Chapter 1: What does it mean to have our eyes opened to Christ?
We've been thinking all this week about the wonder of God's revelation in the cosmos and the marvel as Christians that we understand that we were made as His image for fellowship with Him in order that we might be like Him, that we might know Him, that we might trust Him. But we've especially been thinking about our rebellion against this revelation and our rebellion and rejection of it.
But I don't think that we should leave this week without remembering where this story goes in the pages of the Scriptures. For just as the Old Testament begins with the words that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, there's a very similar beginning, isn't there, to the gospel according to John. And John echoes what Moses had written in Genesis chapter 1.
And he tells us that, as Genesis 1 tells us, that the creation came into being through the instrumentality of God's Word. John now shows us that that Word was actually a person. And he says, in the beginning, when God created all things, He did it through the person who was face to face with Him.
Chapter 2: How does the creation narrative relate to the Gospel of John?
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was face to face with God, and the Word was God. And then eventually in the prologue to John's Gospel, he makes it crystal clear that this Word is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one without whom nothing was made that was made. He is the one who sustains all things. And daringly, John adds, He gives light to everyone.
And that's something we've really been considering, isn't it?
Chapter 3: What is the significance of Jesus as the Word in creation?
that even the people who walk in darkness cannot escape the fact that their thinking, their reasoning, their loving, their living, their sense that there might be some meaning to life, their light on life is grounded in the Word who created everything, and now in Jesus Christ the Word, the true light who enlightens everyone who has come into the world. This is a wonderful thing for us to know.
The inescapability of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The fact that the world owes its existence to our Lord Jesus Christ. The human race owes everything to Him. It's amazing when you think about it, that the world has rejected him, as John goes on to say in his prologue, and yet he has continued to sustain that world.
But it's into that world that the Son came, the Logos, the Word, in order to redeem us. There is, says John, good news for us in the fallen creation order. And it comes in a sense in the prologue to John's Gospel in two stages.
Chapter 4: How does knowing Christ change our perspective on the world?
Stage one is wonderful. The light continues to shine because the darkness can never extinguish it. But if stage one is wonderful, stage two is absolutely phenomenal. The light that gives light has come into the world. The Word has become flesh. The eternal God has come to be face to face with us.
And the purpose of it all is that those who come to trust in Him might have the right to become the children of God. Later on in his gospel, John explains to us that that comes into our lives through new birth, through regeneration, when we receive the Lord Jesus Christ. But what he teaches us in the first chapter is this, that we who in Adam and Eve were created to be the children of God,
to live in loving fellowship with Him, to grow in the knowledge of Him, and who now have been excluded from that Garden of Eden where man and God walked together in love and in faithfulness, that we can now be restored to that, but only through Jesus Christ. I don't know how long it took me for it to dawn on me that there is something quite spectacular about becoming a Christian.
I became a Christian because I was conscious of my sin and I knew I needed a Savior.
Chapter 5: What is the relationship between salvation and our understanding of God?
And by God's grace, I found the Savior. What I didn't expect to find that still opens my mind in awe and wonder is that in coming to know the Savior, I'd actually come to know the Creator of the whole cosmos. and that coming to know him as Savior meant that I now could look on the creation with fresh eyes, that it was created by the one who came into it in order to save me.
That's why one of my most vivid memories as a youngster singing hymns comes in those words I quoted earlier on in the week from Anna Laetitia Waring that are so true, that when you come to Christ as Savior, you discover that He is also the Creator, and something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen. I hope that's true for you too.
Thank you.