John 1 part 2

John 1

THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELLED AMONG US...

The Tabernacle is now Jesus' flesh. It is where God concentrates Himself, it is where people can hear God speak. And 'the Word' can speak God's words because He is here. Immanuel, God is with us! The disciples probably knew 'the Word' when He was sick. And Joseph and Mary knew 'the Word' when He was so young He could only babble or on a day that Jesus cut a board too short and was not too happy about it. 'The Word' became flesh, now He could embrace His followers, laugh with His friends, and ask for a second helping of food...

And now He could suffer terribly because He has got a neck and a back and the back’s of His

thighs are crisscrossed with nerve endings that scream when He gets whipped... He’s flesh. So He probably forgot stuff. On some days He might say something and then on the next day He might say ‘Oh I am sorry I meant to say something else.’ He’s flesh. He wept, He got tired, He prayed before calling His disciples and then got Judas as one of the answers to His prayer. He is flesh. He said there were things He didn’t know, like when the end of the world would happen. He is flesh after all.

But He is also God of God and Light of Light. What you see in His life is the MOST remarkable display of the heart and mind of God the earth has ever known. He has the power to send demons away, He has the power to send sickness away, and the power to send sin away and He does it!

And He has the power in the very next chapter, to turn water into wine. Jesus is at a wedding in cana, Jesus’ mother notices a wine shortage, and Jesus goes to work. He makes about 150 gallons of wine. He does, as what Pope Gregory the Great said in the 7th century , “a speeded up version of what God does all the time.” Every Fall God turns water into wine, in the Napa Valley, in the Cayuga Valley. Jesus does a small speeded up version of what God does in the wedding at Cana. So you can say that Jesus speaks for God, but we will see that Jesus keeps on doing what God does, or to use another metaphor - Jesus as the deed. And He does it in the Flesh. And so you now you have the feet of God taking Him to the shack of a leper, and the hand of God reaching out towards flesh that nobody else would touch, and the knees of God that bent as He washed the feet of His disciples, an act that they would not have dreamed of doing for each other, and you got the arms of God stretched out to be nailed for our sins, wounded for our sins. It’s as if the terrifying work of atonement cannot be done without God becoming flesh.

THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELLED AMONG US... Words don’t have meaning until we see action, until there is flesh and blood executing the deed.

"A young man during the Civil War was watching Abraham Lincoln coming into a Hospital Ward as he sat down by a boy that was dieing. The Secretary of War and some Generals wanted to move him on, but he wanted to stay. And so he did, talking to the boy about his home on the Sangamon River. He sat with him two hours before the boy died. The young man commented later, ‘You know I had a good home, I knew from church that God had compassion, but that day when I saw the sadness in the President’s eye and saw the weariness in his face I came to know something about God that I had never known before. Compassion has to have flesh before we can really understand what it truly is, what the Word truly means in our day, the Word becoming flesh."