The Christmas Origin Story

Let's take our Bibles and turn to John 1. We're gonna take a break from our series in Proverbs. Everybody let out a big sigh of relief. But, Proverbs isn't done with you yet. Lord willing, we're gonna come back to Proverbs on the other side of the Advent season.

For the next four weeks, with the Lord's blessing, we are going to spend our time in what's often called the "prologue" to John's Gospel. That's the first 18 verses of John 1. It's one of the most amazing and profound pictures of Jesus anywhere in the Bible. We are going to just walk through it bit by bit over these next four weeks and we are going to behold the glory of Jesus just like we sang about a few moments ago.

Let me invite you to stand with me as we honor the reading of God's word from John 1:1-5.

I don't know about you, but I love a good origin story. Whether it's a real person, maybe it's a friend of mine who I'm getting to know and I'm finding out about where they grew up, or what their family was like, or where they went to school, or it's a famous person like a presidential biography, learning about the influences that shaped them, or it's a fictional character, there are a lot of movies about fictional characters and their origin stories. I think that movie Wicked is about that, right? It's about the Wicked Witch of the West. How she became this really famous villain in the Wizard of Oz. It's the story that you didn't know before. I love getting the back story of someone who's important to me, going back to the beginning and finding out how it all started, how they arrived at the place where I first met them.

A couple of years ago, we stumbled onto this movie called The Man Who Invented Christmas. And it's the origin story of A Christmas Carol. It's how Charlie Dickens came up with all these ideas for these characters for the story. As you're watching, you're thinking, "Oh, that's where he came up with the ghost of Christmas past. That's how he came up with Jacob Marley and with Scrooge. I've watched tons of superhero origin story movies. Those are making millions of dollars every year. I've told you about my love for The Food that Built America. I didn't think I could love Little Debbies more. But when I found out their humble origins in the great state of Tennessee, my love surged even more, and I ate two right on the spot.

I love a good origin story. And John 1 is the ultimate origin story of Christmas and of Jesus himself. Now by the time John is writing his gospel, he's an old man. He's of course one of Jesus' original twelve disciples. He had an especially close relationship with Jesus. He's often called "the disciple who Jesus loved." He was a part of that inner circle with Peter and James who saw things that no one else saw. He went places that no one else was able to access. John followed Jesus so closely. And now as he reaches the end of his life, the other three gospel accounts in our New Testament, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have been in circulation for a while. People are hearing about Jesus. They're curious about Jesus. Jesus is of course meeting many people in power and changing their lives. The name of Jesus is just circulating out in the world as never before. And before John dies, he determines under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to tell another side of Jesus' story.

There's another perspective of Jesus the savior that he wants to provide, not to contradict, but to complement those other three perspectives of Jesus that we get in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is especially burdened to show us the glory of Jesus. That's what he is going to say later in John 1 in the prologue, "And we beheld his glory." He wants us to behold the glory of Jesus in a deeper way and in a more profound way. He wants to give us a little glimpse of just how vast Jesus really is. And to do that, he gives us Jesus' origin story right here in John 1:1-18. And to show us just how vast Jesus is, and how great his glory is, he begins his story, not at the beginning of his earthly ministry like Mark. He doesn't even begin Jesus' story at Bethlehem when he was born like Luke does. He doesn't back it up to the Old Testament roots in the family tree of Jesus and the family of Abraham and David like Matthew does. No, John backs up the origin story even further. He says, "you will never understand Christmas and you will never behold the glory of Jesus like you should unless you know the true origin of Jesus. And that's all the way back in the beginning. It's the beginning of the greatest story that's ever been told.

If we're gonna understand the glory of Jesus at Christmas, we have to understand:

There are certain phrases that are so familiar to us because we've grown up around them that you could say them in your sleep. You fill in the blank. "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the ___," "Dashing through the snow in a one horse open ___." Now, if I asked you to memorize scripture, could you do it like that? We're so familiar with certain phrases because we've spent so much time around them. I'll tell you a phrase that was like that for John's original readers, his Jewish readers, the phrase, "in the beginning." John knows that when his readers see those first three words, they're going to immediately fill in the blank, "In the beginning, God!" That's the next word. Everyone is gonna shout it out because they have lived in the creation story all their lives. They learned it in Sabbath school. They learned it in worship. They talk about it in their homes. They know this. These are the first three words of the Bible. They're the first three words of the creation story. And that's exactly where John wants to take our minds and imaginations.

