Giving More Than Guesses
Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Moncton · December 11, 2022 · New Traditions series
Nathan Adams explores John 1, where the Word becomes flesh. Instead of relying on human guesses about God and life, Jesus reveals God fully and offers a firm foundation. Nathan shares reasons to trust the disciples' testimony and invites everyone to build their lives on Him.
More from Nathan Adams · The New Traditions series
Topics: Faith, Discipleship, Christmas
Transcript
[0:00] At the center of Christmas is a manger. We've got it here. In Matthew's Gospel, we get the story of the shepherds coming and worshiping Jesus in the manger, and in Luke's Gospel, we get the story of the wise men showing up a little later, months or maybe even a year later, to bring their gifts. And of course, it makes a better movie if we just put them all together, and a better nativity scene. We know the story. At the time when Jesus' disciple John wrote his story of Jesus, he wrote after those accounts had been given already. So people knew the story. But maybe they didn't know what it meant. And so that's what John focuses on. So if you open your Bible to John chapter 1, verse 1, we hear the account from the disciple John.
[0:55] And he says, "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him. Without Him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in Him was life. And that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." It's a fantastic opening paragraph that John has here, and he had two audiences in mind. He had a very Jewish audience in mind, and when they heard this talk about the Word, they thought, "Yeah, when God created the world with the word," and they thought the word, "Yeah, the prophetic word, the series of prophets that God had sent the Jewish people from probably 1400 years before Christ until 400 years before Christ, who had spoken the word of God, and they had promised that a Messiah would come and not only save Israel, but save the world." And then dead silence for 400 years.
[2:05] The people of God, the Jewish people, stopped hearing the word of God through the prophets. And so for them, when they hear about the Word, they're saying, "Is He talking again?" But you know what we do when there's a period of silence. Maybe you have a relationship with someone and you haven't talked to them in a while. You start filling in the gaps about what they're thinking and doing and all this kind of stuff, and the Jewish people began to fill in the gaps. "Well, this Messiah is coming. My best guess is it's going to be pretty great. It'll probably be like a new King David. It'll probably restore our political sovereignty. Wow!" And they started making guesses. God had spoken to a point, and then they took it from there and started making guesses.
[2:52] The other audience that John had definitely in mind when he wrote this was a Greek-speaking audience. Now, many of us don't speak English as our first language. And in the ancient world, a lot of people didn't speak Greek as their first language, but they spoke Greek as the common language. And so John had in mind the wider world outside of Israel that spoke Greek. Not only did these people speak Greek as a language, they were also full of Greek culture, particularly what the Greek philosophers had said about God and life and all those types of things. Now, probably you still know the old Greek legends and myths about a very dysfunctional divine family of gods and how they did all kinds of awful things to one another and good things, too.
[3:43] But the Greek philosophers said, "Hey, let's leave that aside a little bit and start talking about one God." Now, they didn't say where they got the idea from. They basically say they just figured it out that there must be one God. But if I can read history whatsoever, it was the Jewish people who were speaking about one God for about a thousand years before the Greek people, who were not that far away from them, began to latch onto the idea. But rather than latching on to it as an idea, sorry, as a belief that was connected to a relationship with a history, they took the idea and just started using it themselves, this idea of one God. Now, our world does that all the time. It loves to lift religious content, religious beliefs, out of their context and then make something with them for good or for bad.
[4:36] Now, everything that you believe right now in society, and I'm just talking to people here that aren't necessarily Christians, they're just in Canadian Western society, almost everything that you believe can be traced back to a Jewish source or to a Greek philosophical source. For instance, you might believe that people have human rights and dignity. Great. Open your Bible to Genesis 1:26. "God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image.' So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them." That's where that idea comes from historically. And it actually has very little support as a concept if you remove that biblical theological basis.
