Well, I'd like you to turn in
your Bibles with me to the Gospel of John. You might recall that
John is the one disciple that lived to old age. He's the one
of the disciples that was closest to the Lord Jesus Christ throughout
his earthly ministry for those three and a half years where
he revealed himself as God. And he was the one that lent
on the breast, on the chest of the Lord Jesus Christ at that
Last Supper. And he's the one that was there
and witnessed that empty tomb on that Sunday morning. And that's why he says, we've
seen him. We've seen God, is what John
is saying. We've seen him. with our eyes. I'm reading from 1 John, but
you stay in John 1. I'll just read this as an introduction.
We have seen him with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our
hands have handled. He's talking about the resurrected
Lord Jesus Christ. And for the life was manifested
and we've seen it and bear witness and show unto you that eternal
life that was with the Father and was manifest unto us. That which we have seen and heard
we declare to you. We're declaring what we've seen
and heard. This is not a philosophical notion. This is not the suppositions
and the workings of men in their imaginations. The beauty of,
and one of the things that I find very comforting in the truth
of the scriptures is that it's actually grounded in historic
realities. If you'd been there, you could
have done exactly what John has done. And these men are witnesses
and they lived and died with this testimony on their lips.
That's which we have seen and heard we declare unto you that
you also may have fellowship with us. The purpose of John's
writing, the purpose of preaching the gospel, is that you might
have fellowship. People have all sorts of fellowship
in this world. And all the fellowships of this
world, whether it's family fellowships or friends fellowships or fellowships
in all sorts of other things, they're all shallow and empty. And you go through enough of
a trial and you'll find that that's how they go. You should
go through enough in your life and you'll think that all of
what you have is fellowship. Now, it's not fellowship. We
write and we declare and we're telling this truth so that you
may have fellowship with us And our fellowship, truly our fellowship,
is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. If you have
fellowship with God, you're gonna have fellowship with God in the
Lord Jesus Christ, and you'll have a fellowship which is a
different fellowship to all the fellowships of this world, I
promise you. And these things we write unto
you, that your joy may be full. Okay, so this, John's writing,
He's writing to encourage believers to keep on believing. He's writing
that those who don't believe might find themselves beholding
the Lord Jesus Christ. So let's turn back to John 1. You're already there. In the
beginning, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. What a glorious description of
the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything that you will hear
from God is going to be Jesus Christ. The same was in the beginning
with God. In a world where everything is
not the same, there is one who is the same. He's been eternally
the same, the Lord Jesus Christ. The same was in the beginning
with God. All things were made by Him. And just to make sure that you
get the sense of what John is wanting to get across here, and
without Him was not anything made that was made. This notion
that somehow this universe and the glory of the beauty of it,
we have seen something of the beauty of it up in far north
Queensland and it's breathtaking. And yet, this modern world wants
to think that it all came about by an accident. I've seen a whole
lot of accidents in my life, and I've never seen a beautiful
one. Have you ever seen a beautiful one? You know, don't you? God says that the heavens declare
the glory of God. People know innately in their
hearts that when they see creation and when they see the wonder
and the beauty of it, whether it's the little tiny things that
are extraordinary pretty or the enormous things that are pretty,
that this was made by someone. This is not an accident. And
we're declaring to you, and the Bible is declaring to you, and
the Lord Jesus Christ is declaring to all the people throughout
time and history that He made it. Not only does He made it,
He rules it and controls it. The sun is shining now because
the Lord Jesus Christ gives it the power to shine. The stars
twinkle in the sky because the Lord Jesus Christ causes them
to twinkle. the little microbes that roam
around this world, roam around this world exactly according
to the sovereign plan of this glorious God. God is big. So one of the tragedies of religion,
and it's one of the tragedies of sin and the fall of man, is
that we reduce God down to something like us, don't we? We make him like a souped-up
human being. He's not a souped-up human being,
he's completely different. the same as in the beginning
with God. All things were made by him. Verse four, he says,
and in him was life. He is life itself. All life that
moves and breathes in this universe moves and breathes because of
the life that's in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is life. And the life was the light of
men. And the glory of this is it's
not something that just stays away. Light shines. The light
shines in the darkness. And the darkness does not understand
it, does not comprehend it, does not overcome it. Wherever light
shines, it will shine in the darkness. The darkness of unbelief,
the darkness of the rebellion of men, the darkness of this
whole world that stands in rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ.
