Children, do you know what a biography is? I know some of you do. And some of you may not. A biography is quite simply a record of someone's life. It tells the story of someone's life. And so it tries to come and say, this is why this person matters. This is why you should care about this person. If you read a biography maybe of Abraham Lincoln, you might learn that Abraham Lincoln was an important president. He was the president who led our nation through the Civil War, that he was a president who was instrumental in bringing the end of slavery in our nation. But usually, if it's a normal biography, it will also recount some record of this person's birth and origin. So if you read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, you might learn of where he was born. I think Kentucky. Where he grew up. in various places in Illinois, where he came from, so that you might understand his life in context of where he came from. As we open the Gospel of John, we also see that John gives an account of who Jesus is and where he came from. In fact, I would argue that each gospel in its own way addresses to some extent Christ Jesus' origin. If you are familiar with the gospels of Matthew and Luke, you'll know both of those gospels deal with Jesus' mother, to some extent Jesus' father, Joseph, especially the book of Matthew. And so we get, we see an account of Christ's conception, who his family was, where he was living, things of that nature. But we come to Mark and we come to John and they approach the idea of Christ's beginning a little bit differently. We've already read in the Gospel of John, it opens in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. If you look to the opening of Mark, you will read there the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. And comparing those two verses, I would note two things. One, they both highlight the word beginning in them. This is a start point, a beginning. I don't think that's accidental. I don't even think that the relationship between them is mere coincidence. And we'll talk about that in just a moment. But I also note that both of them highlight in particular the divine origin of Christ Jesus. Both confess and say Christ Jesus is not merely human, but he is divine. Mark saying he is the son of God, which means he has the same nature as God. And John taking that idea and exploring it more deeply. He's the word and he was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Both of these gospels focus us not so much on the human origin of Christ Jesus, but on his divinity, on his divine nature. And so as we open the Gospel of John, we open very simply, seeing that we must believe that Jesus, in the most real and complete sense, you might say even in the most strict philosophical sense, is himself God. so that we confess that Jesus Christ is indeed God, and that if we are to have a gospel that makes any sense, we must confess, as John does, that the word was and is and continues to be God. To return to this idea of beginning, note that John begins in the beginning was the word. And if you know your Old Testament well, you hear in the beginning, and you should be immediately thinking of something. The book that begins exactly the same way in the beginning, Genesis 1, 1. And it might be helpful, you don't have to, but it might be helpful to have a thumb over there, because we are going to compare and think about how the gospel of John opens, similar and in comparison to the book of Genesis. So if you are in Genesis, you will see, in the beginning, God created the heavens and earth. And we read in John 1, 1, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And so both books begin by directing us to the beginning. Why does John, Genesis, we understand Genesis is giving us an account of creation. But why does John want to bring us back to the beginning? Let's think for a moment about what the first several, really the first 11 chapters of Genesis are about. If you don't have some kind of outline of these opening books of chapters of Genesis in your head, it's probably good to come up with something that you can remember, because these chapters are very important. You start with Genesis 1 and 2. What are Genesis 1 and 2 about? Creation, right? How does God create? He creates all things good, right? All things are created good. We come to Genesis 3, and what do we learn? We learn of man's fall. We learn of sin. We learn of the curse. And so we have God making all things good, and we now have man taking what God created good and making it, quite simply, bad. It describes the ways that it is bad. You then get into Genesis 4 and 5, and you get there first the account of Cain and Abel, the account of the first murderer. And you get an account of Cain's children. You begin to get an idea of just how bad sin can be. Cain is a wretched and wicked man, and his children are, if possible, even worse than he is. And then you read Genesis 5, which gives the genealogy of the children of Seth. And yet that genealogy has a painful drumbeat. This man lived so many years and he died. And this man lived so many years and he died. Every single one of them, except Enoch, recounts this man lived so many years and he died. What rules over mankind? Death rules over mankind. And so then we come to God's intervention in this. We learn that man becomes even worse, that The sons of God that is the line of Seth is intermarried with the line of Cain, and they have become wicked and corrupt. So God intervenes by bringing the flood. And we have the account of the flood in Genesis 6 through 10. And what do we discover there? That God can wash the entire face of the earth with water, drown all of mankind save One man and his family and who found favor in God's eyes. And after this flood, what do we find? We find this man drunk and naked in his tent and his children making mockery of him, his child making mockery of him. We see that even a flood cannot take sin away. And then finally, to pound that point home, we get the account of the Tower of Babel. where mankind, remembering