[5:26] The fundamental science that we use every day, the technologies that we use, you can trace those back to the Greek philosophers again, who saw order and purpose in this world and began to discover the laws of science and what makes it happen. Now, so this is what we believe. It's a combination of all those things. And it's got some holes in it. I'm not saying what we believe is complete. I'm just saying it's there and it's kind of standing. How many of you played Jenga at Christmas? It's pretty fun, isn't it? Actually, I asked around to see who had a Jenga box. The youth ministry said they had a Jenga set, and the youth ministry set said, "You should see the set we've got." So, thank you, youth ministry. But what's going on in society right now, if I can compare it to a Jenga game, is we're messing around.
[6:18] We're seeing how many of these blocks we can knock out and the tower still stand. You know how it is. You just kind of fiddle around, and then you find that one's risky. Maybe we'll leave that for a second, but you find a loose one somewhere. Oh, there's one. It's always safer there, right? You got to put it back here. And so we're involved right now in modern society in a process of deconstruction. Now, there's nothing wrong with deconstruction. When I do a carpentry project, my favorite part is destruction. But if you smash someone's bathroom to pieces and you don't do anything from there, they may not... thank you. You actually have to build something afterwards, don't you?
[7:03] And all over the world, including in young adult circles and Christianity and stuff, this process of deconstruction is going on. Sometimes a very helpful process. The problem is, though, we don't know how to fill the gaps we're creating. Like, some of these things do need to be deconstructed. Some of them aren't right, but we don't know how to put anything of quality back in here. And sooner or later, guys, we're going to just grab the wrong block.
[7:48] And you can find this one on Saint George Street. Not funny. You don't know what I mean. You can find them there, homeless. You can find this one as a statistic. I took assisted suicide. I needed help as a disabled person. I was offered assisted suicide. You can take this one. And say I'm the person that lost the meaning of life, and I'm still here, but I'm just going through the motions. And I need stuff to get me through. One person at a time in our culture, we are losing the whole meaning and structure of life. It doesn't make sense anymore. And so John, as he tries to make sense the world, starts at the beginning.
[8:35] And he says, "In the beginning," he is echoing the words of Genesis 1, the opening words of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. He's echoing them to the word in the beginning. Genesis says, "God made," and John says, "In the beginning was the Word," with a capital W. So John is starting this account of Jesus by retelling the creation story, using all these verbs of becoming that are present in Genesis 1 in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. They're in John chapter 1 as well, the same words. He's retelling the whole story of life from the beginning.
[9:20] Now, I love kids. They say the funniest things because they don't know how the world works yet, right? My son, when he was three or four, said to us, "When I grow up, I want to be a fire truck." My wife said, "You mean you want to be a firefighter?" He goes, "No. No, I want to be a fire truck." But also, because kids don't know how the world works, they ask us questions. They're often quite profound. My son and I were playing with Lego. You know, with Lego you take things that are in a pile and you put them together into something that works, something that's ordered and created, and he said, "Who made the world?"
[10:09] I mean, somebody's making this Lego. It's not making itself. Who made the world? Or a much harder question: "Where did my sister go when she died?" You see, these kids are asking us questions that really matter, and today I want to help us give them more than just our best guess at these answers. "In the beginning was the Word," says John, and the word he uses in Greek is logos. It is not a word that's hard for us to grasp onto the meaning of because the word logic comes from it. Logistics. So in other words, the world is reasonable and full of numbers.
[10:57] What logos means, and when the Greek-speaking audience to John's Gospel heard that, they knew that logos was a favorite topic of the philosophers. In fact, the first Greek philosopher was Heraclitus, and he said that the logos is the hidden structure or pattern of the world, and each philosopher saw this logic of the natural world as a mirror of some divine creative mind. Now, not everyone watching today or here today believes in Jesus. But I bet you that 99% of you believe in the logos in one form or the other. For instance, when you try to teach a child that two plus two equals four, you know what always equals four, right?
[11:47] You can count on that. And so you're actually echoing Pythagoras, who was the first to realize that most of the world is numbers. I mean, pull out your cell phone, look at a picture. That's numbers. When you snap a picture, it assigns numbers to every pixel. Sends them, reassembles them by numbers, and you have a picture. That's freaky. That the whole world is that orderly, that numbers can capture it? When you sit down with a child and you say, "Cow says moo." "Bear says roar." "Frog says ribbit." And they'll have little babies that look like them.
