Bible Text: John 1:1-18 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard
Today we rejoice because the Lord is gracious. Indeed, the Lord has always been gracious. It is His nature and character to be gracious, as He declared to Moses: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6). The Old Testament is full of examples of the Lord’s grace. In the beginning the Lord created man, and when we didn’t even exist to merit anything from Him, He caused us to exist. When Adam and Eve sinned the Lord spoke the Gospel to them, killed an animal, made garments of skins for them, and covered their shame. When our father Abraham was worshiping idols in Haran, the Lord called him, graciously took him as His own, and made him great promises. When Abraham’s descendants were slaves in the land of Egypt, the Lord redeemed them with a mighty hand and outstretched arm and accomplished a great salvation. He said, “I will take you as My people, and I will be your God” (Ex. 6:7). He is holy, and His people are sinners, and His presence among us could easily have ended in our death and destruction. Yet the Lord is gracious, and He instituted a way to dwell favorably in the midst of Israel, namely, by the tabernacle. Today’s Old Testament reading told how Moses set up the tabernacle, and how the glory of the Lord filled it, and how the Lord dwelt among His people to be gracious to them and to forgive their sins. The whole history of the Old Testament is the history of God’s grace.
Yet the Old Testament foretold more grace and greater grace. When the Lord spoke the Gospel to Adam and Eve, He cursed the serpent, saying, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). In the Old Testament, the Seed of the woman was yet to come. When the Lord brought the sons of Israel out of Egypt to be their God, they could not look on Him and live. You heard how Moses was not able to enter the tabernacle of meeting because the cloud settled on it. The Old Testament is a history of grace, but it was a grace that anticipated an even better grace.
Our Gospel reading for today takes us back to the beginning with an emphasis on the Son of God existing from eternity and ever being our life: “In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God… In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (Jn.1:1, 4). Even before creating man, the Son of God already had His mind on the greatest grace, on His Incarnation, on His atoning death, and all the grace that the Lord showed in the Old Testament would be like a prelude to this supreme grace. Jesus is called in Scripture, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). This title shows that His Incarnation, suffering, and death mark everything He does, and have from the very beginning. We do well to read the Old Testament with our eyes on the Incarnation of the Son of God, because that’s what His eyes looked toward as well.
As the Son of God graciously formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, He already saw the day when He would become a man like the man He was forming, the day when He would breathe a second breath of life, His last breath on the cross, and revive our dust.
As the eternal Son of God cursed the serpent, He looked forward to the time when He would become the Seed of the woman, when He would bring His human foot crashing down on the devil’s open mouth, and would break the teeth of him who had brought woe on mankind, and would bleed God’s blood to cover man’s sin.
When the Son of God called Abraham to leave his country and his father’s house, He saw the day coming, and He welcomed it with joy, when He would leave heaven and His Father’s house and receive the nations as His inheritance and the ends of the earth for His possession (Ps. 2:8), when He who was begotten of the Father from eternity would become in time the Offspring of Abraham according to the flesh.
When the Son of God spoke to Moses, saying that He would redeem Israel with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, He knew the fullness of time would come when He would have a human hand, not mighty in appearance, but mighty because it would be God’s hand, when He would have an outstretched arm, pictured by Moses’ arm holding the staff over the Red Sea. But the Lord’s outstretched arm would accomplish a far greater grace and salvation, embracing His staff of the cross, stretched out to receive a nail, to be pierced, to shed divine blood, to save his people not from pharaoh, but from the devil, not from Egypt, but from hell, not from earthly slavery, but from their sins and eternal death.
When the Son of God had brought Israel to Mount Sinai and made known the will of God by giving the Ten Commandments, He pictured a day when He would be born of a woman, born under that Law, to redeem those who were under the Law (Gal. 4:4-5) by bearing in His human body the sins of men who had broken the Law. He would suffer stripes on His back and blows on His face and death itself. And He did not shrink from this, but with as much force as He spoke the Law in the hearing of all Israel, with such force did He hasten on toward becoming a man and being numbered among the transgressors. He did not hesitate, because He thought of you, and as each commandment sounded forth, He saw how you would violate it. He saw your idolatry, your false trust, your misplaced hope, your neglect of prayer, your misuse of His name, your mistreatment of His Word, your dishonor toward parents and authorities, your anger toward others, your grudges and bitterness, your lust, your disregard for the possessions of others and your craving to add to your own, your gossip and slander, your discontent and envy and covetousness―the Son of God saw all of it and the great weight of punishment you deserved, and He looked forward to another day of thick darkness when He would take that punishment for you, when He would be held accountable for the whole Law that He had just spoken on Sinai and would free you from condemnation.
