John 1:1-18 (4)

08/24/08
John 1:1-18
Hudson UMC

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Nobody wants to mention the elephant in the room?” If you haven’t, what it means is that there is an issue, usually a controversial one, that is being ignored. Everyone knows about it, but nobody wants to bring it up. Many times, political issues are the elephant in the room; other times, it is the theological differences of opinion in a Christian body, like, for instance, the United Methodist Church. The elephant that might be in the room today is not really all that serious, but I want to put your minds at ease. Yes, you have heard this text before. In fact, this will be the fifth sermon on all or part of this passage that you have heard from me since I began my appointment here, and the fourth one in a row. You are not going crazy, and yes, I will eventually move on.

I want to take just a moment to explain why it is that we have spent so much time on one passage. We started on our journey through the Gospel of John on the last Sunday in July and it doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten very far yet. One of the reasons for this is because the first passage in the Gospel of John is one of my very favorite passages in the entire Bible. However, that is not the only reason. One of the things I hope to teach you during this process of looking closely at a single book is that the Scriptures are overflowing with divine teaching. Throughout this process, as we look through this beautiful narrative in a careful and systematic way, I pray that you will begin to see that you do not need to be a Biblical Scholar in order to gain useful information from the New Testament. In the end, though there will be some things that my experience of several years reading and studying the book of John will give some insights that you might not have had, I hope to show you that, if you begin to ask the right kinds of questions, you can quickly learn a great deal from the inspired writers.

Though this is the fourth sermon in a row that I have based on this same text, you will find that this sermon, like the ones that have come before it, is very different. You see, this passage does not have only one thing to teach us, but many things. We have focused on what verse one has to say about the Divinity of Christ, what verse ten has to say about how hard it is to know Christ if we are not intentional about searching Him out, and what verse thirteen has to say about how God’s ways are not our ways and how He has established a way to heaven that is at once completely different than we would have made it, and also far more glorious. Also, we could have looked at the purpose of John the Baptist, we could have examined the Incarnational declaration of verse fourteen (which a professor of mine calls the one-verse Christmas story), or John’s statement that Christ is both after him and before him, but we will touch on some of those later. I have chosen to continue all the way to verse seventeen, where we are told, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” I hope that, though we have spent a lot of time in this single passage, that you would be aware that there is far more there that we will not discuss and that it is all very interesting.

I’m not usually one who titles my sermons. Even though these sermons have titles in the bulletin, when I look at my papers up here, the sermon is simply titled, “John 1:1-18”. However, we are going to talk about Moses and Jesus Christ, so the title does make sense. The text makes a comparison between Moses, the first great prophet of the Israelites, and Jesus Christ, the Son of God who has brought salvation to His people. We are going to do some comparing and contrasting, not to say we have to listen to one and ignore the other, but to understand what God has done and why He has done it.

We read that the law was given through Moses and that grace and truth were given through Jesus Christ. There are some parts of the New Testament that talk about the law of God in not-so-nice terms. Paul, when dealing with certain groups of people, sometimes spoke of the law as being something bad; with others, he portrayed it in a better light. John, in this passage, is not putting the law at odds with grace and truth, but is simply stating facts. The law is not opposed to the grace of God; in fact, it is a great expression of it. The Israelites had already turned from God, forsaking Him for golden calves and other things. God would have been totally justified in forsaking them, and yet He does not. Not only does He continue to love and uphold the Israelites, He gives them a guide to live by so that they might not sin so badly again. The law, though it is often hard to read and harder to live by, is consistent with the grace of God.

Also, the law is not opposed to truth. Sometimes, when we think about the fact that God had known that He would send Jesus since before the creation of the world, we wonder why He did not simply disclose everything to His people? Why did He make them wait, why did he send His Son at a time when He would be murdered after less than five years of ministry instead of at a time when he could have lived and taught for decades, really making a difference in how the world works? The fact of the matter is that God is wiser than we are, and that, though we do not always understand, there is always a reason that God does what He does. What God revealed about Himself in the law was indeed the truth, and nothing but the truth, but it was not all the truth. Why not? First, because God is not under an oath to reveal all the truth to us if He chooses not to; secondly, because He knows how we will receive it, and waits until His plans will be most perfectly served by it; and thirdly, because if we came face to face with all of the truth of God in a moment, it might very well kill us. Though God had more to reveal through His Son, the law was consistent with truth.

As we continue to consider the depths of this phrase, I want to restate it, not daring to say that my way of saying it is better than God’s way, but because I think that it might help us get our minds wrapped around it. We might say that rules came through Moses, Christian liberty came through Jesus Christ. Now, nobody likes rules. Rules, by their very nature, are restrictive. Rules tell us what we can do and what we can’t do. Now, during Moses’ time, the people needed rules just like a young child needs rules. They didn’t know what it meant to be the people of God. If they didn’t have rules, they would run all over the place, doing whatever their selfish desires wanted, which I hardly need to say, are not what God wanted them to do. Also, the laws that God gave His people had a lot to say about who He is, that He is not merely some figment of the imagination, nor is He the personification of our conscience. God did not simply declare what the people wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear. The law of God operated as a judge of human opinion and cultural trends.

