Scripture: John 1:15-18
Date: May 15, 2011
Speaker: Sean Higgins
Out of all God’s attributes, which one causes us to think most highly of His glory? That’s a difficult question to answer for a few reasons, including the truth that every one of God’s attributes is infinitely excellent by itself. His power is infinitely glorious. His holiness is limitlessly worthy. His knowledge, His omnipresence, His faithfulness, any one of them, could occupy our attention for eternity and our affections would still not ever rise to a level fully commensurate. That one God holds all these attributes together perfectly is almost unfair for sake of our worship. At best we only scratch the surface and, as soon as we sing through one verse, we’re another thousand verses behind.
No god has glory like our God. No glory in the galaxy compares to the glory of God.
So how is God communicating Himself to us, knowing, as He does, our limited capacity? What does He reveal first? Most? What is most dear to His own heart?
The clear, though surprising and often unseen, answer is that God is most glorious because of His grace. Graciousness is the thing He loves to show off, to talk about, to share. His work is full of grace, and His Son embodied it. Grace is what makes our God most glorious; it’s His best side, so to speak. Rarely do we grasp the fulness of glory that God displays, in particular, His glorious grace embodied in Jesus Christ.
We considered from John 1:14 that the incarnation of the Logos did not make it so that God could talk about His glorious grace in person. The Logos becoming flesh, the incarnation itself, is glorious grace. The Logos embodied glory, “we saw his glory,” and that glory has all grace as He condescended to His creation, related to men, gave Himself, and saved the undeserving.
Verse 14 summarizes God, glory, and grace on display in the incarnation while the rest of the paragraph supports the point. An outline of the paragraph might look like this:
We already worked through most of the point of the paragraph last time because the first sentence is the key sentence.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, (verse 14a)
As God lowered Himself by becoming a man, by living with men, by identifying with them and serving them and even sacrificing Himself for them, we see what He wants us to see about His glory.
and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (verse 14b)
True glory doesn’t take, it gives. True glory doesn’t distance itself, it associates with. True, divine, eternal glory features grace. The Word made flesh is the poster Person for glory exhibited.
But why don’t more men see Him, see this? Why did so many reject this Jesus? For that matter, how do any men come to understand God’s glory and His grace? The apostle John will help explain that in verses 16-18.
First, in verse 15, he adds a parenthetical comment about John the Baptist.
(John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’“) (verse 15)
The apostle introduced us to the Baptist in verses 6-8 and will return to the Baptist’s ministry in verse 19. Verse 15 interrupts this paragraph almost as if the apostle John knows how crazy the incarnation sounds, so he pauses to acknowledge, “Yes, I’m still talking about the same person. When I said John (the Baptist) was a witness to the Logos, I was serious. John the Baptist also knew the Logos as a man. We’re both on the same page.”
The particular emphasis relates to the Baptist’s knowing of his place. Typically in the first century, and very much unlike today, people valued what was old(er) rather than what was fresh. They gave precedence to the guy who came first, not the young upstart. The Baptist acknowledged that even though he was six (whole) months older than Jesus (see Luke 1:24, 26), and even though he began his public ministry prior to Jesus beginning His, Jesus was greater. “He ranks before me,” He has preeminence, and the reason is because “he was before me,” a recognition of Jesus as the preexistent One, which is really quite a prophetic statement.
After the parenthesis, the apostle returns to his point about glory being exhibited, glory made visible in the grace of the Logos. Now he explains how it was visible.
Why/how glory was seen? There are two steps of explanation, or, an explanation with its own explanation.
And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (verses 16-17)
Unfortunately, the ESV blows it here. I figure the reason is because we’re not good readers, so it would be easier for us to have things broken into smaller chunks. With the parenthesis in verse 15, it might confuse us to start verse 16 the wrong way. And while the NAS is a better translation, who wants to start a sentence with “For”?
The Greek word that begins verse 16 is ὅτι (hoti), a conjunction that introduces explanatory or causal clauses, “because” or “since” or “for,” the same word that starts verse 17 as well. Again, the only reason I can figure that the ESV (and others) start with “And” is to make it a smoother read. But it misses a key point. Try reading it like this:
We beheld His glory—a glory full of grace,