[12:34] You're just like Aristotle sitting there going, "Wow, the whole world can be classified." Species, genus, phylum. It all makes sense, and everything's reproducing according to its kind. Wow, the world has purpose. And when you sit down, when you go to eat and you put food before your kids, some of you are really excited because you've taken great pains to make sure you don't have genetically modified food, or that it's whole food. Because you have a belief that what's natural is good. And that's, you'd make a good Stoic back then. Because they believe that everything in nature was good, and we needed to harmonize ourselves to it. And when you say to a disappointed teenager who's faced some setback in their life, "Everything happens for a reason," you are definitely a believer in the logos. You probably call the universe, if you're not a believer in Christ, or God.
[13:37] But I'm telling you, you think there's an order to this world. So with this foundation of God, or at least a logos, the Greek philosophers started trying to figure out the world. So the first was Plato. I've got too many blocks up here. Let's pretend that this is ground one. Okay, that's all right. So Plato says, "I'm gonna start with this big idea. There's one God. That's going to be where I start." Okay. This God is happy. Okay. Now, we're not happy. Why is that? Oh, because we die, because everything's hard, unpredictable in our lives. So that means that God is eternal and nothing changes for Him. It's all predictable.
[14:32] Okay. And then he says, really, if you think about it, the real problem is the material world. I mean, God's immaterial and eternal, and He's fine. Our problem, humans, is this material world and our bodies. Hmm. Okay. Well, wow, if we've got this God that's happy and everything's good, and material world, we live and things are bad, there must be a bunch of intermediate deities that separate that God from us and kind of like pass the word along to us. And if that's true, then my goal as a human being is to escape the prison of my body and rise up to oneness with this impersonal One.
[15:20] You see, he starts with his amazing foundation, doesn't he? There's one God. And he was right. God's happy and everything like that, but he made a mistake: the material world. Is not bad. It's okay. It's a good thing. His follower Aristotle, I think, kind of realized where Plato's big mistake was. So Aristotle said, okay, let me start with the material world. Let's start with the fact that I can perceive a material world. With my senses, I can taste it, see it, smell it, touch it. That's true. And he said, I'm gonna go from what I see, and I'm going to try to work out to God. I'm gonna start little and try to end big.
[16:07] Okay, so I see stuff. I've got a mind, and I kind of can see the order in it. That's cool. Good foundation. Okay. As I look around, the order in this world, it all seems to have a purpose. Everything's trying to become something: the little calves trying to become a cow. Everything's moving. Something started it and gave it purpose and a goal. Not so bad. And then he said, you know, it's almost like a cosmic mind created all this and started everything in motion, maybe. Okay, and then for this cosmic mind, for this person to be the unmoved mover, everything that moves starts with this one, this cosmic person. No one else is moving him.
[16:53] This person is sitting there, totally self-enclosed. He, the divine mind, is thought thinking about thinking. There you go. Not a bad series of deductions. And actually, most of those ones I mentioned kind of hold true, but this isn't God. What's he got to try praying to? The god that is thought thinking about thinking and not an inward-facing and disconnected from you. The problem with science: It can't think its way up to God. It always falls short into something that's not God. And you know, all that happened is after these two great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, other philosophers came along and said, come on, that's not right.
[17:46] Skeptics came along and said, you know what? There's no way we can know what's true for sure. It all just falls down eventually. And so they said there's nothing true. Do you know what they just said, though? They said there's something true. So they contradicted themselves. That's what relativism does. And then along came some other philosophers, and they said, you know what? I don't need to know the ultimate truth of life. I just know need to know how to get along in life. So there's one guy. He says, let's live for higher pleasures in life. Like the good ones. Let's put aside our base pleasures and live for the higher pleasures of pleasures, but pleasure, that's our highest goal, and builds it up like that. Guess what? His followers decided all pleasures the goal. Do you know anybody like that? Do you know, does our society still say that? And cynics came along and just said, this is garbage. None of it makes sense.
