John 1 v 18 final
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The document discusses how no one has ever seen God directly, but that God came in the form of his Son Jesus to reveal himself to humanity. It explores passages from the Old Testament where some saw visions of God but still did not see his full nature. The key point is that through Jesus, who has the closest relationship with the Father, God made himself fully known in a personal way so that people could understand him.
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John 1 v 18 final
- 1. Welcome to Grace - and a Happy New Year! Croeso I Gras - Blwyddyn Newydd Dda I chi gyd!
- 2. John 1:18 • Introduction – Christmas – what WAS that about?! “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”
- 3. John 1:18 • Introduction – Christmas – what WAS that about?! – Knowing God
- 4. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God
- 5. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God – A problem for those without faith
- 6. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God – A problem for those without faith – What about Old Testament ‘Theophanies’?
- 7. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God – A problem for those without faith – What about Old Testament ‘Theophanies’? • Exodus 33-34 … Moses
- 8. Exodus 33 “18 Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ 19 And the LORD said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ 21 Then the LORD said, ‘There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.’
- 9. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God – A problem for those without faith – What about Old Testament ‘Theophanies’? • Exodus 33-34 … Moses • Isaiah 6
- 10. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God – A problem for those without faith – What about Old Testament ‘Theophanies’? • Exodus 33-34 … Moses • Isaiah 6 “5 ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.’”
- 11. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came and explained μονογενὴς θεὸς ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
- 12. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came and explained – God the One and Only μονογενὴς θεὸς
- 13. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came and explained – God the One and Only – The Son μονογενὴς
- 14. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came and explained – God the One and Only – The Son – Closest fellowship with the Father ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς
- 15. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came and explained • And made God known ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
- 16. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known – Personal – HE came to US
- 17. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known – Personal – HE came to US – Revealing
- 18. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known – Personal – HE came to US – Revealing – Revealing WHAT of Him?
- 19. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known – Personal – HE came to US – Revealing – Revealing WHAT of Him? • Not what was expected • Not what was wanted
- 20. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known – Personal – HE came to US – Revealing – Revealing WHAT of Him? • Not what was expected • Not what was wanted • Revealing what made sense of the rest of it!
- 21. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known • Conclusion
- 22. John 1:18 • Introduction • No one has ever seen God • Then God came • And made God known • Conclusion “This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.” 1 John 4:9
Editor's Notes
- ‘Quiet.’ Which all too often means: ‘Disappointing!’ Words that really shouldn’t be but all too often ARE associated with Christmas. So what WAS it all about? Does it matter? John 1:18 gives us a pretty good answer to that one … What it celebrates – admittedly all too often in the wrong way at the wrong time of year – is Jesus coming to earth in order to make God … and all that He is about … to be known. We’re looking at John 1:18 on this and yes it DOES matter because today, I think we’re going to be dealing with the source of one of the biggest problems we encounter with living the Christian life and probably with living life at all. We’re dealing with the big thing the lack of which saps the life out of us, and the thing without which our crises (too) become the most unreachable of challenges. We’re dealing with how we know God.
- Here’s the issue at the heart of most of the problems that anyone has living the Christian life. It’s not so much the understanding of what’s going on. Forgive me, but it’s usually not so much the difficulty of our circumstances themselves. It’s usually much more the difficulty that we cannot say we’ve found Him, known Him, WALKED with Him as we encounter our circumstances … it would be different if we were constantly conscious of Him THERE with us. So there’s where we need to be going. There are several distinct propositions in this verse …
- The noun ‘God’ here has no article in the Greek text, which indicates that the author is presenting God in His nature or being … rather than as a person. ‘Deity’ might be a better translation. The meaning here is that no human being has ever seen the essence of deity.
- Now, this invisibility of essential Deity is a problem for those who do not believe … If a person does not perceive spiritual truth on account of being spiritually blind then they are still in the position of the person whose natural vision cannot see by the light of the x-ray machine. The materialist’s criteria for the assessment of reality relate to stuff you can see, smell, touch, throw a brick at … you know? But you can’t SEE God … so He lives outside the things the materialist is prepared to acknowledge as being real. That’s an absolute problem for MANY without faith.
- But it’s a problem for some believers and theologians too … because there are times in the OT when people SEEM to, and that’s important because they don’t SEE God in the sense intended here.
