John 1:1-18 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

⁹ The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. ¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (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.’ ”) ¹⁶ For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome back to the Gospel of John. Last week I gave you an introduction to the whole of the Gospel. In it, I mentioned that in the most basic terms, there are four parts to John: An introduction (1:1-18), a longer section on Jesus’ teaching and ministry (1:19-12:50, the Book of Signs), a longer section on the last few days of Jesus’ life (13-20, The Book of Glory), and a conclusion (21). This week is a type of introduction to the introduction.

My simple, but lofty aim is to help you all appreciate more fully John’s central claim that Jesus is the Christ, in order that you would more fully live in light of that glorious, eternal, guiding and life-giving reality. To do so, this sermon has four parts. First, I want to simply present a number of the Old Testament passages in which the Christ was promised and described (Christ is the Greek/NT translation of the Hebrew/OT word, Messiah). Second, I mean to revisit and reiterate John’s claim that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of those passages. Third, I’ll help you to see how John’s introduction, our passage for this morning (1:1-18), relates to all of that. Finally, and most briefly, I intend to give you a few glimpses into how the Christ-promises of John 1:1-18 are demonstrated and proven in throughout the rest of the Gospel.

Let’s pray that God would show us the glory of Jesus Christ and transform every fiber of our being in light of it.

OT PROMISES AND DESCRIPTIONS OF A FUTURE CHRIST

By some accounts, there are nearly 600 OT references to the Christ. And as I mentioned in the introduction, the first part of this sermon is a survey of a number of them. The passages I’m about to share with you offer a number of descriptions of the Christ God promised to send. Some will be familiar from Christmas time, but I specifically chose a number of less familiar ones too, in order to give you a fuller sense of the scope of what the Bible says. My aim is not to do a deep dive into any of them, but to help you appreciate the vast array of Christ-promising OT passages. My hope is that you would be amazed as you consider the glory of the promised Christ.

And my sense is that doing so will require you to imagine yourself in a truly tough spot (maybe really sick or in deep financial trouble or in what seems like a broken relationship), imagine not being able to see any way out of that problem, and then imagine God promising you that someone like the person described in the following passages would come and rescue you. How awesome would that be? Do I dare believe? Oh, if only it were true and he would come quickly!

The very first OT Christ-passage comes almost immediately after the Fall of Adam and Eve. Genesis 3:15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. This is a simple promise that the Christ would be a descendant of Eve and would one day defeat the power of the devil that had just won a tragic battle.

Genesis 49:10 The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.

The Christ would come from the line of Judah and would rule forever.

Numbers 24:17-19 I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near: a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab …¹⁹ And one from Jacob shall exercise dominion and destroy the survivors of cities!”

The Christ will conquer and destroy all His enemies.

Deuteronomy 18:15-18 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— … ¹⁸ I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

The Christ would speak on God’s behalf and with even more authority than Moses.

Job 33:23-28 If there be for him an angel, a mediator, one of the thousand, to declare to man what is right for him, ²⁴ and he is merciful to him, and says, ‘Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom; ²⁵ let his flesh become fresh with youth; let him return to the days of his youthful vigor’; ²⁶ then man prays to God, and he accepts him; he sees his face with a shout of joy, and he restores to man his righteousness. ²⁷ He sings before men and says: ‘I sinned and perverted what was right, and it was not repaid to me. ²⁸ He has redeemed my soul from going down into the pit, and my life shall look upon the light.’

The Christ would be an angel (messenger), a mediator, a ransom, a merciful redeemer, and a restorer of righteousness.

1 Samuel 2:10 The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

The Christ would be anointed and strengthened by God in His kingly rule.

2 Samuel 7:12-13 When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. ¹³ He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

The Christ, the eternal king, would come not only from the tribe of Judah, but also from the line of David.

Psalm 2:7-9 I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. ⁸ Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. ⁹ You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

The Christ would be begotten of God and God would bring everything under subjection to Him.

Psalm 22:16-18 For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet— ¹⁷ I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me; ¹⁸ they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.

The Christ would be pierced and mocked, but not broken.

Psalm 16:10 you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.

The Christ would go to death, but not remain there.

Isaiah 7:14 the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Christ would be born of a virgin.

Micah 5:2 But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.

