All Sermons

Word Was God by Douglas MacMillan

Text, in the whole of the New Testament Scriptures, John chapter 1 and verse 1, words with which we'll all be very familiar.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
There are only 17 words in that verse, and there is only one of those words which has more than one syllable in it.
And yet, although on the surface of things it seems so simple that even a child, the smallest child at the Sunday school, could understand what it means.
It is at the same time so profound and brings us theologically into a realm of thought that's beyond the probing of the human mind.
And in a sense it's characteristic of the man who writes it, the man who was brought into tremendously warm and close fellowship with the Lord Jesus.
He was the man who leaned on the breast of Jesus, Jesus instituted the Last Supper, and he was the man who had not merely the heartbeat of a man, but the heartbeat of the eternal God.
He says in his letters, the things which we have handled of the Word of life.
It's very fitting that John, the beloved disciple, should give us what is one of the great Christological texts of the New Testament.
A text whose teaching establishes beyond any question the deity, the absolute deity and godhood of the Lord Jesus.
Now I want to approach this text in a very simple way and also to approach it kind of slowly.
It's truths are so tremendous that I think we will approach them just step by step, lest they overwhelm us.
And I want us to do what we must always do with the Word of God, first of all to put the text into its context and setting.
Now the text is not found in a vacuum, no text of scripture ever is.
It's the opening words of the Gospel of John.
And the Gospel of John is in many ways and many respects very different from the other Gospels, the narratives of the life and the ministry of Jesus.
The Gospels with which we are all very familiar, Matthew, Mark and Luke.
The Gospel of John, let me say it again, is in many respects very different from these.
It contains for example, and this is just one of the differences, it contains many things which the other Gospels omit and never touch on at all.
And it omits many things which the other Gospels tell us.
It leaves us.
Now this is not surprising that John should speak about things that Matthew, Mark and Luke don't touch on, or that he leaves things that they have spoken of, things which are already well known.
It's not surprising because John writes, we believe, much later than any of the other Gospels writers.
And John, under God, has a very definite aim in his writing.
He aims to fill out and flesh out the picture that the church already has in the other three Gospels.
He's supplementing a history which the church already knows well and which already possesses.
And more than that, he wrote in order that the faith of men should be firmly grounded, not merely in the facts of the ministry and life of Jesus of Nazareth, but that the faith might be grounded in this doctrine of the absolute deity of Jesus.
And his Gospel was to have one of the aims that all preaching should have, and which all preaching should never forsake.
His Gospel was to have an evangelistic aim.
And this is not the bad way to begin an evangelistic sermon.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
You see, it was to present, it was to present before men claims of majesty and of absolute deity, claims that were to stagger the mind and overwhelm the heart.
It was to be absolute, this Gospel was.
It was to set forth a Jesus who requested and demanded the trust and the obedience and the belief of all men everywhere in every age.
You see, and only one who is God has the right to set himself over against other men with all their pain and all their sense of failure and all their sin.
And Jesus does that.
If any man, he says, come unto me, he shall live.
And John begins to lay a foundation which will sustain one who makes those kinds of claims.
These things have written, he says, himself at the closing of his Gospel, these things have written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name.
Let's for a moment remember some of the things that John leaves out of his Gospel because it's very instructive.
He leaves out of his Gospel altogether the story, the narratives of the birth and the infancy of Jesus.
He never speaks about the baptism of Jesus or the temptation of Jesus.
He doesn't give us the Sermon on the Mount, significantly enough.
He obviously doesn't believe that all Christian doctrine and all Christian practice have been packed into the Sermon on the Mount.
He doesn't touch on the Mount of Transfiguration and if you go through his Gospel he gives us very few of the miracles and even fewer of the parables recorded by the other evangelists.
But the things which John brings in, the new information that he gives us about Jesus,
these also are very interesting.
The things that he relates of Christ are amongst the most precious truths that the Christian Church possesses, I believe.
Just think of some of them.
He is one that's fundamental to our understanding of the Gospel.
It's John who records it, records it as a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.
That message which came thrusting out from Christ to a religious man, except a man be born again of the Holy Spirit of God he cannot see or enter the kingdom of God, the demand of regeneration is put absolutely clearly by John and it's on the authority of Jesus himself.