[18:35] And they're like the people that are on your social media right now, trolling along, dumping on everything. The thing is, with this way of thinking about God and the world, is that they're really just educated guesses. And you can get several guesses in a row, right, but sooner or later you're going to guess wrong. And then every guess after that is wrong. So if we're trying to impart to our children what the meaning of life is and who God is, where did you make a wrong guess? The scary thing is, you barely know, we never know.
[19:22] When early Christian father Clement of Alexandria said, the guessing at truth is one thing, and truth itself is another thing. Now John's summary of all these attempts to guess at God and life are here in verse 5, where he says, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. That word "overcome" is kind of a neat word. It means grasp. And it had the same double meaning in Greek that it does in English, actually. So if I want to grasp someone physically, I'm going to try to wrestle them and overcome them, right? But if it's something that's a mental concept, I'm trying to grasp it. Oh, okay, I get what you're saying. I grasp it.
[20:12] I get the concept. And what John says, by using this double entendre, he says the world doesn't understand the truth. And it's also very aggressive to the truth. You know what? We don't understand, we often hate. So what is the solution? In verse 14 of John chapter 1, it says, and the Word became flesh, and the idea who that Word is that he's been talking about all through the chapter: Jesus. And the Word became flesh and lived among us. We have seen His glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth. From His fullness we have all received grace upon grace.
[21:01] The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made Him known. This is revelation. Instead of guessing about who God is, God reveals Himself to us fully. He comes to us in person. The preliminary revelation about God that was given to the Jews through Moses and the other prophets is now completed by Jesus, who gives us grace upon grace. We know God because God the Son shows Him to us. Now this is a conception of God that neither the Jews nor the Greeks saw coming.
[21:47] This is God the Son, who is both with God and was God. And He is the one who becomes human. This blew apart Greek ways of thinking about God, because for them God was really remote, but this God comes down and becomes flesh, becomes human, and lives among them. And we've seen Him. We've touched Him. We've seen His glory. The Bible goes on to talk about, very clearly, about God the Son, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, who exists in a Trinity of three persons in one God. This is a God who is relationship itself, rather than a god that is remote and doesn't care. This is the relationship that all life is patterned on.
[22:35] And to be created in the image of this highly personal God is to be designed for relationship, and designed to know God, not just in a rational way but in a personal way, bridging the distance between us. So there's a spin-off group from Christianity known as the Jehovah's Witnesses, and they insist that John 1:1 should be translated, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god. They're the only group in the world that choose to translate John 1:1 that way. I've been using, actually, the NRSV translation, which is perhaps the most liberal, skeptical, academic translation There is, and they won't translate it that way, even though they'd love to say Jesus wasn't God, because you can't actually translate the Greek that way, nor can you read the Gospel of John that way.
[23:25] Because all through the Gospel of John and the other Gospels, Jesus keeps doing things that only God can do. He keeps claiming prerogatives, like to forgive sins, that only God can do. And when He died on the cross for our sins and rose again from the dead, the disciples saw something that had never happened in human history before, and they were blown away. There was one disciple though that wasn't present at one of the initial appearances of Jesus to His 12 disciples. His name was Thomas, and we heard when he heard the report of Jesus being alive, he said, "I just can't believe it.
[24:11] I won't believe it unless I put my hands in where the nails were and put my finger in His side where the spear pierced Jesus' side before He was taken from the cross. Unless I see the marks of the nails in His hands." It says at the end of John, chapter 20, verse 25, "and I put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in His side, I will not believe." And so a week later Jesus appeared to Thomas and said, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe." And then Thomas answered Him, "My Lord and my God," and he fell on his face and worshiped Him. And so from the beginning of John to the end, Jesus is Lord.