When Jesus came to teach us the ways of God, it is very interesting that He never sets out a comprehensive list of things that God approves and things that God does not. Why is this? It seems to be because He was preaching and teaching to Jewish people, people who already had the law of God, who had been raised in a culture that knew right from wrong. There was no need to restate what God wanted the people to do and what He didn’t want them to do because it had already been said. Jesus was famous for exclaiming that He was not trying to undermine the Law of Moses, but to more clearly explain it. He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” There was nothing wrong with the law, nothing wrong with the rules that God had given, but human beings had showed, like they do today, their incredible ability to twist the good things of God into sin.

In order to understand this a little clearer, we might say that a focus on our external lives was brought through Moses and a focus on our internal lives came through Jesus Christ. The Mosaic Law prescribed the way of life for the Israelites to the point of telling them what foods they could and could not eat. If a person wanted, they could make a checklist and keep track of which laws they had kept and which ones they had broken. And yet, when Jesus came, we find that this was not at all what the Law was getting at. There were Pharisees, who were very careful to keep all of God’s commandments who, by the way they did things, showed that they completely misunderstood the whole point of the Law. For example, they would tithe, that is, give ten percent of what they had to God by putting their money into the boxes in the Temple. They even were careful to give ten percent of their herb gardens to the priests. All of this is good, but Jesus points out that, though they were so careful to tithe, they still oppressed the widows and orphans, who that money is supposed to help. It isn’t enough to follow the rules if you are only concerned with how you look; the laws of God have always been given to make us alive on the inside.

Yet another way to look at the difference between what God worked through Moses and what He worked through Christ, His Son, is to observe the differences between how the law looks at us and how grace and truth looks at us as human beings in a broken world. When the law looks at us, it presupposes that we are in bondage to sin. It recognizes our tendency to seek our own desires instead of the desires of God. We are so single-mindedly set on following our own will that we hardly ever set ourselves to following the will of God. Though it sounds somewhat harsh that the law would presuppose that we are in bondage to sin, when we look at how the law defines sin, we are hard-pressed to refute the claim. The law knows that, without it, we wouldn’t even be able to perceive what God has commanded, let alone be obedient to it. It uses harsh, paternalistic language because it knows how hard our hearts are.

When we are addressed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we encounter the grace of God and we encounter the truth of God in a more full way than ever before. Remember, the law is not at odds with grace and truth. The ministry of Jesus does not claim that we are not full of sin and in need of guidance beyond ourselves. In fact, if we look in the various accounts of Jesus’ life, we find that He had as low or lower an opinion of what human beings were capable on their own than anyone else in all of history. The key difference between Moses and Jesus is that the grace and truth we experience through Christ is that, while the law assumes that we can never be free from the dominion of sin and so will always need the commandments of God as a taskmaster, grace and truth takes us from that very dismal reality and promises that, if we accept Jesus Christ, the Son of the most high God, with the empty hands of faith, not trying to show off how good we are, but acknowledging our own sinfulness, we will be set free from that dominion and bondage of sin. I want to make sure that I am as clear as I can be. Grace and truth does not contradict the law, but it supercedes it.

All of this means that, when we talk about being made free in Christ, we are not talking about no longer being held accountable to the law of God contained in the Ten Commandments, but being so inwardly changed, that the sins named there are no longer committed. The freedom we have in Christ is not a libertarian freedom, with no checks and no accountability. The freedom we have is not a freedom to sin, but a freedom from sin. Let us imagine for a moment that a young person hates to do their homework right when they get home from school, like most of them do. In the child’s best interest, a rule is made that, unless they get their homework done right away, they lose some of their privileges. Let us then suppose that this child learned to love the productivity and freedom from worry that this responsibility gives and begins to do their homework right away, not because they have to, but because they want to. At this point, the rule has been fulfilled; it is not necessary, yet it remains as a reminder that problems develop if this good habit goes away. When we are born again, made new in Christ, sin doesn’t stop being bad, but we stop wanting to commit it. So long as we remain in true faith, the law does not apply to us, because we are not violating it.

Though we call God “Father”, we do not do so because we are saying that He is anything like our fathers. Even still, the law we have received through Moses and the grace and truth we have received through Jesus Christ shows us that God is indeed a good father, even in this sense. Because God our Father loves us deeply, He sets up boundaries, that we would not always do what we want to do, but that we would do what we ought to do. However, in the end, the goal is not that we would grudgingly follow a list of “do’s” and “do not’s”, but that we would grow up into righteous and holy people, whose hearts are alive to God. The goal of the law is that, through the grace and truth of Christ, we would no longer need it.

If we were merely under the law of Moses today, we would have a comprehensive guide to our lives that would help us to do good and avoid evil, but we would still be bound by sin and our hearts would be far from God. As it is, the door has been opened that, not only do we no longer need to do bad things, but we are empowered to love with a greater love than we ever have before. Though the law remains to check us if we begin to lose faith and our persistent transgression of the law is a reliable way to show that our faith needs to grow, if we are following the law without grace and truth, we have not yet arrived at the fullness of Christian faith.

If you are struggling under the law, convinced of your brokenness and sinfulness, rejoice because God has not closed the door of salvation on you. There is indeed hope; it has come to us in the form of the Son of God. The grace and truth of God are available to the sinners of the earth if they will but receive them. If you have experienced the new birth, the indwelling of the Spirit, and the assurance of your acceptance in the eyes of God by the merits of the blood of Christ, you know the grace and truth that is mentioned in our text. Let us join together in thanksgiving and praise to the Triune God that loves us and cares for us. Let us pray.

AMEN