“No one has seen God at any time.
The only begotten Son,
who is in the bosom of the Father.
He has declared Him”
(John 1:18)
I love this verse, because in this verse, John says some unprecedented things about Jesus. As we saw at the beginning of the week, John takes us all the way back to the beginning. He reminds us of God’s original design and desire to experience relationship and intimate communion with humanity. As our minds track back to what was in the beginning, we are reminded of what happened to that divine plan and the consequence of humanities’ disobedience. We lost connection with God as spiritual death occurred. God, at that point ultimately became unknowable, at least in the truest and deepest sense. No man had seen God at any time. Why? As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:13, humanity after the fall no longer possessed the ability and capacity to receive and understand the things of the spirit. This is where John introduces another aspect of who Jesus is. He is the one, the only one who has seen God at any time. Furthermore, John says that Jesus not only has seen God, but He has “declared Him to us” (1:18).
In our Western Culture, the word “declare” doesn’t pack much punch. It seems that everybody is declaring something, most of which we pay little or no attention to what’s being declared. The word typically denotes nothing more than someone talking about something with some minimal description. Therefore, it’s unfortunate that this is the English word used in the translation of verse eighteen. In actuality, this is a spellbinding word in the Greek and when it is applied to Jesus as John does, it becomes mesmerizing. It’s the Greek word exegeomai, we get the word exegete from it. I’m sure that gave you goose bumps. Okay, perhaps, not yet. We would also use this word in the context of someone doing an exegetical teaching of a particular book of the Bible. In short, if someone were to do so, they would take a particular book of the Bible and proceed to draw out of it and bring out of it everything that was originally intended and hoped for in the heart of the author. There would be a thorough discourse of the culture, history, geography, and social allusions of the time. To do an exegetical, study means to look into any and everything that could provide insight and greater understanding to what the text actually meant to the first hearers, as well as to us today. In addition to the externals of the text, one would then turn their attention to the structure of the text, the words used, the words not used, the words that could’ve been used, all of this and more helps gain a fuller understanding of what the author was originally communicating. After all that has been blown out on the table, one begins to pull all of those pieces back together to show forth the fullness of the text.
It can be a bit like endeavoring to put a thousand piece puzzle together. The first thing you do, is scatter all the pieces on the table, with only a few of them providing a clear enough picture to know where they go. Yet, as the picture becomes clearer, the pieces begin to appear and as more pieces begin to appear, the picture becomes clearer still. The corners and the borders provide additional clarity as to what this puzzle will at some point be.
John has a picture in mind of who Jesus is, and he desperately wants us to see it. John said, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). Jesus is full of grace and truth, He is from God, He is God, and now He’s come in the flesh to us and began to “declare Him” to us. What John is literally saying is this: No one has seen God, since the fall of humanity, indeed no one could. With the first Adam, life- spiritual and eternal life found in communion with God was lost, but here One has appeared to us and He possesses it once more. Not only that, but He is giving us an exegetical disclosure of who God is to us. He is breaking the infinite God down bit by bit, showing us, teaching us, demonstrating to us the mind, the heart, the core of Who God is. For John, everything Jesus did was indicative of who the Father was, this is why in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I do nothing unless I see the Father do it, and the Son does it in like manner” (5:19).
Jesus is the picture of Who God is, He’s the picture on the box of the thousand piece puzzle. In chapter one, John tries to lay out some of the corner pieces that are imperative to our seeing Jesus. The corner pieces are the elements that Jesus possesses that have been beyond the reach of fallen humanity: the eternal life (1:4), the truth (1:14), the Logos-Word – which entails an accurate understanding and perspective of who God is (1:1), and the Spirit residing within (1:33 and 20:22). Everything John then proceeds to tell us, is in effect filling in the borders and interior of Who Jesus is and what He came to do. Each piece is “declaring” to us another aspect of the Father. This is where John starts his Gospel, however he discovers a slight problem as he’s writing, there’s not enough room on the table to put the puzzle together, and what he thought was a thousand piece puzzle has turned out to be at least ten million. He discovers, that he’s going to be unable to complete the puzzle in this Gospel writing, actually he’s pretty sure that he’ll never finish it. He simply closes the Gospel by saying,
“And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one,
I suppose that even the world (cosmos)
itself could not contain the books
(John 21:25)
Portraits of Jesus We’ve said today that John is laying the pieces to a puzzle out on the table and then he begins to fit some pieces together. As you read through John, see what pieces you can begin to identify and how the fit together.
Can you recognize any themes (parts of the puzzle) that John starts working with and putting together, but then turns his attention to another theme, only to later to come back to the first, and so on…?
Meditate on John’s closing sentence.
“And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one,
I suppose that even the world (cosmos)
itself could not contain the books
(John 21:25)
Perhaps Jesus is bigger than we’ve made Him to be… Pray and ask God to begin to show you how Jesus truly is the one that “holds all things together.”
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