- This incident in the OT where Moses was allowed to hide away in the cleft of the rock as God’s Glory passed by has just been alluded to in John 1:14 … “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” But MOSES DIDN’T …
- Bruce “We should perhaps say … that Moses saw, so to speak, the afterglow of the divine glory.’ In that diminished sense God speaks with Moses ‘face to face’ (but without the face) and Moses ‘sees the form of the Lord’ (Numbers 12:8)
- In Isaiah 6, the prophet cries out in anguish at the thought that his eyes have seen God …
- In Isaiah 6, the prophet cries out in anguish at the thought that his eyes have seen God … But what had Isaiah ACTUALLY seen? Not a lot. It was just the hem of God’s robe that filled the Temple, around which the Heavenly creatures then flew! Carson: “The fact remains that the consistent Old Testament assumption is that God cannot be seen, or, more precisely, that for a sinful human being to see Him would bring death (Ex. 33:20; Dt. 4:12; Ps. 97:2). Apparent exceptions are always qualified in some way.” But then John – earth-shatteringly – says … the Unique and the Beloved One, Himself God, has expounded God and made Him known to us. What it means is that the beloved Son, the Word made flesh (v. 14) Himself fully God whilst being the One Who is ‘at the Father’s side’, has broken the barrier that made it impossible (even DANGEROUS) for human beings to see God, and by Christ’s coming has made Him known.
- How do we KNOW that God’s come?! Contemporary accounts Gospel accounts. But that’s not John’s primary concern … he is concerned with Who the Jesus Who came is because John has such good evidence that He did! Who is this One … the Word?
- In A Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell & Scott the following main definition is given: A. the only member of a kin or kind: hence, generally, only, single, "child" (pais, παῖς) Hesiod, Works and Days 376; Herodotus Histories 7.221; cf. Gospel of John 1.14;Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 32.1; Hesiod Theogony, concerning Hecate.2. unique, of (to on, τὸ ὄν), Parmenides 8.4; “εἷς ὅδε μ. οὐρανὸς γεγονώς” Plato Timaeus.31b, cf. Proclus Institutio Theologica 22; “θεὸς ὁ μ.” Friedrich Preisigke's Sammelbuch4324.15.[6] There have been exhaustive debates about what is the right text and what the correct text should be. The external evidence strongly supports μονογενὴς θεός … the only begotten God rather than the suggested ‘the only begotten Son’. Internally, although υἱός fits the immediate context more readily, θεός is much more difficult. As well, θεός also explains the origin of the other reading (υἱός), because it is difficult to see why a scribe who found υἱός in the text he was copying would alter it to θεός. Scribes would naturally change the wording to υἱός however, since μονογενὴς υἱός is a uniquely Johannine christological title (cf. John 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9). But θεός as the older and more difficult reading is preferred. As for translation, it makes the most sense to see the word θεός as in apposition to μονογενής, and the participle ὁ ὤν as in apposition to θεός, giving in effect three descriptions of Jesus rather than only two. God the One and Only The only begotten of the Father The One in closest fellowship with the Father.
- The NIV’s ‘Who is at the Father’s side’ might more literally be rendered ‘Who is in the bosom of the Father’. You get a similar expression used to describe Lazarus in the parable as being ‘in Abraham’s bosom’ (Lk. 16:22-23) or to describe the disciple John leaning on Jesus’s bosom at the Last Supper … The idea is of close proximity as you lie at table together. It becomes a metaphor that describes the closest of table fellowship … intimacy, mutual love and knowledge of one another. It is this intimacy that enables Jesus to make God known … but we are coming to that.
- It is from this Greek word (here ἐξηγήσατο) that we derive our term ‘exegesis’ … the unpacking and explaining of what lies in a text. Elsewhere in the NT the word means ‘to tell the story’ or ‘to narrate’ (so Lk. 24:35, Acts 10:8; 15:12, 14; 21:19). J.P. Louw suggests you could say that Jesus is the narration of God.
- In knowing Creator we understand whatever else has been made. D.T. Project – James Dyson studied, not vacuum cleaners!
- It’s that personal aspect of discovery and learning Him that is CRITICAL. You get to know God in Him through FOLLOWING Him. The challenge for us as a church through the things we have known this year and anticipate for next year is to know Him through following Him and in doing so, ourselves, to follow Him in making God known.
- The emphasis of the Prologue then is on the revelation of the Word as the ultimate disclosure of God Himself. The being and nature of God – which cannot be perceived directly from ordinary senses – has been adequately presented to us by the Incarnation … and John gives us the record of the revelation of this Jesus Who reveals God to us. If you want to know Who God is – more than that if you want to know HIM – John’s Gospel is the place to read about Him and to meet with Him. It’s that personal aspect of discovery and learning Him that is CRITICAL. You get to know God in Him through FOLLOWING Him. The life and words of Jesus are more than an announcement. They are an explanation. More than that they make an introduction to Someone. The challenge for us as a church through the things we have known this year and anticipate for next year is to know Him through following Him and in doing so, ourselves, to follow Him in making God known.