John's Witness: The Incarnate Word Dwelt Among Us

Because we are made in the image of God, our original design was to display God's holiness. And because God made people like Himself, people have the ability to be in relationship with God. Being in loving fellowship with God is every person's greatest purpose, every person's greatest good, deepest fulfillment, pleasure, happiness and satisfaction.

So John went on to say that

...The Word became flesh and dwelt among us

Literally, that word “dwelt” means “tabernacled,” which would have made the Jews think immediately of God’s tabernacle in Exodus. During the desert years, the Hebrew people lived in tents, and God had a tent pitched for Himself as well, which would be His home, so He could live among the people.

God’s Shekinah, the pillar of fire and cloud which was the visible aspect of His presence, descended on the tabernacle and tented with the rest of the Hebrews in the desert.

The law was kept and put on display at the gate of God’s tabernacle. It was the place of revelation, where Moses would speak to God face to face, and God would speak to the people.

People came to God’s tent, the tabernacle, to worship Him and at the tabernacle, the sprinkled blood of sacrifices would symbolize God’s forgiveness for their sin. Now Jesus fulfilled all that by taking on a body to tabernacle in with His people

...And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The glory that Moses had asked God to show him, John saw in Jesus.

Jesus was fully man, but He never stopped being God. John the Baptist gave his testimony that even though Jesus had been born six months after the Baptist, and even though Jesus started His ministry after the Baptist had start prophesying in the desert, still

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.'"

Jesus is from eternity.

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The Incarnate Word

To the Greeks Logos was an abstract philosophy, and in fact a heresy had been growing in the church in John’s time that claimed Logos was a spirit that had entered Jesus when He began His ministry and then left Him before the crucifixion.

This heresy was called Docetism, from the Greek word “dokeo” which means “to seem.” It was a form of Gnosticism that said Jesus only seemed to be both man and God.

So John carefully chose his words to dispel any misunderstanding about Who Jesus is

And the Word became flesh [John 1:14a]

In the original Greek text those two words appear side by side, “Logos sarx became,” “The word flesh became.” The word, the creative thought and energy of the universe, became a soft, vulnerable baby. This is called the incarnation:
* the infinite became finite,
* the eternal became conformed to time,
* the invisible became visible,
* the supernatural one chose to reduce Himself to the natural.

He did not cease to be God. He willingly laid aside some of the privileges of glory, but He never gave up His deity. This is the hard part to truly grasp. Jesus is fully God and fully man.

Amazingly, this was what God had in mind from the very beginning. He designed human beings to be the bearer of Himself. Every person has the capacity for God and a hunger for God. God created people in His own image, the image of Jesus, and made us to correspond to Himself, the way Eve was made for Adam. Being made in God's image means that people are made as personal, moral and spiritual beings.

Spiritual
God gave some animals the ability to think and feel in a "soulish" way, as the Bible puts it, but only Adam received God's breath, or "Spirit". When a person is reborn, the Lord fills – totally saturates and permanently alters – believers with His Holy Spirit. People are designed to contain God's Holy Spirit in the most intimate communion possible.

Personality
People have intelligence, the ability to think and to know, to understand ideas -- we have the ability to think God's thoughts after Him, to share in the Mind of Christ.

We also have emotions, specially designed to experience God in a different way than thoughts: adoration of His beauty, reverence towards His holiness, awe at His power and perfection, a response of love to His own loving kindness, compassion and mercy. People have a will – the ability to make choices, to reject or receive the light.

God gave people the gift of language, the ability to communicate with God and to understand His unique revelation of Himself.

Morality
Jesus has always shined the light into darkness, by giving every person the innate ability to tell right from wrong, which is called the conscience. From the beginning God has always given each person a simple test, to teach us how to know, and understand in an experiential way, the difference.

Right is obedience to God's word, and wrong is choosing something apart from God's expressed will.

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