The Christ would be an ancient ruler from the city of Bethlehem.

Malachi 3:1-2 the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. ² But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.

God would send a messenger to prepare the way of the Christ and the Christ would come with fire.

Isaiah 40:3 A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Again, the way of the Christ would be announced by one set apart by God.

Malachi 4:5-6 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. ⁶ And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

The prophet Elijah would come and bring about a revival of repentance to prepare the way for the Christ.

Zechariah 9:9-10 Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. ¹⁰ I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations; his rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.

The Christ would be king of the whole earth and would bring righteousness, salvation, and peace while humble and mounted on a donkey.

Zechariah 12:10 I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.

The Christ would suffer and die to bring the mercy and grace of God.

Isaiah 53:1-12 he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

³ He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

⁴ Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. ⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. ⁶ All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

⁷ He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. ⁸ By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? ⁹ And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

¹⁰ Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. ¹¹ Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. ¹² Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

There is a lot more that could be said about every one of these verses and the many other OT Christ-passages, but I invite you to truly imagine the hope these promises would bring to a lost and lonely and desperate people. Imagine how wonderful these words must have sounded to all who would dare to believe. They are but a brief sampling in order to help you more fully appreciate the Christ-promises and with that, the next section.

THE OVERALL PURPOSE OF JOHN’S GOSPEL IS TO SHOW THAT JESUS IS THE CHRIST

Once again, the overall purpose of John’s Gospel is to show that Jesus is the Christ promised in all of those passages. As you stand amazed at the promises of the Christ, stand in even greater awe and wonder that all of them were speaking of Jesus! In chapter 20 John tells us directly.

John 20:30-31 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; ³¹ but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God…

It’s hard to put into words just how significant of a claim this is. To even begin to grasp it (as I mentioned earlier), we have to try to put ourselves in the place of Abraham’s children. We have to remember God’s promise of being with them as their God. We have to remember God’s promise to make them into a great nation and provide for them a great land. And within that, we have to try to recall their centuries long history of a roller coaster of high highs and low lows. Remember that the main covenantal promises of God (of countless offspring and fertile land) came first to Abraham. And with that, remember Abraham and his wife Sarah getting older and older without a child. We have to remember miraculous conception God eventually granted to old, barren Sarah. We have to remember the fledgling, wandering family through Abraham’s son, Isaac, and grandson, Jacob. We have to remember the betrayal, imprisonment, and eventual rise to power in Egypt of Jacob’s son, Joseph. We have to remember the slow, but steady increase in number of offspring to the point that they made the greatest power in the land (Egypt) nervous, resulting in a centuries-long enslavement. We have to remember their covenant-defining, spectacular rescue at the hand of God.

We have to remember the giving of the Law, the promises, the sacrificial system, and the feasts. We have to remember the taking of the Promised Land. We have to remember the prophets, judges, and kings who both faithfully and tragically led Israel. We have to remember the pinnacle of Israel in King David and the building of the temple under his son, Solomon. We have to remember the sin-wroght, divided kingdom under Solomon’s sons and the gradual and devastating decline of the nation to the point where God was silent for 400 years.

We need to remember Abraham’s children’s spectacular oscillations between acknowledgment and rejection of God; between obedience and disobedience to God; between faithfulness and faithlessness; between desperation and ecstasy; between God’s blessing and curse; and between their prideful, ridiculous confidence in themselves and a broken, conquered realization of their need for God’s help.

And within all of that, we need to remember that God promised to send One who would fully and finally deliver Israel from her enemies and, more importantly, from herself. That is, we need to remember Israel’s deep, deep longing for the promised Christ to make all things right when it seemed as if all things were wrong.

The claim that John made, therefore, that Jesus was this Christ, the very Son of God, was truly earth-shaking. There was perhaps no bigger claim that John could make about a man. This was the very thing that God’s people had so long, longed for! And to make sure that everyone who read his Gospel knew that he knew how radical of a claim it was, he wrote,

These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

I’ll mention these things over and over because they shape and flavor all of John’s Gospel, and because they ought to shape and flavor all of our lives.