And nothing else that men believe and nothing else that men read in the whole writ of God can cancel out that demand.
Let me say this, not even our religious experiences of the greatest kind is the fall-shaft of regeneration.
Not even our religious heritage of the most precious kind.
Not even the blessings and privileges which our covenant God gives to his covenant children.
None of these things cancel out that demand of Jesus, except a man be born again.
If ever there was a covenant child it was Nicodemus.
If ever there was a man who was taught of the Word of God it was Nicodemus.
And it was to Nicodemus that Jesus made the demand, except a man be born again.
And in a sense my friends, let me break into the psalm and I'll say this this afternoon.
Not just in a sense, eternally or realistically you have nothing at all to commend you to God if you are not yet born again.
If you're not yet born again, Jesus says you are under God's wrath and curse.
Well that's one of the truths that John gives us.
There's the lovely story of the woman of Samaria where Jesus talks with one cushion, a sinful woman and shows us that none is beyond his care and none beyond his reach.
And he says, if any man thirsts then come unto me and drink.
He said to that woman, I that speak unto you, I am Messiah.
The raising of Lazarus, we were talking about it here this morning.
It's John and John alone who tells us that Lazarus was brought back from the dead after being four days in the grave.
It's John who gives us these tremendous, theologically profound, I am sayings of Jesus.
The sayings which look back to Moses and his experience of God at the burning bush.
Jesus, I am the door by me if any man enter in.
I am the way, the truth and the light.
I am the bread which has come down from heaven.
You go on, how many others?
You know the scriptures well.
Well I'll leave you to remember for yourself.
The I am sayings, these great public sermons of chapters five, six, seven, eight and ten.
And then the great devotional, doctrinal sermons when he had instituted the supper, what some commentators speak of as the private discourses, the family sermons of Jesus, sermons that have upheld God's people in the very swellings of Jordan and of death.
John 14, 15, 16, 17, sermons that lay down the foundational truths about the ministry of the Holy Spirit and central to it is this, the Holy Spirit shall take of that which is mine and shall reveal it unto you.
And any doctrine of the Holy Spirit that doesn't magnify Jesus as the only redeemer of God's elect is a suspect doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
This is where the Spirit's work, all this we have in the Gospel of John.
And then there's that great high priestly prayer.
Lifting up his eyes to heaven he said, Father the hour has come, glorify thy son, for thy son also may glorify thee.
What a magnificent gospel, isn't it?
Now that's us just remembering the context in which these words come.
And the preface, as John mentioned, the prologue of this gospel is one of the most striking features of the whole book.
It gives us a tremendous amount of teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ, sublime statements about his deity and about his manhood, and about his tabernacling among men, about his ministry.
And this opening verse, it comes out to us so quietly, doesn't it?
And yet quiet though it is, when we bend the ear of the heart to it, when we take not just this ear but the ear of the inward man and bend it down to these words, in the beginning was the word.
It's got a thunder in it that reverberates through eternity, hasn't it?
This spells out for us who we worship, whom we serve. And it's setting out basically three arresting truths about the Lord Jesus Christ.
His eternity in the beginning was the word.
And then his personality and the word was with God.
And then his total deity and the word was God, or God the word was.
Now that's an opening, sublime opening.
Altogether worthy of a preacher that Jesus himself called one of the sons of thunder.
And it constitutes a very worthy, it constitutes a magnificent introduction to a gospel that's going to set out the glorious majesty and power of the Jesus who claims our faith and our obedience.
Now, we've come quite a long way, haven't we?
We've been putting the text in its setting, I want you to relax now, we've just been putting the text in its setting and taking a few steps up towards the text.
We don't want its glory to blind us and leave us with no message.
Let's take another slow approach to it still.
Let's relate it now, this gospel, and the way it opens to the other gospels and the way they open.
Because here again there's a very distinctiveness, a distinctively different approach in the mind of John under the hand of the Holy Spirit.
The other gospels all begin their history of the man Jesus Christ, they begin with the man and they gradually set out his story until they are looking at him and holding him before us as the Messiah of God, as the risen, exalted Saviour.
And then they say God has surely visited his people.
In the other gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, you see the movement is from below upwards if I can put it like that, they begin with a child or a man.