[25:02] He is God who has come to be with us in human form. John didn't just write a gospel though. He wrote a letter as well to early Christians, and he starts that letter in 1 John 1:1 almost the same as he starts the Gospel. "We declare to you what was from, we declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at, and what we have touched with our hands." Look at the primary means of knowing God. Aristotle would have been happy. What is it? It's the senses. I touched Jesus. I saw Him. I heard Him.
[25:48] I hugged His resurrected body. I saw Him ascend into heaven, said the disciples, and we have experienced the anointing and filling of the Holy Spirit with power that has transformed us from a bunch of runaways from Jesus into an unstoppable force of witness in the early world. There are a few reasons why we can believe their testimony to this revelation about God. The first is that there was nothing here in what they had to say that could have come out of the mouths of uneducated fishermen, tax collectors, and things like that. Yet their wisdom has proven to be so much greater than the philosophers that they displaced.
[26:41] The second thing why you can believe their testimony is that these disciples died for their faith. They knew what they had seen, and they weren't afraid to die in front of Jewish crowds, in front of Greek crowds, in front of Roman crowds who didn't like the new message that put aside all the old gods and said they were false. But these disciples died for their faith. In fact, John's the only one that wasn't killed early on, and he died in exile at the end. The third reason we can believe this testimony is that Jesus' story, that is relayed by John and Matthew and Luke and Mark, systematically fulfills all the prophecies made over the period from 1400 BC to 400 BC about the Messiah, in a way that you could never have made up or manufactured.
[27:41] It's worth looking into. The fourth reason that you can believe this testimony about the revelation of God is that when this testimony, this Scripture, is read, the Holy Spirit does something in our hearts if we're open. He begins to say to us, "What you're hearing is true, whether communicated well or poorly, true." And your heart and your mind start to react to it. And the only thing that can get in the way of what the Holy Spirit does is you. In John 7:17, Jesus said, "Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching that I'm sharing is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own." He's saying, if you're willing to face the truth at any cost, if you're willing to say, "Look, whatever the truth is, I just want to know the truth," then you're going to know whether or not what I'm saying is true. And today, if He's speaking to you, I want you to set aside the implications and say, "I need truth more than anything else. I need someone to make sense of this world for me." In a couple minutes, I'm going to ask you to say a prayer to begin this relationship with Jesus Christ.
[29:09] The other thing, the other reason you should believe this testimony about Jesus Christ is that the world starts to make sense when Jesus is the foundation. It starts to be stable. You have a reference point. Everyone knows there's something dead wrong with our world today, but no one can figure out what it is, because we've got no solid starting point. And Jesus is that starting point. And the final reason that you can believe the testimony about the revelation of Jesus Christ is that there's people all around you here today in this room and in your life, past and present, who can tell you that Jesus is real. I want to confess to you: I don't believe in Jesus in a hypothetical way.
[30:02] I know. Like, there was a point in my life when I believed in the hypothetical way, but what's the point of a hypothesis? You do experiments, right? How many experiments do you have to have before the theory becomes a law of nature? I mean, I have no real doubt about the theory of gravity. And I'm going to tell you, I have no real doubt about Jesus Christ. You can investigate Him any way you want, as deep as you want. And He is true.
[30:51] One of the misperceptions that comes when someone talks about Jesus Christ is we think that it is a white man's religion. It's a nice accusation. It lacks any history. Jesus was a Jew. Not white. Kind of tan. One of the first converts was an Ethiopian. And the Ethiopian church still lives today. The place where people were first called Christians was Syria. As Paul took the gospel West, Thomas the doubting disciple took it East into India. There are still churches in India today that trace their origin to Thomas.
[31:41] My friends, this is not a religion for one part of the world. This is the truth for all people. I want to ask some people to be bold here this morning. But I don't want you to be in any way disingenuous. I told you that for me, believing in Jesus is no longer a hypothetical belief. It is something I know. I want to ask if there's some people that know Jesus today. Is there anyone that would stand up today? And say, someone from Africa that would stand up and say, "I know Jesus and I know He's true." Would you stand up and bear witness this morning and add your testimony?