The darkness of all of that, all that needs to be overcome
is the light that shines. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the
light shone today? There was a man sent from God
whose name was John. Not the John that wrote this
gospel, this is John the Baptist. The same came for a witness to
bear witness to the light that all men through him might believe. John was not the light, but was
sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light,
which lightens every man that cometh into the world. He, the
Lord Jesus Christ, was in the world, and the world was made
by him, and the world knew him not. What a perfect description
of this world today, isn't it? The world doesn't know him. The
world doesn't know him. the one who created it. They
have no idea of their creator. The world knew him not. He came
to his own people. He came to the nation Israel.
He came to the most religious, zealously religious and morally
upright nation that this world has ever seen. People call America
a Christian nation. It's not a Christian. There's
never been a Christian nation. But the closest this world's
ever seen to something that might be called a Christian nation
is the Jews in the days of the Lord Jesus Christ. They went
to their spice cupboards and worked out how much they had
to pay in a tax of their mint and their cumin and their salt,
and it's ridiculous. They were so, so, so religious. And yet they didn't receive him. He came to them and he said,
I'm the one that's been promised. I'm the one that you've been
looking for for this last 2000 years. I'm the one that all of
your Bible speaks about. In every passage of your Bible,
it speaks Jesus Christ. And here I am, I am here as God
and I'll prove to you that I'm God. I will create out of nothing. I will create out of nothing. I will speak to to a dead man and you'll come
out of the grave. I will go and heal a blind man,
and I'll keep healing blind men. And your Bible says, your Jewish
Bible says, your Old Testament says, that only the Messiah,
who is God, will ever heal the blind. It was one miracle that
no one else ever did in all of the Old Testament history. And
even though he did it again and again and again in the very presence
of these people, what's that verse say? Verse 11, he came
to his own and his own received him not. And here's the good
news in verse 12. But in the midst of a world that
doesn't know him, in the midst of a creation that doesn't recognize
him, in the midst of a people who should have known who he
was, They didn't receive him, but as many as received him,
to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them
that believe on his name. There is a people in this world
who receive. There is a people in this world
that believe on his name. To believe on his name is to
believe in all the character that's just been spoken of here
and what will be spoken of in the future. These people that
believe, these people that receive Him, which were born not of blood,
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man. This
is not a human activity, this is a God activity. They're born
of God. And verse 14 is where we're looking
at today, down to verse 18. And the Word was made flesh,
and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory. the glory of the only
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bear
witness of him and cried saying, this is he of whom I speak. He
that cometh after me is preferred before me. He was before me,
had an existence before me is what John the Baptist is saying. I came as a man, he was God before
the foundation of the world. He was before me. And then verse
16, these glorious pictures of the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And of his fullness have all we received graceful grace. You need grace to believe, you
need grace to receive, you need grace to see, you need God to
do something for you when you can't do it yourself. That's
what grace is all about, it's God acting on behalf of his people
on account of who the Lord Jesus Christ is. Not because he sees
something special in you, not because he sees some remarkable
potential in you. Grace for grace. Verse 17, for
the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ. No man has seen God at any time,
but the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father. He has declared Him. No man has seen God. If you're
gonna see God, all you'll ever, ever, ever see is God. is the
Lord Jesus Christ. We're going to sing number 27. Thanks, Normie. Behold my soul,
the love of God, behold the grace mastery. Before all worlds his
purpose stood. Yeah. is my name, Christ, he is my
name. 15 is a great description of what
all preaching is about. Bear witness of Him. To bear witness of Him is to declare Him as He is and every God sent preacher stands before
people knowing something and increasing something of the depth
of their inadequacy in trying to declare the glories of the
Lord Jesus Christ. And one of the wonders of the
gospel and one of the wonders of the promise of God is that
he actually is promised to be the one that comes. He's the
one that comes and he's the one that teaches. And he sends, he
sends his messages and he sends his witnesses into this world.