And then they go through that amazing story and they say the child, the man, is none other than Messiah God and he's now in Heaven's throne, that's how they leave him ascending into Heaven.
And John does the very reverse, John takes his starting point for his story, not in the midst of a stable, not in the womb of a virgin, he goes away beyond that altogether and he goes into the womb of eternity and he begins his starting point before time begins.
In the existence, the others I said have begun low down and the whole movement of describing Jesus climaxes, it's a movement from below upward and it climaxes in focusing in for us as the God-man, the John, his movement is the very opposite, it begins up there and then it comes down.
Can I put it like this, Matthew, Mark and Luke are saying, this Jesus is God and John begins where he says, this God became Jesus, you see, this God became man, that's the whole movement here or we can look at it from a slightly different perspective.
The other Gospels, Mark, probably the earliest one, Mark takes us back to the ministry of John the Baptist to introduce us to Jesus and he talks about the one who was a voice crying in the wilderness and then he sets out the story of Jesus, the Lamb of God.
And Luke takes us further back than John the Baptist, he takes us back through the prophetic scriptures to Abraham and he begins his story of Jesus by relating him not merely to John the Baptist, the forerunner, but by relating him to the father of the faithful Abraham.
And if you go to Matthew, he begins his Gospel by going even further back, he begins not with John the Baptist, not with Abraham, but with Adam.
He takes us right back into the Garden of Eden and he relates Christ to the whole run of human history.
Do you see, one man, Mark, relates Christ to the forerunner which ties him into Isaiah and the other prophetic scriptures.
Mark, Luke takes him and he takes him further back right through the history of Israel to Abraham, the father of Israel and Matthew takes us right back to Adam and relates Christ and the significance of Christ to the whole human race.
And John, where does John go?
John takes us beyond the Baptist and beyond Isaiah and Abraham and beyond Adam and beyond tie him into the realm of eternity and he says, in the beginning.
Now let's take a step nearer to the text, one more step, before we look at his three-fold statement.
John uses a name for the one with whom he is talking.
He calls him the word and that name runs through all three phrases of our text.
That's the name that informs every statement the text makes about this person, this one.
Every statement that the text makes, every proposition it puts forward, every truth that it posits is related to this one name, this one title that John, and it's a very strange title isn't it?
It's the title word.
Now what does John mean?
Now I don't think for a moment that we have to go back into Greek philosophy.
I don't think we have to go far back at all.
I think John expected all the people who ever read his gospel and the people who heard him preach in his own day, he expected them to understand what he meant when he used this title for what does a word do?
Well a word is first of all a means, a vehicle of communication.
Now if I stand this afternoon and for the next fifteen minutes put my hand across my mouth I may still be thinking, may be thinking very profound thoughts or may be thinking very silly thoughts, but there's one thing sure, if I keep my hand over my mouth and I don't speak you will have no idea what I'm thinking about will you?
The only way in which I can convey my thought to you is to use words as a medium of communication.
Everyone in this congregation who has ever attempted to preach or to write or to speak to other people about the gospel, when we do something definite like that we begin to realize how important words are and how exact we must be, for words are our only vehicle of communication.
What is John saying when he says in the beginning was the word, he says he is talking when he uses this title he's talking of one who is a vehicle of communication, whose sole ministry in a sense is to communicate the fullness of God to us and a word is something else, a word is not just a vehicle of communication it's a way of manifestation, the same illustration again I manifest, I bring out into clarity my thoughts through my words, if I keep on speaking, when you talk to me you manifest the kind of passion you are, all I have to do when I stand at the door and speak to you, in the past meetings I've been able to understand for example where people belong to, going out the other night one brother spoke in a very Irish accent and I knew right away that he belonged to the Emerald Isle and this morning going out from the service there was a lady who spoke to me and I said well you must belong to near Glasgow and she said oh yes I come from Paisley and then there was others of you and I wouldn't have a clue where you came from except that you had been in Australia for a long time, you manifest yourself, you reveal yourself, a word revealed and you see this is what Jesus is, he is the revealer of God and verse 18 there speaks of the soul of this fact that no man has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father he has declared him or if you go back to the original Greek it literally says he has exegeted him, the preachers here will all know that the original Greek word there is the one from which we get exegesis and we were told in the college