As we work through John, we’ll see that even though Abraham’s children had a spectacularly high understanding of who the Christ would be and what He would accomplish, and that even though they were right to long for His coming, deliverance, and reign, their view wasn’t right in either content or intensity. They missed the true nature of the Christ and how truly awesome He would be. It is for all of these reasons that John began his Gospel by making Christ-claims about Jesus that were even more remarkable than the Israelites were expecting. That’s where we’ll turn now.

THE PURPOSE OF JOHN’S INTRODUCTION WAS TO INTRODUCE JESUS AS THE CHRIST

At the end of his Gospel, John told us why he wrote what he wrote—to prove that Jesus was the Christ. At the very beginning, in the first 18 verses, John described the Christ he wanted his readers to believe in in staggering terms. He certainly claimed some of the OT passages we just read, but he also went even further than all of them. With that, let’s look again at our text and the unfathomable claims it makes about Jesus of Nazareth.

With all the weight of centuries of waiting and expecting and longing for the Christ, John’s Gospel begins…

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Much that John would claim about Jesus as the Christ would fit neatly with the what was described in the OT Christ-passages. Indeed, the idea of the Christ being “with God” in a certain sense, would not have been surprising at all. Likewise, the Christ being linked with the wisdom of God would not have been hard to fathom (Deuteronomy 18:18). However, linking the Christ with the Genesis 1 creation account, along with the idea of the Christ being eternally with God, as God, was something different, altogether. This is hinted at in the Genesis 3 passage we read earlier, but no one would have been prepared for what John wrote. Similarly, the idea of the Christ being the wisdom/knowledge incarnate was not something Abraham’s children would have expected.

To understand this even in a child-like way is to be absolutely awed. It is to find help for every trial and hope for every struggle. Jesus, the Christ, John wrote, was eternally with God, indeed He is God, He is wisdom embodied, and He participated fully in the creation of the world.

⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is more familiar territory. We saw in a number of passages earlier that the Christ would bring life in the way of salvation and redemption. We saw earlier that the Christ would be a guide—a light—to the people of God. We saw earlier that the Christ would be righteous. And we saw earlier that the Christ would be entirely victorious! Jesus was all of this according to John. Jesus is life, He is light, He is victorious, and He is the Christ.

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

Before the Christ would come, John wrote, God would send a messenger to announce His presence (Mal 3:1-2, Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 4:5-6), John the Baptist was that messenger, and Jesus was that Christ.

⁹ The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. ¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

Again, while God would send many people to reflect His light to the world and while the enemy would send many counterfeit lights, Jesus, the Christ, John claimed, was the one true light of God. And yet, as a number of OT Christ passages promised (like Isaiah 53), the light of Jesus would be rejected, even among His own people because they loved the darkness. To those who would receive Jesus as the Christ, however, John taught here that they would be born again of the Spirit as God’s children.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (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.’ ”) ¹⁶ For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

The Christ would be born as a man and would live as a man, but would have a glory, a glory of grace and truth, that was from God. And the Christ alone, being from the Father alone, has seen God and came to make Him known. This is Jesus, Grace Church! He became flesh and dwelt in divine glory among us! He is the only Son of God. He is full of grace and truth. He has seen God because He is God!

The simple point, once again, is that in this introduction (that we’ll look more closely at in the coming weeks), John was making spectacular claims about Jesus—that He was the fulfillment of every OT Christ-promise and more still! He was and is the hope of the nations and the hope of you and I!

CONCLUSION – THE REST OF JOHN’S GOSPEL WAS TO DEMONSTRATE AND DEFEND THAT CLAIM

As I’ve tried to make clear, in the first 18 verses of his Gospel, John wanted to put all his cards on the table. He claimed all of the OT Christ-promises for Jesus and even expanded on them. It’s one thing to make claims, however, and it’s another to back them up. The rest of John’s gospel was meant to back them up. The stories about and the teachings of Jesus that John recounts in his Gospel are all meant to demonstrate and defend the spectacular claims he makes in the introduction.

The main takeaway for all of us is to recognize afresh that more than anything else, we need Jesus. More than anything else, Jesus is our help and hope and healing. More than anything else, Jesus is truth and life. More than anything else, Jesus is our guide and our way. And all of this comes—not through our own good works or righteousness, but—through God’s mercy and grace to all who will receive him, who will believe on His name. Would you do that today? Would you receive Jesus Christ and call on His name, that all of the promised blessings of the Christ would be yours forever!