The First Miracle
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2020 · 19 July 2020
John 1:14-18 says, “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. 15 John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’ 16 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. 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.” John opens his gospel in 18 verses with a prologue, and the statement is that Jesus is God in human flesh, that He is the Creator of the universe who has become a part of His creation.
Jesus is not a created man, He is God in human flesh. And that is why there have been and continue to be so many heresies concerning Jesus Christ, concerning the essence or the nature or the person of Jesus Christ. And this is the essential 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.
The true church of Jesus Christ has always believed that. It has always proclaimed that. It has always demanded that. Any other view of Christ is unacceptable and a damning heresy. This is the reason John makes such a case out of the deity of Jesus Christ. John 20:31 says, “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.”
So in His opening John talks about the nature of Jesus Christ. He introduces Him as “In the beginning was the Word.” In other words, He already existed when everything that began, began. He was with God, which means though He was God, He was at the same time distinct from 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. Jesus is a pure being that eternally existed. To prove that, everything that came into being came into being through Him, and without Him did not anything come into being, because He is the source of life. He has life in Himself. And the Creator whose eternal being, verse 5 says, came into the darkness of this world like a light. That Light came into the world.
In the first century, John wrote his gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John wrote 1 John to believers to identify for them the marks of true salvation. 1 John 1:1 says, “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 that life was manifested.”
John said, we proclaim to you the Eternal Life, meaning the Son of God, which was with the Father and was manifested to us. John has touched the Creator of the universe in human form. You know, John never got over it. John refers to himself in his gospel as, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” because he understood the reality that this is the eternal Creator God in human form.
In 1 John 2:22 he says, “Who is the liar? Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? 23 Whoever denies the Son doesn’t have the Father. But the one who confesses the Son, has the Father also.” Again if you tamper with who Christ is, you will alienate yourself from God. 1 John 4:1 says, “Do not believe every claim, every teacher, every spirit behind every teacher.”
Because there are so many false prophets in the world. How do you know when someone is a false prophet? 1 John 4:2 says, “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” Those who affirm the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, they’re from God. “3 Every spirit that doesn’t confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, who is coming and now already is in the world.”
1 John 5:1 says, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” Verse 4 says, “Whoever is born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith. 5 Who is the one who overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” And finally verse 20 says, “We know that the Son of God has come.”
Verse 20 says, “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” 2 John 1:7 says, “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.”
Verse 9-11, “Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son. 10 If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; 11 for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds.” With John it’s all about Christ and who Christ is.
It is, therefore, not surprising that of all of the Christian doctrines, no single doctrine has been more assaulted and attacked than the incarnation of Jesus Christ. There have been all kinds of Christs offered to the world. And in the future, as we get closer to the coming of Christ, false Christs will multiply, and we have to be discerning about whether people are speaking of the true Christ.
To believe in the wrong Jesus is as damning as to believe you’re saved by a rock, or some animistic religion. You can’t be saved by believing the wrong thing about Christ. You must believe in His deity and humanity. Now, in verses 14 to 18, we come to the peak, “And the Word became flesh.” The Word, meaning the pre-incarnate Son of God whose eternal being became flesh.
The eternal Word became human, that’s what it means. So you have the God-man. The eternal God who is pure eternal being becomes a part of His creation. God and man are joined in one person, never again to be separated. Listen to that. Yet never confounded and never mixed. They are both perfect and distinct and indivisible and yet unmingled and unmixed forever.
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 witnessed for forty days. He is the same Christ exactly. He will be who He was on earth, fully man and fully God in the same way He walked on earth. His humanity is not the humanity of Adam before his fall.
Jesus is fully man in the sense that Adam was after the fall. Because He lived and grew and died, and 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 He is truly human with one exception: no sin. He is without sin, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, without sin forever. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He knew no sin.” Then he says, “and dwelt among us.” For thirty-three years, He lived in our world, took on the form of a man, and became one of us. Luke 2:52 says, “Jesus grew in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and men.”
How did we know He was God? John says in verse 14, “And we beheld His glory.” We saw His glory. “The glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” What is glory? God’s glory is intrinsic to His nature, it is who He is. It is the sum of His attributes. The glory of God is the complex of all of His attributes, and sometimes it is manifested in blazing light.
But there is also His manifest glory, symbolically and in reality. Moses in Exodus 33:18 says, “Please, show me Your glory.” 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.”
That’s the powerful majesty and glory of God that would destroy us because we’re sinners. God led the Israelites by a pillar of fire at night, and when the tabernacle was built in Exodus 40, the glory of God came down to the tabernacle. So God’s glory is seen frequently in the Old Testament as light (2 Chronicles 7:1). In the future, Matthew 25:31, when Jesus comes in His glory, the Shekinah light will be back.
Revelation 6:16 says people will call on the rocks and the mountains to hide them from the face of Jesus’ 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. That happened in the past and in the future it will happen again.
In the meantime, the glory comes to earth in the form of Jesus. And on one occasion in Matthew 17 they went up to the mount, Peter, James, and John, and the Lord exposed His flesh and what did they see? They saw His glory, and it was so blinding, they fell like dead men under the force of this blazing light, even though it was veiled to some degree so they didn’t burn up.
When John says, “We beheld His glory” he can mean that they saw the light, the Shekinah light, because John was up there on that mount. But it’s more than that. When John says, “We beheld His glory,” he’s not only talking about the representation of that glory in light, he’s talking about the reality of those attributes which were manifest throughout the ministry in the life of Christ.
John could say: 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 a visible representation of His glory, and we saw the invisible representation in His life.
In John 2 when we go to a wedding, Jesus did a miracle there. John 2:11 says, “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory.” He 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 water. Jesus is God, the God-man, God in human flesh, John will tell you: yes, He is God because we saw His glory.
John will also tell you that the incarnation of Christ dispenses His grace. The end of verse 14, “Full of grace and truth.” Grace and truth are together in this passage. They have to be together because the only way that you can experience grace is by believing the truth. So John says, “We have experienced who He is.” He is the essence of the Father. That’s His essential being.
Verse 15, “John the Baptist bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He was before me.’” How can somebody who comes after me exist before me? Answer: Because He is eternal. John says, “He was born after me.” Elizabeth was pregnant with John the Baptist before Mary was pregnant with Jesus. John was born first.
The incarnate Christ dispenses grace in verse 16-17, “And 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.” We’re so glad to be delivered from the law, and to be given grace. Grace came through Christ. So He displays glory and He dispenses grace. This is the evidence of His deity.
“Grace upon grace.” It’s just endless, non-diminishing supply of grace upon grace. There’s never any diminishing of grace. To the apostle Paul who was concerned about his thorn in the flesh, our Lord said, “My grace is sufficient.” It’s a never-ending supply. All we knew under the law was threats and warnings, death and judgment. Along comes Christ, and it is grace upon grace.
At the end of verse 17, “Grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.” Was that promised in the Old Testament? Yes. Activated in the Old Testament? Sure. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. 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 means ‘came into existence’.
And the grace that Christ exhibited and purchased at the cross extended back as much as it extends forward. Verse 18, “No one has seen God at any time.” Why? He’s invisible. There are times when God has appeared as smoke and fire, but He has no form. No one has seen God at any time. However, “the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”, the One who is in the Father, “He has declared God the Father.”
Wouldn’t you like to have God explained to you? How do you explain God? Well, you would go to that verse and say, “Look at Jesus Christ, He explains God.” So you want to know about God? Jesus defines God the Father. He displays glory, He dispenses grace, and He defines God. And if you believe that and you receive Him - Verse 12, He gave us the right to become children of God. Let us pray.