the flood, gathers together and says, we will build a tower, and we will stand up against God, and we will get up to the heavens, and essentially we will be God for ourselves. The opening of the book of Genesis shows us just how far man has fallen. It shows us ways God has intervened in man's history, and yet those interventions have not been effective to deal with sin, mankind has simply gotten worse and worse and worse. If man was sinful before Noah, now he's calculating his sinfulness. We're going to work together to oppose the Lord." And so I think John, and I think even Mark, use this word of beginning because they're making a case and saying, you know, or maybe you don't, but you need to know, that mankind is corrupt from almost his very beginning. You go back to where man came from, from his first parents, and they sinned. And man has been in sin and misery and under the curse ever since. And what this gospel represents is in many ways a new beginning. Mark, we're kind of saying you've heard the bad news. You have it there in Genesis. You have it elsewhere. But here's the beginning of what? The good news, something new, something different, a new story, a new beginning. John brings us back to the creator, the one who was there and the one by whom the earth was made. Bad? No, not bad. The one by whom the earth was made good and begins and directs our attention there. And as we heard in the following verses of John, it is this one who was in the beginning, this one who made the earth, He is the one who is coming to us. Why would John care about this? Well, you might have heard of the Millennium Tower in Los Angeles. If you have not, it is an interesting story. When they were building this skyscraper, they made some mistakes. They didn't build the foundation right. And so over time, they discovered that the skyscraper was beginning to lean. And it wasn't just that it was leaning, it was that it was leaning more and more over time. I read a news article this week that said that come 2024, they think they finally solved the problem after expending massive amounts of money and great amounts of time. You see, when the foundation of a building is broken, if it's crooked, if it's gone wrong, it is exceedingly difficult, perhaps even impossible, to fix. In the same way, as we think about the foundations of who we are as mankind, as we think about where we've gone wrong, we have to understand where mankind went wrong is not up here on the superstructure. It's not the roof that is broken. It is not the walls that are crooked. It is the very foundations of our being. We in Adam are sinful and corrupt. We have gone wrong from the beginning. We are born in sin. And so I think John directs us to this one who was at the beginning, because he's directing and saying, if you understand sin rightly, you understand you need someone of the power of creation, the power that the word had to save us. And so why don't we take a look and see what John says about this one, the word. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And the word was God. Why does John use the term word? There are both philosophical approaches looking at the use of logos in Greek. I'm more curious, actually, in seeing because I think John has Genesis 1, 1 in mind, Genesis 1, 2, and 3 and some of the following verses in mind as he writes this. And I think there we get some clues. If you go back to Genesis 1.1, we read in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was that form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Notice in verse one, you have a count of God. Verse two, the spirit of God. And then verse three, and God said, let there be light. And there was light. And so then we have this account of God speaking and by him speaking, he creating. And so then we have in John saying, and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. And I think they're part of the reason that John is picking up on this idea of word is what does God speak? God speaks a word. He is asserting and saying once again, notice. that this word is there at creation. He is intimately involved in what is created. Now, I don't want to push that picture too far because some will say, well, the sun is an emanation. He comes out of God. He is this thing that is created by God, by whom God creates. I don't think this is what John is doing. John is rather asserting The union of this word with God, the activity of this word in creating, and I think most importantly, the presence of the word at the very beginning before there is anything else. He is present and he is active. And also think about this. What happens when God is ready to do something at creation? He speaks. He sends his word to go and do the work as it were to use this image. And so we come to John. And when God is ready to make a new beginning, what does he do? He once again sends his word into the creation. He is heard once again in speech. And so John is showing us the level of power. that is involved at in the gospel, in the good news, in the coming of Christ Jesus. We are not talking about an angel that was sent to save. Sadly, in Presbyterianism, we have come up with the idea in some circles that we ought not to, we don't always have to avoid images of our creator, of our God. So you will see some argue that we can represent Christ Jesus in images to learn or to teach or to direct us. To that, I would note that when John presents to us Christ Jesus, he says, who is he? He says he is the word. Is it not fitting that we would know the word through words? But he doesn't present to us images. He says, when you think about Christ Jesus, think about what he has said. what God has said, how God has spoken. One of the reasons then why we want to think of Christ Jesus through his word and avoid the other images is this is the most accurate presentation of who he is. It protects us from error. But to continue, we've seen this idea of word. Now we see we want to look at the word God. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. It's hard to represent this in the English, in the Greek. One of these instances of God has a definite article on it and the other does not. To make that clear, I'll read it, and the word was with the God and the word was God. And some will take this and try to assert that Jesus is a created being or a sublevel of God. That is totally not what John is doing here. Rather, he's being very precise for a very important reason. He says, the word was with the God, and this is showing that there is a distinction, there is a diversity within God. And then he turns around and says, and the word was God, the word was divine. What is true of God is true of this word. They both have the same nature. This is a foundational text for our understanding of the Trinity. Because this text asserts that there is, in one sense, a diversity in the Trinity, we can look and we can see different, what we call, persons in the Trinity. And yet we also see a natural, there is a unity of substance. I fear to get these wrong, so I use our confessional, our catechism language. where we say there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. There's the diversity, the threeness of person. And these three are one God, same in substance, equal in power and glory, the unity of being. This is what John is saying. And maybe I don't have the grammatical chops to make it clear to you. But what I want you to understand is when you look at the grammar, John is actually saying there is a diversity with respect to this idea of person. There's more than one. And there is a unity with this idea of substance, what he is. What the word is, is what God is. They are the same being. And so we look and we see this. We see this assertion, he was in the beginning. I've got far more notes than I have time to go through. So I fear I'm going to edit on the fly a little bit as we think about this. I knew this would be difficult with John, because John speaks so wonderfully. This image comes to mind. Have you ever seen a lightning strike? You're seeing a lightning strike, you're standing there, maybe, I know the Finleys, the farms up on the hill, I bet y'all saw lots of lightning strikes in your time. Sometimes I would be surprised one or two quite close. As you've been close to a lightning strike and hit it, see the ground. You see this great power, you see the light, you hear the thunder, it is terrifying. There's a reality that we look at lightning and we say, we don't understand it. The last time I read scientific discussions of lightning, quite a bit of it was, we still don't know where lightning comes from. We know it happens. We know it's powerful. We know it's scary. We know it's important, but we don't really understand it. John is trying to bring us to this point. When he begins talking about this word and he talks about God, what he is saying here is, When Christ comes to earth, you are seeing something akin to the strike of lightning, more wonderful, far more glorious. But that sort of image, something amazing and powerful and beyond your reckoning and power has happened. And John doesn't try to explain to us all the why's and the why's. And how it could be, he simply describes the what. This is what happened. As you might go and describe seeing that lightning strike to your friend and say, I can't tell you why it happened. I can't tell you the natural mechanisms that make it possible, but I can tell you that something glorious has happened. As we think about Christ Jesus, we think about our salvation. So we think about the incarnation, as John will say in a few verses, the word became flesh. We ought to wonder. We ought to wonder far more than we see a lightning strike nearby us and say something powerful, something amazing has happened. And where John is going with this is again that idea of beginning. John recognizes he's gonna make it painfully clear in his gospel that you and I are at our very foundation broken. We are sinful, we are fallen, we are wicked, and we are wretched. And all of our suffering and all of this life comes back to that broken foundation. And so, mankind being in need of an entirely new foundation, his history in one sense being in need of a complete restart, what does God do? He doesn't send an angel. He doesn't send a man and he doesn't just destroy this whole place and start with new people. He sends the word, he sends the son, he sends the one who created all that is to come and be active again to create something new. We talk about, Jesus will talk to us in chapter three about being born again. A new beginning for you and for me. You know, the birth is a wonderful thing to see a new life emerge and to hold that baby in your hands. And God in Christ Jesus has acted powerfully to do something even more incredible. Take someone who's living and breathing. Take you who are walking and alive and say, I know your nature is totally corrupt, and so I'm going to give you a new nature. One that does not hate me, but one that loves me. One that is not destined for destruction, but one that is destined for eternal life. And so as you read those first couple of verses of John, let us look and let us see that your salvation was not a light thing. It could not be done cheaply. It could not be done by any but by God himself. and to think upon the love that God has shown for us, that he sent this word into the world, that we individually in Christ might have a new beginning, that we look forward to an age when Christ returns, when human history will have that new beginning ruled by him. See the lightning strike and wonder. Let us pray. Through our world, That you have truly done something new, something that was unheard of, something that was never done before and will never be done after. And you did it for our salvation. So we praise you, our Father, we praise you, Son, we praise you, Holy Spirit, for the great work you've done in our redemption. We pray that you would work upon us that we might rightly reflect the glory of what you have done. That you might receive the glory and that others might see and give you the praise you deserve.