And we just say, this is who God is. This is who God is. And this is what he's done. And
all of the work is his. I passionately desire that we
might behold his glory. I want to behold his glory. I want you to behold his glory.
I don't want the words of men, and I want to clarify one of
the words in the scriptures that is much misused by people in
religion, and that is that in our In verse 14 it says, at the
end of verse 14, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the
only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And
in verse 18 it says, no man has seen God at any time. The only
begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him. So for the last 2,000 years, people of all sorts,
have wanted to use those words forgotten to establish that the
Lord Jesus Christ was a created being. The Jehovah's Witnesses
do it, the Mormons do it, the Christadelphians do it. There's
a whole bunch of people do it. A whole bunch of people in so-called
professing Christianity would do it as well. They would want
to deny the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And John is making
it so abundantly clear that the Lord Jesus Christ is God. And
he begins by wanting to deny that. It's interesting, isn't
it, in the Scriptures that the Lord anticipated, as it were,
all of the objections to the Gospel and He put a simple answer
in as clear of words as you could get. In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the
Word was made flesh. So this same Word is the Word
who was in the beginning. This same Word is the one that's
the only begotten. So the question before us just
briefly now is what does this word begotten mean? What is it
for him to be a begotten son of God? Does it mean that he's
less than God? The scriptures here are saying
absolutely not, he's one with God. One of the best descriptions
of it, I think, is given in Isaiah 9, verse 6, and you don't have
to turn there, but it talks about the Lord Jesus Christ, and it
says, for unto us, A child is born, and unto us a son is given. The Son was always the Son of
God. He says in Micah that whose goings
forth have been from everlasting, he was always, he's always God. The Son of God can be declared
to be God the Son. word and he is absolutely all
that God is and in this remarkable time of his incarnation as promised
in the scriptures he came and he donned human flesh without
ceasing to be God he was as fully man as man could ever be which
is why He was formed in the womb of Mary and he lived the full
length of a mature human life to the age of 33 years before
he was put to death. So that all of what the rest
of humanity goes through, the Lord Jesus Christ goes through.
And he had limitations. He had limitations in his flesh. He could be at one place and
not at another place at the same time. He could be weary and asleep
in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. When a storm arose, he could
get up from his seat and he could just speak to the wind and the
waves and stop them. He could be weary. The glory
of God becoming flesh in the Lord Jesus Christ, Emmanuel,
God with us, is that he can be touched. with the feelings of our infirmities. He is fully man and fully God. You cannot say of the Lord Jesus
Christ at any point ever that he doesn't understand what you're
going through. He went through it all, all of
it, and he felt it more intensely than you've ever felt it. He
knows what it is to be betrayed. He knows what it is to be rejected
of people. He knows what it is to feel extraordinarily
lonely. He knows what it is to feel the
fragilities of being human. And yet, at the very same time,
he was God. So this word begotten, he's called
God's own son. It means that he is equivalent
to God. It means that all of what God
is is revealed in him. He's the only begotten from the
Father. He keeps saying it, doesn't he?
In John 6, 38, he says, I came down from heaven. I came from him and he sent me. He says in John 10 verse 30,
he says, I and my Father are one. I and my Father are one. He's one with his Father. He's
the one, one born, the one that's come into this world. attributes of God. God was perfectly
embodied in the Lord Jesus Christ. So he has all of the attributes
of God. He has all the knowledge of God.
He knows everything. He could sit before those Pharisees
and he could see what they were thinking. Couldn't he? He knew what was happening from
a distance. He was miles, he was two days' walk away from
Lazarus dead in a term and he knew that he was dead. He has
infinite knowledge. The knowledge of the Almighty
is infinite. He has infinite knowledge. We saw earlier that he's the
creator. It's a special prerogative of
God to be a creator. We play with God's creation and
Meron does some beautiful things in June and other with God's
creation. But as God, who is the creator,
we play with his creation, but he's the creator. We enjoy creative
people, but they're not really creative people, are they? He's
the creator. He's one with Him. He's one with Him in sovereignty. He's one with Him in His eternality
of His being. He's one with Him, as our text
says, He's one with Him, He's with God, and He was God. So I want you to get rid of the
notion that this Beloved means, this Begotten means one that
is born in the normal way as man and then somehow is less
than equal to God. The Son was given to have life
in Himself. He's won with him in absolute
sovereign rule over all things in this world. And the one charge
the Jews could make against him, he says, you are a man, and you
make yourself out to be God. The remarkable thing about the
Lord Jesus Christ is that he was God who was made a man. They got it round the wrong way.