As he begins the story of Jesus, he takes us back to the creation story. Only he adds a twist. He says, "yes, in the beginning was the word." And everyone would have gasped when they heard that because they know John is changing the most important and most familiar story in the Bible. And as he proceeds over these next few verses, John is using really the smallest, simplest Greek words. I was really not a Greek scholar, but I took a bunch of Greek classes in college and in seminary. And John would always be the first thing we would translate because it was the simplest, easiest, shortest little words compared to other parts of the New Testament. And in these teeny, tiny, little bite-size words, John completely rewires our brains. It changes the way we have always thought about God, about creation, and about the story that we're living in. And the first thing that he says was, "in the beginning was the word."

Now, on the one hand, if you know the creation story from Genesis 1-2, you know that the word plays a really central part in that story because how does God create everything? He creates by speaking! "And God said, 'let there be light,' and there was light." And you keep walking through Genesis 1 and God speaks everything into existence out of nothing. We know that the word is so important in God's creation. And John says that's exactly right. But what I'm telling you is that all along the word of God has been a person. As we have heard the creation story and thought about how God made everything, we've always thought that God acted alone. But I'm telling you, he had an accomplice in creation. Someone Else (capital S capital E) was there with him the whole time. And that person was the word. Theologians call this the preexistence of Jesus. He was there before anything else was there.

But John's not done. He keeps going. John says in the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. Now that little bitty word "with," it's describing two people who are face to face with one another. Literally, the word was toward God, looking at God. It's describing two people in fellowship or in relationship.

We had a big family funeral earlier in the week for my grandmother's last living sibling. I drove to Germantown and we went to the funeral. I met my mom and dad there. Then afterwards, there was a little family reception at the house of my great uncle. It was filled with so many people who I didn't really know that my dad and I kind of slipped off and found a quiet little room with our plate of barbecue. We just sat down together at that little table. If you had passed by that room, you would have seen my dad and me face to face just having a conversation, sharing fellowship, sharing in a relationship together. That's the description that John is giving us of the word and God before anything else existed.

Now, it's kind of amazing that that the word would be toward God, face to face with God, because John's gonna go on to say in John 1 that no one has ever seen God. If you know the story of the Bible, you know nobody gets face time with God. Nobody goes face to face with the eternal creator. You remember how Moses got to glimpse the wake of God's glory. He was going around Mount Sinai. That experience was so overpowering that he had to wear a veil maybe for the rest of his life because it transformed his countenance. It made him radioactive. Nobody could look on Moses because he had seen the trailing wake of God's glory. Maybe this is on some of our levels. Have you seen The Raiders of the Lost Ark? What happens when they peek into that box? Their faces melt off, right? Nobody can look upon God face to face. And yet, John says the word for all eternity was face to face with God in fellowship, in relationship, in companionship.

Now, what he's going to proceed to tell us is that this relationship is not just two friends having a conversation. This is a beloved son and his father. And for all eternity, the son has been at the father's side. Jesus will tell us more about this in John 17, the high priestly prayer. He will say, "Father, my desire is that they see me in my glory that you gave to me because you loved me before the foundation of the world." Jesus, the word, is sharing the glory of God, receiving the love of the father face to face with one another. What John wants you to understand is that we should not think of God the creator as dwelling in lonely, cold, isolation in the universe. No, for all eternity, God has been in fellowship, in communion, with the word, which leads to the last thing John tells us about this communion.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Now this is the most shocking part of all because if there's one thing that set the Jewish people and their beliefs apart from everyone else in the world, it was their rock solid belief that there is one creator God. Every other people in the world has this pantheon of gods, all these little territorial deities. You've got the God of the river, the God of the Sun, the God that you pray to for fertility. You've got all these different little gods competing and squabbling with each other.

The Jewish people are different. They go back to that creation story, back to Genesis 1. They know the truth that there is one God. Their confession of faith every time they get together is from Deuteronomy 6, the Shema. "Hear o Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength." There's one God. And so if there is one thing that an Israelite would go to the wall over, it's monotheism. We've only got one God. Isaiah 42:8, "I am Yahweh. That is my name, my glory. I give to no other nor my praise to any carved idols." There is only one God. Are you with me on that?

When John starts talking about this word, who was in the beginning and was with God in some kind of fellowship, some kind of community, our first instinct with that Old Testament background is that he must be some kind of created being. Maybe he's the highest created being, maybe he's the first created being, maybe he's the most glorious, maybe he's like the chief angel over all the angels, but he certainly wouldn't be God.

