jesus as to believe in no Jesus. You can’t be saved by believing the wrong thing about Christ. You must believe in His deity and humanity. V 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.

The Word became flesh. The Word, meaning the preincarnate Son of God whose eternal being became flesh.

Romans 1:3, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh,

The eternal Word became human. We have the Godman.

The eternal God, who is pure eternal, being and not becoming at all as His creatures are becomes a part of His creation. God and man are joined in one person, never again to be separated. Yet never confounded and never mixed.

• His human nature does not overpower His divine nature.
• His divine nature does not overpower His human nature.

They are both perfect, distinct, indivisible, and yet unmingled and unmixed. The deity of Christ is not diminished by His humanity nor is His humanity overpowered by His deity. When you see Christ in heaven, He will be exactly the same God Man that He was when He walked on Earth in the post- resurrection form of the body that the disciples spent forty days with.

He is the same Christ. He doesn’t become a floating fog in heaven, as some of these silly people say who take fake trips to heaven and then make up things.

He is exactly who He is. He will be who He was on Earth, fully man, fully God in the same way He walked on earth. Jesus’ humanity is not the humanity of Adam before his fall. He does not have a pre-fall humanity. Some people think that He is fully man, but He is fully man in the sense of Adam was before the fall. That is not true.

He is fully man in the sense that Adam was after the fall.

How do we know that? Because He lived and grew and died, that is a factor of fallen condition. Furthermore, if He was not in the form of man after the fall, He would have no ability to understand our weaknesses and our infirmities and be tempted in all points as we are tempted and come out as a merciful, sympathetic high priest.

So, Jesus is truly human in the sense that we are human in the post-fall realm with one exception: no sin. He is without sin, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, without sin forever.

2 Corinthians 5:21, For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. John says, this God Man, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” Dwelt among us, Skēnoō, means to pitch your tent. He brought His tent to us. He settled down in our world. For 33 years, He lived in our world, took on the form of a man, came and became one of us.

Hebrews 2:14, Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,

Philippians 2:7-8, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

Luke 2:52, And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.

If you deny that Jesus came in the flesh, the Son of God was an actual man, then that’s heresy, and you don’t know God. God in human form dwelt with us.

How did we know Jesus was God? John gives us three very important statements.

• Word,
• Glory,
• Grace. 1. The incarnate Christ displays divine glory.

V 14, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. We saw His glory. The glory that belongs to the Monogenēs of the Father, and it was full of grace and truth.

What is glory? We must go back to the Old Testament to pick up on that. God’s glory is intrinsic to His nature, it is who He is. It is the sum of His attributes. Take all the attributes of God and list them, all the attributes of God in perfect complex are His glory.

His intrinsic, innate glory all His attributes.

But then there is also His manifest glory. He manifests His glory symbolically and in reality.

Exodus 33:18, And he said, “Please, show me Your glory.” Moses asks God the question.

Exodus 33:19-23, Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” 20 But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” 21 And the Lord said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. 22 So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by. 23 Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.”

What is this kind of glory? This is God’s nature, God’s essence, the eternal complex of all that He is, the all-glorious God, manifest in blazing light. Something of what Adam and Eve saw when they walked and talked with God in the garden because God is invisible, called repeatedly the invisible God.

What did they see? They walked with the Shekinah. They walked with the presence of God manifest in light to some degree. Maybe they were able to absorb more of His glory since they were unfallen, and once they fell, they had to be kicked out because they could no longer look at His glory or fellowship with Him.

Moses asks, “Show me your glory”. God says, “I will let you see the afterglow. I will let you see the back part. I will let you see the edges, or you would be incinerated in a millisecond edges. The powerful majesty and glory of God that would destroy us because we’re sinners.

I will make all my goodness pass before you. I will proclaim the name of the Lord, and the name of the Lord is all that He is. I will proclaim my attributes. I will be gracious to you. I will show compassion on you.

Exodus 34:5-7, Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. 6 And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, 7 keeping mercy for

thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.” The Lord this light passes in front of Moses, this glowing light, and the Lord begins to describe His glory.

The glory of God is the complex of all His attributes, and sometimes it was manifested in blazing light. When the children of Israel were walking in the wilderness God led them by a fiery flame at night. When the tabernacle was built in Exodus 40, the glory of God came down to the tabernacle.

When the temple was built, 1 Kings 8:11, the glory of God came down to the temple. So, God’s glory is His attributes but manifestly seen frequently in the Old Testament as light. In the future, Matthew 24, Matthew 25, Jesus returns we will see His glory.

Matthew 24:29-30, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the

heavens will be shaken. 30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Matthew 25:31, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. Jesus will come in great glory and the Shekinah will be back. Revelation says people will call on the rocks and the mountains to hide them from the face of glory. The sky will go dark, the moon and sun will not give its light, and into the blackness will come this blazing Shekinah presence of Jesus Christ.

Again, the manifestation of the attributes of God in light. So that has happened in the past and in the future will happen again. In the meantime, the glory comes to earth in Jesus. On one occasion they went up to the mount, Peter, James, and John. The Lord pulled back His flesh and they saw His glory. It was so blinding, they fell like dead men under the sheer shock and force of this blazing light, even though it was veiled to some degree, so they didn’t burn up. (Matthew 17)

2 Peter 1:16-18, For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 17 For He received from God the Father honour and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” 18 And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.

When John says, “We beheld His glory” he can mean that they beheld the light, the Shekinah, the blazing light, because John was up there on that mount. He certainly can mean that. This is written long after that happened, so he would remember that experience as well as Peter did.