Religion always gets the Lord Jesus Christ upside down and
round the wrong way. He is inseparably God. He's the only begotten of the
Father. He's the only one who ever came
to this world who fully represented God in all the being and all
the character of God. One with the One who sent Him.
And so in the letter to the Hebrews it says that all you'll ever
hear of God, and all that God is ever going to say to this
world, is Jesus Christ. God who at sundry times in indiverse
manner spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophet, has
in these last days spoken to us by Son. The last words of God to this
world. are Jesus Christ, whom is the
appointed heir of all things, and by whom he made the world,
who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of
his person, upholding all things by the word of his power. And
the reason he became man was that when he had purged our sins,
when he had by himself purged our sins, he came in all of the
glory of humanity that he might go to the cross of Calvary. This
universe was created so that the Lord Jesus Christ could be
crucified outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago and three days later
rise from the dead. glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. He sat down at the right hand
of the Majesty and High, and in his last appearance before
his disciples, before he went back permanently to heaven, after
40 days of proving to all of those people that he was all
of what God is and all of what He was received as a man with
the wounds on his hands and the wounds on his side, bearing all
the marks of the sin of his people. He went back into heaven with
that resurrected body, and the disciples I love the
ignorance of the disciples in the scriptures. I love the fact
that they ask questions, and the questions cause God to be
revealed in all sorts of ways. And while they looked steadfastly
towards heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white
apparel, two angels, which also said, you men of Galilee, why
are you standing here looking up into heaven? Why are you gazing
up into heaven? This same Jesus, Acts 1.11, this same Jesus, this
same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall also
come in like manner as you've seen him go into heaven. He's
coming back, he's coming back. He is one with his father. The point I'm trying to make
is that he's not born like the rest of Adam's children. He is separate and yet he is
100% human in every single aspect of it. In fact, when John says
that I and my father are one, If he'd used the masculine tense,
it would have been one person, but he actually uses the neuter
tense, which means that it's one substance. The Greek has
two words, the original language that John and the other writers
wrote in the New Testament, and the Greek has two words for son. One of them is the son by, in
terms of normal sonship as we would think, it's relationship
by birth. I have two sons. Simon has three sons. Lord willing,
our newly engaged couple will have sons in time. Maybe quite
a number of them. That'd be lovely, wouldn't it?
But anyway, they'll have sons in the normal course of generation.
So there are two words, aren't there? One is just a normal word
for son, and the other word for son of his very being, it means to
be identified precisely with. Which one do you think the scriptures
always use with reference to the Lord Jesus Christ? The second one I mentioned, dignity
of position. So I don't want you to be confused
at the outset about that. I think there is so much more
that we'll see as we go on through this amazing passage. He was
made flesh, but he was always God. And it's something that
we will wrestle with and never fully understand. And like most
of the scriptures, we rejoice in the fact that we can believe
what God has said. If we're given the grace to believe,
we'll find what God has said about God and what God has said
about his son, the most glorious things. He was made flesh, He
was touched. God was touched with the feelings
of our infirmities. Touched, you know what the word
touched means? Moved to sympathy. One of the things that we need
to bear in mind with the Lord Jesus Christ being both man and
God, that he is not inactive in this world. I find it a tragedy that people
want to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ as if he's some object
to be examined. He's alive to be in relationship
with and to be in communion with. Talk to him and talk about him
as a living, real presence here now, because that's what he says
has happened. That's what he says is happening. I'd love to be one of the weeds
that behold his glory. I'd love for you to be one of
the weeds that behold his glory. Let's have a run.