This idea of the word being less than God is exactly what Jehovah's Witnesses teach today about Jesus. It's actually a call back to a really old heresy, a false teaching in church history called "Arianism." I'll have to tell you a great story one day about how Saint Nicholas slapped the taste out of Arias' mouth for saying that Jesus wasn't fully God at the Council of Nicaea, but that's a story for a different day. This is unfortunately a common teaching, that Jesus is somehow above everything else, but he's not the same as God, he's not equal with God. John won't allow that. He says, "no, I'm telling you, hold on tight because this blew my doors off too when I was following Jesus in his earthly ministry, but this one who was in the beginning with God, he also is God. What I'm telling you, John says, is that when you read your old Testament, all those stories about Yahweh who saved Israel with his mighty, right hand, who led them through the wilderness, who fed them with Manna, who raised up David, Yahweh, is an eternal Trinity. He is one God existing in three persons.

Jonathan Edwards called it a sweet and holy society, a father, a son, and a holy spirit. One God existing in three persons, co-equal, co-eternal, co-glorious. And Jesus is the word. He is the second person of the Trinity. Now, is that mysterious? Yes. Is it essential for the Christian faith and for the Christmas story? Yes.

This is how 1 John 4:8 makes sense, you probably memorized it in Sunday School, "God is love." God is love. It doesn't just say that God does love, although that's true, or that God loves the world, although that's true, that God loves you, although that's true too, it says that God is love. That's who He is. If there's one thing that you need to love, it's someone else to give to, to serve, and for all eternity, God has been loving. The father has been pouring out his love on the son, the son has been responding to the love of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is binding them together in perfect love. That's how God is love.

God did not create the world because he was lonely and needed friends. If he needed friends, he could have done a lot better than you and me. God didn't create the world because he needed a bunch of slaves. If he needed people to obey him and do his will, he could have done a lot better than you and me, because the angels obey him a lot better. No, God created not out of loneliness or lack, but out of love. He created out of the overflow of the love of the father, and the son, and the spirit. They wanted to bring more people into this fellowship. It is incredible.

And what John is saying is that Jesus, the baby born in Bethlehem, he is that eternal word. He is that second person of the Trinity, in the beginning, with God, who is God. That's why Jesus is called the word in this passage. When you want to express yourself, when you want to reveal what you're thinking, what you desire, what you're like, what do you do to communicate? You use your words. Some of you are really effective at that. Some of you communicate and express yourself very frequently all throughout the day. We don't have to wonder what you're thinking or what you're all about because you are communicating and expressing it. That's what words do. They express who we are. And that's why Jesus is called the word.

He is God's communication of himself to us. We can't see God. We can't look on his face. We've been watching God reveal himself little by little across the Old Testament like turning up the dimmer switch real slow in a dark room, showing us little by little what's in there. But when he sends Jesus, he sends his full and final word. He flings the lights on full blast and we see who God is. That's why Jesus will say later in John, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." If you want to know what God is like, if you want to know God's heart, if you want to know God's holiness, you look at Jesus. He's the full and final word. The high point of John's gospel is at the very end when Thomas falls down at the feet of the resurrected Christ, and he says, "My Lord and my God." If you want to know how glorious Jesus is, if you want to understand why Christmas is so magnificent, you've got to understand the communion Jesus enjoyed in the Godhead, in the Trinity, for all eternity.

The second one is a lot easier to explain. Second, we need to understand:

John is moving the story forward when he gets to verse 3. He says, "all things were made through him," through the word, "and apart from him was not anything made that was made." We have the Trinity dwelling in perfect love and glory for all eternity. And then one day, if I can use time language, they decide to create the world, to expand this fellowship, and to pour their love out on all these new sons and daughters, and to bring them into the family of God.

In this plan to create, the father is the architect. The father draws up the plans. But the son is the contractor. The son is the one who executes the plan and the will of the father. That's always what the Son does. That's what he does in salvation. It's what he did at creation. And what John wants to make clear to us is that the word made everything. Jesus created everything that there is.

Several weeks ago, we were in Proverbs 8, and we we listened to the person of wisdom talking about the role of wisdom in creation. Wisdom said, "I was there in the beginning when the foundations of the earth were laid. I was like a master builder at God's right hand. We were rejoicing together in all that we were making." John is drawing on that picture now. He is saying the wisdom of God that helped create the world is the eternal Word of God, Jesus himself.

This is so critical for John's Christmas story. He wants us to grasp just how big Jesus is and how central to all of reality he is. Jesus does not live in a little spiritual box in your life that you open up on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Jesus is the creator of the entire universe! The rest of the New Testament heralds this. Hebrews 1:1-3 says, "Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets, but in these last days, he's spoken to us by his son. He is the radiance of God's glory, the perfect imprint of his nature. And he upholds the universe by the word of His power." Right now, our universe is being upheld by the powerful word of Jesus Christ. In Colossians 1. Paul says, "He was before all things, and in him all things hold together." What's holding the universe together? We call it the law of gravity, but that's just what Jesus chooses to use to hold this all together. Jesus holds the universe together, the baby born in Bethlehem.