When John says, “We beheld His glory,” he is not only talking about the representation of that glory in light, but also about the reality of those attributes which were manifest throughout the ministry in the life of Christ.

John could say it this way

• We saw His love,
• We saw His mercy,
• We saw His wisdom,
• We saw His knowledge,
• We saw His power,

• We saw His justice,
• We saw His holiness,
• We saw His compassion,
• We saw His omnipotence,
• We saw His omniscience,
• We saw His anger,
• We saw His wrath,
• We saw His kindness,
• We saw His patience,
• We saw it all.

We saw all those things that the Lord listed back in Exodus 33 and 34, and we saw the light. We saw His glory. We don’t question that this is God. We saw the manifest light that symbolizes His glory, and we saw the attributes that make up His glory.

We saw a visible representation of His glory, and we saw the invisible representation of that glory in His life.

John 2:11, This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him. Jesus didn’t pull His flesh back like He did in the transfiguration, but He manifested the glory of His power by creating wine out of nothing.

John says, “we saw His glory, yes, on the holy mount, visible glory. But yes, we saw that invisible glory, the operation of His attributes.” When we ask John if Jesus is God, the God Man, God in human flesh, John will tell you yes, He is because we saw His glory.

2. The incarnation of Christ dispenses His grace. V 14, “Full of grace and truth.” Not half measures, not fractions, not incomplete but full of grace and truth. Grace and truth are together in this passage. They need to be together.

They must be together because the only way that you can experience grace is by believing the truth. They go together. John says, “We have experienced who He is.” Intrinsically, He is the glory of the Father. That is His essential being. We have also experienced His glory through His grace and truth manifest in His works and words and life.

John calls His friend, John the Baptist. John the apostle calls on John the Baptist.

V 15, John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’ ” How can somebody who comes after me exist before me? He came after me.

He was born after me. Elizabeth was pregnant with John the Baptist before Mary was pregnant with Jesus. John was born first. Pure eternal being. John the apostle borrows some testimony from John the Baptist.

Why John the apostle does that?

Is that necessary? Yes, if you are Jewish and you believe in Deuteronomy, that everything must be confirmed in the mouth of two or three witnesses. It was John the Baptist. He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, because He existed before me.

How can anybody who comes after me have existed before me unless He is eternal?

The testimony of John the apostle, John the Baptist join to declare that Jesus is the divine glory. The incarnate Christ dispenses grace. V 16-17, And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

We are so glad to be delivered from the law. Brought to grace. Grace came through Christ. So, Jesus displays glory, He dispenses grace. This is the evidence of His deity. He is full of grace and truth. Of His fullness we have all received and then he illustrates it by saying in the Greek, “Grace after grace.”

“Grace in the place of grace.” It’s just endless, non-diminishing supply of grace upon grace upon grace. They use the preposition after grace, after grace, after grace - after this grace is moved, there is more grace filling the vacuum. There is never any diminishing of grace.

We have received the fullness of the grace that He possesses, grace in the place of grace in the place of grace in the place of grace.

Romans 5:2, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Grace comes constantly to us because we have believed the truth of the gospel, and we don’t receive some small amount of grace. Paul who was concerned about his thorn in the flesh, our Lord said, “My grace is sufficient.” It’s a never-ever-ending supply.

Hebrews 4:16, Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

There is a never-diminishing supply for every need that you will ever have.

How do we know He’s God? Because we are living in this realm of grace that just keeps being poured out and poured out and poured out on our lives. All we knew under the law was threats and warnings, and death and judgment.

Along comes Christ grace in the place of grace.

V 17, For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Grace was promised in the Old Testament. Activated in the Old Testament. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Grace all through the Old Testament. Everybody ever saved in the history of the world has been saved by God’s grace.

But grace was not fully realized until Christ came and paid His penalty on the cross. The word “realized” here is egeneto. It’s from the verb ginomai, to become, and it means came into being, came into existence. We could read it that way.

Grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ. If they only came into being through Jesus Christ, then was there any grace before Jesus Christ? Yes, God, knowing that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, was applying the grace that had not yet been validated.

The grace that Christ exhibited and purchased at the cross extended back as much as it extends forward.

John says, “This is not an ordinary man.” Gospel truth tells us that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, the God Man, fully God, fully Man. We see it, we have experienced it. We have touched Him. We have heard Him. He displayed grace. He dispensed glory.

3. The incarnate Christ defines God. Jesus displays glory, dispenses grace, and defines God. V 18, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

Why? God is invisible. There are times when God has appeared as smoke and fire and things like that, but He has no form. No one has seen God at any time. However, the monogenēs, the Son of God, the incarnate One, the One who is in the bosom of the Father.

“Bosom” is really an antiquated word, let me tell you what that word is. It’s used in the book of Acts for bay or inlet. It’s a word for the fold in material.

If you took a bunch of material and piled it up and it had little folds, that would be the word used, or it’s for a very tight, small pocket. What he is saying is the monogenēs, who is tucked in intimately to the very presence of God who is folded into God, he has explained Him.

He has declared Him. Wouldn’t you like to have God explained to you? When somebody said to you, “How do you explain God?”

Where would you go? Look at Jesus Christ, He explains God. The word “explained/declared” exēgeomai, from which we get exegete. Teach people how to do exegesis, how to exegete Scripture. To explain, interpret, give the meaning.

Jesus’ exegetes God.

Do you want to know about God? Jesus defines God. He displays glory, He dispenses grace, and He defines God.

Don’t say that Jesus being a nice man, a good teacher, a noble, religious leader. That’s not an option. Jesus is God. If you believe that and you receive Him. V 12, But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: