What the Logos Became

Transcript

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[0:00] Thank you, Adele. Well, our sermon text is from John, and it's the first 14 verses of the Gospel of John, 1 through 14. Just a word of introduction, this is the second Sunday after Christmas, so it's still Christmas season. The Christmas tree's still up, so that's good. And now we're telling John's version of the origin of Jesus. This is John's Christmas story, and we find that in John's version, there's no mention of the baby Jesus. Not exactly, you'll see. Matthew has baby Jesus. Luke has baby Jesus. Mark has nothing at all from the early life of Jesus. Mark starts with Jesus as an adult and just goes. But John doesn't just talk about Jesus, doesn't talk about Jesus as a baby. He goes back in time to the very beginning. And so he goes all the way back, all the way. I mean, if there's any further to go back, you can't really go back, because you'll notice that the first three words of John are the same as the first three words of Matthew. The first three words of the book of Genesis. And there's no accident there. He's telling kind of the same story. In the beginning, in Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth. And in John's Gospel, in the beginning, this is how God created the heavens and the earth. How? Through

[1:16] the Son, through the Word. So we'll get into that. So that's the birth of Jesus, actually, essentially, is from before time. And he was active and involved in the creation of the universe, which we don't always think about Jesus as having a hand in the creation of the universe. But this is what John's Gospel tells us. So we're going to read this, and then we're going to try to understand it, because this is probably, these 14 verses are one of the most, what I would call, philosophical parts of the New Testament. And I actually mean that in a good way. Sometimes you could think something being overly philosophical would mean it's too obscure and hard to understand and belongs somewhere else. But this is good philosophy. This is good, a really amazing philosophy that brings all sorts of things together. So I'm excited about it. But this is really one of the most philosophical parts of the New Testament. So I'm excited that we can go through this together. And John connects Jesus to the creation of everything, and he uses the Greek word logos, or logos, logos, to describe him. So if you looked at the text in Greek, it would say, in the beginning was the logos, the Word. And that Greek word is translated as Word, sometimes with a capital letter, and sometimes with a capital letter.

[2:42] So that means the Lord is going to take place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in the most profound place in you're actually dealing with sort of a, almost like a proper noun, somebody's name. So this is another name for Jesus, another name for Jesus, Emmanuel, you know, Prince of Peace, the Word, the Word is another name for Jesus. But it has a lot more meaning just than another name for Jesus. So in other parts of Scripture, you'll see the word, God's Word, lowercase. That simply means what God spoke and what the authors of the Bible wrote down, that's also God's Word. So another way of talking about Scripture is to call it God's Word. This is different. This Word with a capital W, we're going to get into it, is different than that word, although very much related to it, as we'll see. So the logos here is connected to an important category in Greek philosophy, and I'm going to ask you now to listen to what really can only be described as a very different

[3:54] word. Kind of Christmas story, okay? So no shepherds, no angels, no stockings hung with care, you know, it's, this is a Christmas story, but it's super different. And it's so cool that we have these three different Christmas stories in the New Testament. Matthew, Luke, and John. Mark doesn't have one, like we said. And they're also, they're actually also different, and this one is amazing. So let's go to our reading. It's John, John chapter 1, beginning at the beginning. In the, beginning, the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through Him, and nothing was created except through Him. The Word gave life to everything that was created, and His life brought light to the world. And He created everything that was created, and His life brought light to the world. The Word gave life to everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. God sent a man, John the Baptist, to tell about the light, so that everyone might believe because of his testimony. John himself was not the light. He was simply a witness to tell about the light. The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the

[5:19] world. He came into the very world He created, and He was the light. He was the light. He was the light. He was the light. But the world did not recognize Him. He came to His own people, and even they rejected Him. But to all who believed Him and accepted Him, He gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn, not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God. So, the Word, became human and made His home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness, and we have seen His glory, the glory of the Father's one and only Son. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank You for this Christmas story that You've given us in the Gospel of John. We ask that You would add Your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen. So, we're going to go a little bit backwards and kind of go a little bit backwards and kind of go a little bit backwards and kind of go a little bit backwards and kind of try to understand where some of the language in this passage, what it's related to and what people have been thinking about it. And so, we're going to ask Steve to go on to the next slide and how we have a little bit of history, archaeology. Did you put on your lecture hat? Doesn't matter because you're getting one anyway, but here it is. Now, it'll be fun. It's

[6:44] very interesting, okay? So, I want to talk about John, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Essenes. You've heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls, okay? Very interesting stuff. The really, probably the biggest archaeological find of the 20th century. There's other ones that are pretty big, but it was way up there. So, I want to talk about this group called the Essenes. They lived in an area near the Jordan River called Qumram, spelled with Q, and they're mentioned by the historian Josephus. Josephus is a Jewish historian who tells the story of the Jews. He records that there were three main Jewish sects. You've probably heard of them. The Sadducees, who were collaborating with the Romans and had control of the temple. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Josephus also mentions the Pharisees, who opposed Roman rule. They didn't collaborate. They insisted on a life marked by adherence to the laws of the Old Testament. So, the Pharisees were very much in favor of keeping a holy life. They did believe in the resurrection. And the third group that Josephus mentions, along with the other first two, is the Roman Church. The Roman Church is a place where no other prophet were able tobound thebound

[8:19] the river. And they thought the temple was corrupted. They didn't go near the temple. They didn't like it. They thought it was corrupted by the Romans and the Sadducees. They did believe in the resurrection. And they thought the Pharisees were not nearly serious enough about the law. So you could kind of imagine how fun these people were to be around, you know. But they lived together and, you know. But they were famously hospitable, at least to other Essenes. And so there was a lot of good things they had going on. Well, they had this rigorous system of communal life, which we're going to see later. Now, why are we interested in this? We're interested in the Essenes because there are some strong similarities between their teaching and their lifestyle and that of John the Baptist, who's mentioned in our passage. And we see a lot of John the Baptist. And this is the important part. Some of their teachings seem to correspond with the teachings of Jesus himself, especially in the attempt to bring back the Roman Empire. And so they were very, very, especially in the Gospel of John, which is where we are today. And so there's some speculation that John the Baptist maybe had been a member of the Essenes or had kind of been around them a lot and

[9:25] been influenced by them. And there's speculation that Jesus had maybe spent some time with the Essenes, rubbed shoulders with them, taken on some of their teachings. Now, we don't really think that because we think Jesus knew everything that he needed to teach. He didn't need to be influenced by outside groups. But this is maybe what the cynical archaeologists and scholars would think is that Jesus and John the Baptist were members of this sect or they were influenced by this sect and that drove their thinking. We'll get into why that's probably false later. But it is an important group to pay attention to because some of their teachings overlap with what John said and with what Jesus said according to John the Baptist. Let's keep the two Johns separate. John the Baptist is John the Baptist. John the Apostle is the one who wrote this. John the Baptist is John the Apostle. John the Apostle is the one who wrote this gospel. He was the disciple whom Jesus loved. So they're two different people named John. Okay, so we also want to look at how we receive these teachings of the Essenes. And that's, like I said, one of the most amazing archaeological stories of all times. And so let's go to the next one. Just should be a man holding a

[10:32] jar. There we go. A clay jar. It's a clay jar. So, you know, I want to ask some of you who are older, like around my age or just maybe a little bit older, maybe a little bit older, maybe a little bit maybe 10 years younger, I'm 56 now, I guess.

[10:45] Because our kids have tablets and phones. They don't necessarily go outside with nothing to do and try to figure out what to do. But when you were like 10 and it was boring in your house, and you'd played all the board games in your house five times and all the books on your shelf were dull, you'd go outside. What would you do to have fun outside? Just tell me anything.

[11:10] How did you know that? Did you know that, Brian? You just said that? That's what, yeah. Who else threw rocks? Yes. Now, do any of our, well, why don't the girls throw rocks? No, no idea? They can throw rocks. The question is, why do boys throw rocks? Why does anyone throw rocks? Well, why did we throw rocks? Exactly, why did we throw rocks? To hit something. What's that? Because they're there. Because they're there? Because there's a target somewhere that needs to be destroyed by the rock? Right, OK.

[11:47] I thought this would be a little more drawn out, but, Brian, thank you. You just, what's that? I build a fort. You build a fort, and then the fun part is telling which other kids are in and out of the club that can use the fort. That's treehouse, yeah. And you know, the best thing is you have rocks next to a streamer or a river, then you can skip the rocks on the water, and that's super fun. OK, so this all begins with a kid throwing rocks.

[12:17] That's how this begins. There's a little Bedouin boy who's with his sheep down by the river, and there are some caves up on the side of the hillside, and he's throwing rocks. And he's throwing his rocks into the cave just to see if he can get it to go into the cave. It's a little bit of practice, target practice. And he throws a rock in, and he hears kind of a clunk, and a crack that he wasn't expecting from the rock landing inside the cave, and that was interesting. And so he sort of clambers up the side of a, not a super high cliff, but there it is, clambers up the side of the cliff and goes into the cave. And lo and behold, a clay jar, just like this one was there, that was smashed because he hit it with a rock.

[13:01] Wow, how interesting. Wonder where this is from. He looks inside, and there's all sorts of rolled up, rolled up scrolls inside of it. And these are the scrolls that had been written by, this is in 1948, OK? These are the scrolls that had been written by the Essenes in their community about 2,000 years before this, like 1,900 to 2,000 years before that. Perfectly preserved because it's a dry, sort of arid, low humidity place. They kept them in jars so that that kind of protected them from the elements, and they were inside a cave. So it didn't get washed away by a river, and it was lost to all, you know, at some point. The Essenes, that was their library. They put them in jars, put them in a cave. I don't know if they had to run off somewhere.

[13:47] Their community disbanded in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. So we don't know. They've been there at least in 70 AD, but maybe earlier. And what a find. Almost 2,000-year-old parchment is a great find, no matter what. Now, parchment is what? They were written on. Parchment is like the Egyptians had papyrus, you know? The problem with papyrus is it kind of decays over time. Parchment is made out of something a little tougher. It's animal skin. So a sheep and a goat, you butcher it, you eat it. The skin's left over. Let's not waste anything. We're going to write on this skin. It's called parchment.

[14:28] And we don't do that anymore. We have paper. It's much, much better. And this parchment, they would kind of flatten it out, cut it into strips, sew the pieces together, so that you'd end up with a really long stretch. And you would write on it. But you would write from right to left, of course. And you would write column by column by column by column. And then you would roll it all up. And then you'd have it. And you can unroll it. And you could kind of move along like this inside it.

[14:59] It's easier to go around in a book. Books are easier. But scroll's not bad. So you can do that. And again, they were written on. They were found up in these caves. And so they started investigating. And there's more than just one, more than one jar, many more jars. And unfortunately, maybe not the first boy who found them, but other people found these. And they were nice and dry. So they made good kindling for a couple of campfires, which is crazy. But there you have it. So you kind of wonder, what did we lose to the campfire? Some of them were fed to the animals, because goats and sheep just love chewing things. And so they just. So some was lost. But some of the Bedouins were like, oh, this could be important. So they found some scholars and said, we have something you might be interested in. It's going to cost you. And so the scholars were like, absolutely, we're going to come and pay you whatever.

[15:53] Once they saw it, they were like, this is old stuff. We better take this. And then the Bedouins, this is all from one of my theology professors in seminary, they were going to take this. realized if we cut these into smaller pieces, we can get more for each piece. Then because the scholars are competing for pieces of this stuff. And then the scholars are like, this is no good. We're never going to put pieces together. We're going to only tell them that we'll only give them money for bigger pieces. So then some of the smaller pieces were sewn together by the Bedouins into things that didn't make any sense because they were from different scrolls. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that kind of funny and sad? But it doesn't matter because the scholars were like, we can figure this out. We can figure this out. We can take it apart and put it back together. And so in actually more recent years, all the different pieces of this, you'll see that computers were able to kind of get it. And some of the scrolls were in pristine, perfect condition and were not fragmented at all. And so there's one scroll, at least, that you can see. And I'll show you a picture of the museum. It's the entire scroll of Isaiah, the whole thing. And it's all of it.

[17:03] It's all in one piece. And there's nothing missing. And it's like the find of the century. So let's go to the next slide. Do you see the lid of that jar? Let's go to the next slide. That is the museum where a lot of these are held. And they made the museum look like the lid of the jar. You can find this in Jerusalem. It's very cool. Let's go to the next slide.

[17:23] OK, does that look like fun? That's one of the scrolls. Well, what do you do after? What do you do with a 1,900-year-old scroll? It's all stuck together. Painstaking labor to unroll it, unstick it from itself, right? Keep all the little fragments together. It looks gross, doesn't it? But they managed it. They treated this with the utmost care. And they were able then to put it all back together again. Most of it. All right. Let's see. Now, let's go to the next slide. And here's, I'm going to talk about two things in particular that we found. One was called the Manual of Discipline. And here's an example of it. It's a book called The Manual of Discipline. And we can go to the next slide as a close-up of the writing. And it's beautiful. That's really well preserved. That's pretty good for a 1,900-year-old scroll. Very legible. You know, it's not the same. It's like a very old language. But if somebody knows that old language, they can just read it like that. So this is the Manual of Discipline. What was it about? It was like these are the rules of our community. This is how we know about the Essenes' daily life. Daily work. They took a bath at least once a day. They would ritually wash themselves as part of their religious sort of obligations.

[18:35] They took an oath to the community to give all their belongings to the community, to never leave the community, to never be disobedient to the laws of the community. And it's that washing aspect that connects them to John the Baptist. But there are some differences. You go to the next slide. This is one of their ritual baths at Qumran. This has been unearthed at archaeological find. And so they would, that would be full of water. They would go to the river or someplace and just fill it up. They would go and wash themselves every day. They would walk down in that. They would wash. They would come back out every day. And they had a simple diet. So you think about how long these people lived. Because they kind of lived like John the Baptist. They lived out in the wilderness. Cities are full of germs. But out in the wilderness, it's pretty sterile. They would wash every day. They would work every day. They would eat just small meals because they were frugal people.

[19:29] And they lived together. And they would spend the evenings writing. Some of them who could write, they would be filling up these scrolls with their teachings. So you can imagine somebody could live a really long time that way. They wouldn't, you know, no violence, no disease to speak of. Good work, good food every day, hard work every day, washing yourself every day. So the amount of things that they could produce is just astounding. They probably were able to produce a large number of scrolls. And again, the question is, what don't we know? What don't we have? You know, what got burnt? What never got put in the cave? What didn't get fed to a goat? You know, this is just a funny thing. Now, so people say, oh, they washed themselves every day. They, you know, were calling people to a higher level of adherence to the laws of Moses. And so they say, that sounds like John the Baptist. Also, where John was baptizing wasn't far from where they were. It wasn't far at all. A couple of miles. You know, 10, 20 miles.

[20:33] So there was this idea that John maybe had been part of this community. And, you know, I think he might have visited it. We don't know. But there are some similarities. Except you would think that John's baptism was more like a one-time event where you would say this person is repenting of their sins and starting a new life. Whereas the Essenes took a bath every day. They believed in washing, but it was maybe more for part of their community life together.

[21:00] So the comparisons are there. But it's hard to say that John was an Essene or was influenced by the Essenes. There's some other themes that occur in the Essene writings. And they had this apocalyptic worldview that was really actually pretty common at the time they thought the world. There was some point in history where these sort of cataclysmic events would happen. And it would reorder the world in a way that was good for them. So they anticipated the world. They anticipated that someone called the teacher of righteousness would come. And he would teach accurate Torah interpretation or accurate interpretation of the law. He would challenge corrupt leadership. This is a list. He would lead spiritual discipline. And he would foresee future judgment. And he would expect his followers to uphold absolute righteousness. And that sounds like Jesus, doesn't it? You know, it sounds a bit like Jesus. This teacher of righteousness was expected to come on the scene. So you do wonder. If instead of you can look at this in the reverse. How many Essenes maybe became Christians because they saw in Jesus what they were hoping for and expecting? Because these are a lot of things that Jesus did do. Sort of the cynical view of it would be that Jesus knew all these things about what they were teaching.