That verse, Colossians 1:16, is on the cornerstone of a building on the campus of Union University where I was a student. That building was dedicated when Candace and I were there. But that cornerstone with Colossians 1:16 is not on the theology building where you would expect a Bible verse. It's on the science building, because you can't study science unless Jesus, the word, is holding all things together. Everything belongs to him. Everything is for him.

And that's why Jesus is not just concerned with the spiritual part of your life. He's concerned with every part of your life. It's why Jesus can come to us in a book like Proverbs and talk to us about the most ordinary specific practical matters of life like if you should take out a loan or if you should be friends with this person or if you can trust that guy. Jesus knows about all that stuff because he made all that stuff. It all belongs to him. It's his world.

And not only did he make it all, John says, but he gives it all life. He says, "In him was life and the life was the light of men." We got to go to Rocky Mountain National Park over a year ago now. I remember this one gushing waterfall with these huge boulders all around it. I just wanted to keep going further and further up and I kept climbing until Candace told me to stop climbing, because I just wanted to get to that source that's feeding all of these rivers, all these streams further down below. I just wanted to go higher and higher and get to the source. It was like it was drawing me up. John says, "That's who Jesus is. He is the Source, "capital S," of all life. He is life itself. At creation that life is gushing out of him, pouring out of him, taking this inky black nothingness and making our beautiful, lively, vibrant world that we live in. It's all coming from the Word pouring out of his heart.

And then he takes this special attention and this special care with humanity. He says, "his life was the light of men." Do you remember Genesis 1:26 where God makes the statement that really doesn't make sense until you understand the Trinity in the New Testament? "Let us make man in our image after our likeness." Everything else God creates just gets the statement, "And God said, and it was so," "And God said, and it was so," "And God said, and it was so." But when you come to the creation of men and women, God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." There's a special care here.

You move into the next chapter, and in Genesis 2:7, after God forms Adam out of the dust, he comes face to face with him, and God breathes the breath of his life into Adam and then he becomes a living creature. God is animating. God is putting life into his creation, into men and women. John says that was Jesus, that was the Word turning the lights on inside of Adam. It is Jesus Christ who turns the lights on inside of you at the end of that funeral.

The body of my great uncle was in a casket, it was lowered down into the ground, and the episcopal archbishop had this little tube of dust and dirt, and he poured it out in his hand and he spread it on that casket. "From dust you came, and to dust you will return." Because the lights had gone out. The reason the lights are on inside of you right now is because the word turned them on. Jesus gives physical life to you.

I hope by now you're beginning to see why Christmas is so breathtaking to John. It's because at Christmas the creator entered his creation. The eternal Word took on flesh and stepped into time. The life giver was born as a baby. The one who controls all things and upholds all things became this small, fragile, little infant. Why would he do that?

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." Now, John really likes double meanings. He likes to use phrases that mean two things at one time. This is the first of many times that he does that in the gospel. At first, John seems to still be talking about creation and what Jesus did when he created the world and created Adam because the light shines in the darkness. "Let there be light and there was light." That makes sense. But he also has this odd note of conflict  in verse five. I don't know if you picked up on that. The light shines out into the darkness, and the darkness fights back. The darkness resists the light. It tries to overcome the light, and to snuff out the light. I don't remember reading about any of that in Genesis 1, but that's because John is not just talking about creation anymore. He's now moving into the Christmas story. He's talking about that world that the Word made, so beautiful, so full of life, so full of the light of God. It didn't stay that way, did it? The world that we live in, these men who had the light of God inside of them turned away from God, and darkness fell on men and women and on our world, spiritual darkness, moral darkness, the darkness of deception, believing the lies of the evil one instead of the truth of God, the darkness of evil, the darkness of death.

This theme of light and darkness is so huge all throughout John's gospel. It's why when Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus to ask him questions, he is real confused and mixed up. Also, when does Nicodemus show up at Jesus' house? At night. At the end of the Gospel in John 13, when Judas goes out to betray Jesus, it says, "And Judas went out, and it was night." It represents this deception and this evil, and that's what has happened in our world, we see it all around us. Do we not? This darkness, this rage and rebellion against the God who gives life and who gives light.

We know it in our own lives too. But at Christmas, the light of life comes back into the world. The one who made it in the beginning re-enters the creation even in its darkness. Jesus will talk about this all the time in the gospels. John 8:12, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life." What could be better news than that in our dark world the light came back into the world? I mean, this is the stuff that Christmas carols are made of. "A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices." We're stumbling around, we're falling, we're in danger, we're in trouble, and now the light comes to show us the way out.

Surely the world rises up and rejoices at the coming of the light, right? Isn't that what happens when the light dawns? No, we know better than that. The dark world doesn't rejoice over the light like we expect. Instead, the darkness resists the light. Do you remember in A Christmas Carol when that ghost of Christmas past is showing Scrooge his history and all the ways that he's turned away from the people who love him, how he's chosen the love of money over the love of people, how his soul has just shriveled and hardened over the years, and he's just having to get a good cold look at himself like Proverbs these last few weeks. You know what I'm saying? He's getting a good cold look at himself and the choices he's made that have led to where he's at. And Scrooge finds it so unbearable that this ghost of Christmas Past is wearing some kind of little hat and he's just glowing with light. Scrooge pulls that hat down over that light beaming from the ghost of Christmas Past because he can't bear to see what he's showing him about himself. He tries to snuff out the light instead of facing it. And that is straight out of the gospel of John, because John says we're all like that. That's just how the world is.

Even though it is so dark, even though the best thing that could ever happen to it is for the light of life to shine on it again, we hate the light. We can't bear to see it. John 3:19 says, "This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil." We don't want to be exposed. We don't want to let control go. And so right from the beginning of the Christmas story, we see the dark fighting back against the light. It's there in Herod trying to kill Jesus as a baby. It's there in Bethlehem, a city totally uninterested that the savior of the world has come and rejecting him. It continues all throughout the gospel story as Jesus' light shines everywhere he goes. Yes, there are some who receive him and rejoice in him. But many people snarl and gnash their teeth and pick up stones to kill him. John 1:11 says, "He came to his own people and his own people did not receive him." This is the light of the world, and they don't want anything to do with him, until finally you get to the end of the book and the whole dark world seems to rise up to extinguish the light of life. They lie about him, they betray him, they nail him to a cross, and they lay him in a tomb. They have finally snuffed out the light of life there. "We did it. We don't have to listen to him. We don't have to see ourselves. We don't have to have him leading us back to God, the source of life." Darkness is so deep at the end of John 19.

But in the beginning of John 20, John tells us many times that it is the first day of the week. What story does that remind you of? Genesis 1. They get to the tomb so early that it is still dark outside. But as the dawn slowly emerges, we see that that tomb that had extinguished the light, it's empty. And as that story continues of that first Easter, we realize that John has written this entire story as a new creation story, because the light that originally gave life to all people has come back into the dark world to give eternal life. That's why when Mary sees Jesus in the graveyard on Easter Sunday morning, she thinks that he's the gardener, taking us back to Eden. It's why later on that first Easter night, Jesus comes before his 11 believing disciples and what does he do? Do you remember? He breathes on them. He says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." This is just like when God came face to face with Adam and breathed the breath of life into him. In other words, God is starting this story all over again. God is breaking into the darkness with his light. And life starts rushing into this world of death. That's what verse 5 is talking about. "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it." And that's where you and I get pulled into the story.

The big point of this gospel is that you would see the glory of Jesus and you would see that his glory is for you. John tells us in John 20:30-31, "I wrote these things down, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing in him you would find life in his name." The whole purpose of the Christmas story is that you would come to know the eternal Word of God who took on flesh to rescue you from your darkness and from your sin. No matter how dark it is in your heart, no matter what ugly details are a part of your origin story, Jesus, the light, has seen it all. He knows it all. He knows it better than you know it. And he's not afraid to shine his light in you and on you to make a new creation out of you, to bring order out of the chaos of your life apart from God, to bring life where there is only death and hopelessness in you. It's why Jesus talks about life on every page of the gospel. He says, "the thief (the devil) comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I came that you may have life, and that abundantly." "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

There's a reason why so many of us are stumbling around like the walking dead. It's because the further you get away from Jesus, the further you get away from life. We're searching so hard and working so hard to be alive, to find something that will make us feel alive. But the further we get from Jesus, the further into death we go. And there's a reason why some of us who may have absolutely everything taken away from us, who may even be on the brink of physical death, yet because we know Jesus Christ, we are brimming with life. It's because the closer you get to Jesus, the closer you get into eternal, abundant life.

So do you believe in Jesus? Have you entered into this vast glorious Christmas story? God is making all things new through the Word who made it in the beginning. And he wants you to be a part of that. Let's worship Jesus as he deserves. Let's pray.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church