When the Son of God gave Moses instructions for the tabernacle, He saw the day when He would say, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2:19), speaking not of the poles and tent coverings of the tabernacle, nor of the stone and gold of the temple, but of His own body, for He Himself would become the physical place of God among men. He would be man and could die, and He would still be God and would rise again, for death has no dominion over God. His glory filled the tabernacle such that Moses couldn’t enter, but the Son of God would be “manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16) so that man could behold Him, and the aged Simeon would take Him in his arms in the midst of the temple, and look on the face of God, and sing, “My eyes have seen Thy salvation,” and Thomas would look on Him in awe and declare, “My Lord and my God!”
The greater grace of the Incarnation was on the mind of the Son of God as He did all these things in the Old Testament. And now the greater grace has come and God is a man. This is what John means in today’s Gospel when he says, “from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16). The Old Testament is about the grace of God, but the New Testament is about greater grace. The Lord has always been gracious, but the Lord has not always been incarnate. This is also the meaning of the words spoken at the wedding in Cana, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!” (Jn. 2:10). Lord, You have always acted with grace toward man, but in these last days You have crowned Your grace by becoming a man.
Now everything that God anticipated and that He taught His people to anticipate has come to pass. The Son of God made a journey farther than Abraham’s, departed from His Father’s house, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. He was born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons (Gal. 4:4-5). He entered His temple, not in unapproachable glory, but as a baby in the arms of His mother, and Simeon saw the truth, that this babe is God in the flesh. He who according to His divinity causes all things to grow and Himself neither increases nor decreases because He is perfect, He according to His human nature did grow and increase in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men (Lk. 2:52).
As a man Jesus hungered and thirsted, slept and sorrowed. As God Jesus forgave sins, commanded the wind and sea, and raised the dead. And these two natures of Christ are not unrelated, like two boards glued together. No, they are united in the person of Jesus, and as He acts according to the properties of His divine nature or human nature, the one person Jesus is the one acting. Jesus slept, and Jesus stilled the storm. Jesus wept, and Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb. And nowhere do we see the unity of the two natures better than at the cross. As man Jesus has acted in our place to fulfill the Law. As man Jesus suffered the punishments that we deserved for our sins against the Law, though He committed no sin. As God Jesus acted as our ransom, for no mere man can ransom another (Ps. 49:7). As God Jesus overcame death and the devil, which is beyond the power of a mere mortal.
Put all of this together and we have the pinnacle of grace: God’s arm is outstretched on the cross and His mighty hand is pierced through with a nail. God’s heel comes down on the serpent’s open mouth, bearing a fatal wound yet causing a more fatal one. God’s blood flows, and while ordinary human blood has no power, by virtue of its union with the divine nature, this blood does have power, as it says in 1 John 1, “the blood of Jesus Christ…cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn. 1:7). God breathed His final breath on the cross, and it was new life for man. The temple was destroyed in the death of Jesus, but He raised it up again on the third day, bursting forth from the tomb, and bursting forth not as a spirit, but as a living man. Jesus has not put aside His human nature, but is to this day the God Man. By our union to Him in Holy Baptism, we can be assured that what has happened to His flesh will happen to ours. As He has risen, we will rise. As He has ascended before His Father, so we will stand body and soul before our Father in heaven. As He lives forever in the flesh, so we will live forever in our flesh.
We are blessed to live in the age when the Lord’s greatest grace has come to pass. “Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Mt. 13:16-17). And your eyes shall see today what your ears have heard, and you will sing with Simeon, “Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” What better way to celebrate Christmas than to receive the Sacrament of the Altar? The very name of this holiday―Christ-mass―comes from the fact that on this day Christians come together for mass, to receive their incarnate Lord in the Sacrament of the Altar. This Sacrament only exists because the Son of God became a man. The only reason a human body and human blood can grant the forgiveness of sins, which is what they do in the Lord’s Supper, is because that human body and human blood are God’s human body and blood. If there were no Incarnation, there would be no Lord’s Supper. But the Son of God has become incarnate and given His life for you, and that’s why Jesus instituted His Holy Supper: to be an everlasting testimony of His Incarnation and the means by which His Church receives all the benefits of His Incarnation. Isaiah foretold this day of grace when he wrote, “And it will be said in that day: ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation’” (Is. 25:9). The Lord has indeed given us grace for grace: in place of His grace in the Old Testament He has given us even greater grace in the New. God is man. Rejoice, partake of His supreme grace, and behold your God. Amen.