[32:28] You know He's true. Is there anyone? From South America that knows that Jesus is true, and you would stand, and please keep standing if you stood. Do not stand if you have doubt. Those of you standing because Jesus has answered prayers directly, you're standing because you have felt and experienced the power of the Holy Spirit, and He set you free. He's touched your life. You know He's true. In fact, you're standing because if everything else had to be taken away from you, even your life, give me Jesus. Is there anyone? From India that would say Jesus is true, or from Korea?
[33:17] You know, people today think of Christianity as something based in Europe or the United States. Give me a break. It's based in Korea these days. It's based in Nigeria. It's based in Brazil. It's a worldwide religion. If you are a person from anywhere in this world, and Jesus has shown you that He can set you free from anything, any addiction, any compulsion, mental illness, anything like that, would you stand and bear witness today that you know Jesus is real? And see, I don't want everyone to stand. In fact, some of you need to sit down. If you have a doubt, please have a seat.
[34:02] But if Jesus has touched your marriage and you know He's touched your marriage, stand, or maybe better, raise your hand because you already stood, that He could fill your life with love and grace and forgiveness to allow the marriage to go forward in a world where marriages just break apart like nothing, usually. You see, all around you are people that if they could tell their story to you, if you would ask them their story, they would tell you Jesus is absolutely true. He is the Firm Foundation. I see a friend here from the former Soviet Union standing, where for two or three generations they tried to stamp out the name of Jesus. But Jesus is true.
[34:48] He is with us. So now I want to invite you. If you want to give your life to Jesus, I want to invite you to put your hand up. There are people all around here. I see your hands. That's amazing. We're going to pray in a second. I want you to put your hand up, and what you're saying when you put your hand up is I'm ready to build my life on Jesus. I need His faith, hope, and love. I need the Word of God in my life. I need prayer. I need fellowship and worship with other Christians. I need someone who will direct my paths where I can be obedient to Him. I need His help.
[35:36] And I want to build my life upon Him. Is there anyone else that says, "I want to accept Jesus this morning. I'm going to put my faith in Him for the first time, or to renew faith that had died." Is there anyone else that will do that here this morning? We have two people right here. I can't really see. Let me know if there's more. Thanks. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. If you're online and you want to give your life to Jesus, I want you to type in the chat, "I'm ready to believe." You see, my friends, this world can offer you zero stability. It's full of holes. You never know when you're going to pull the next block and it will all come tumbling down.
[36:31] But Jesus Christ is the Firm Foundation. He says in that Scripture we read, you will know God. And when you know God, everything else can start to make sense. Your kids need that, my friends. You need it to have that certainty, to know the answers to life's tough questions. They deserve it. For those of you that are ready to pray, to give your life to Jesus, I ask that you repeat these words that I'm going to say after me from your heart. You may do it out loud. You can do it in your heart. Those of you that are ready. Jesus, life without You doesn't make sense.
[37:22] Thank You for coming into this world to show us the truth and to make us Your friend. I receive the gift of knowing You. I confess my sins to You, and I receive forgiveness, and I will go forward from this day building my life upon You and trusting You. In Jesus' name, amen. I want you, if you've done that today, to grab one of those cards that's in front of you in the seat and write your name, your phone number, and your email, and say, "I gave my life to Jesus today." Can you write that on there? There's pens in the seat in front of you, and please give those to an usher on the way out.
[38:23] Our prayer team is going to come down front, and you can come and have them pray over your new relationship with God, or anything you want to do during that time. But all of us, as we sing now, as our worship team leaves us, let us celebrate Jesus. Let us celebrate that He came to show us the truth. And while there are certain things that He does not reveal in life this side of heaven, He has revealed the things we need to know, the things that provide a firm foundation for our life. You see, everything I need to know is right here, right here, with the God who became a baby, grew up among us, lived life, and fixed everything about life that was broken, who triumphed over death, who ascended to heaven and has poured out the Holy Spirit for all who will receive Him, who's coming again. This is the message of Christmas, and we give God praise for His goodness to us today.