[22:16] And tried to do them to become the person that they were looking for. That's the cynical view. I don't agree with that. You could if you want to. But I don't think you should. But so this is the debate. Inside these scholarly circles. Was Jesus influenced by the Essenes? Was John the Baptist influenced by them? Was John the Gospel writer influenced by them?

[22:37] The Essenes also anticipated at some point in the future that somebody called the sons of light or the children of light would rise up and fight what they called the children of darkness. And so let's go to the next slide. And this would be this long battle between darkness and light. And it would finally be won. And in case you're wondering like who would win. You're like who's going to win? The light side wins of course. It's just like Star Trek or Star Wars. But the angels had to help. According to them. So they had a really high view of angels. A lot of writings about angels. And the sons of light could not actually defeat the sons of darkness. Until the angels came in at the last moment. And brought in sort of the divisive help. The decisive help. And divisive. So for them you would see what sometimes we would call sort of a Manichean battle.

[23:28] As they were going across the world. As they were going across the world. West, drew this as the death on a pale horse. So this is a Christian interpretation, sort of, of this final battle, sort of this battle that we kind of get in Revelation. I just think it's amazing because you have sort of the children of light there in the middle, but the children of darkness are sort of surrounding them. And it looks like they're, you know, it doesn't look like they're going to win the day unless an angel comes and gets them and helps them. So we see that the Essenes sort of lived on one side of this duality. They were the good. They were expecting that somehow the teacher of righteousness would come and help them somehow at some other point. They and other people like them would rise up. What did this mean in actuality? Did it mean some sort of geopolitical change? I think so, that they thought maybe the Romans, it's always the Romans had to get kicked out. This is the expectation that all of Jesus's disciples seem to have had at various times and other people looking to Jesus and hoping he was going to do this. And this was... This was the current and hopeful expectation of some messianic person who would be in the

[25:01] line of King David who would sort of lead Israel to this sort of place of independence and sort of throwing off the Roman Empire and all the taxes and all the occupation, all that. So we see then, let's go to the next slide. This is the interesting part is that if you look at the Gospel of John, there are a lot of dualities in the Gospel of John. And so you remember, you'll remember them. So Jesus talks about light versus darkness. He calls himself the light of the world. You know, in our reading, it says he was the light that came into the world and the darkness has not been able to extinguish it, implying that there's already this fight between darkness and light. Life versus death in John. Truth versus falsehood. You know, the truth shall set you free. Belief versus unbelief. And then in John's Gospel in particular, he mentions the world sort of as a kind of a category as this part of the creation that sort of actively opposed to God and God's work. And that's in distinction to the kingdom of God. That's sort of this place of light. So you might go, well, God, John, John the Baptist, Jesus, John the Gospel writer, they seem to be echoing a lot of themes from this Essene community. You see, that's why this is important that we can kind of do all this stuff about the jars and the scrolls

[26:34] because it's an important question. But I think the reality is that that language of light versus darkness and this desire to see something change in the world, that was common to all the groups in that time. And that was common to those people in that time. And so it wasn't just the Essenes who thought in these categories. And so I don't think it's correct to say that you can't. I think it's correct to say that Jesus or John or the other John were influenced by them. I think Jesus is speaking the language of the people that are around him. And he's connecting with them in a way that so that they can understand that he really is the one that they're hoping for. And he really is going to lead them out of oppression. Now, we understand that's not in a political or a military sense. It's in a different sense. It's freedom from sin, death, and the devil. It's freedom from the power of actual darkness. Like the darkness of sin, the darkness of evil.

[27:30] So we want to look now real quick, and let's go to the next slide. This is the final slide. Oh, we're doing all right. We want to see, so Jesus is actually different than the Essenes too. And John gives us this in the very beginning of the Gospel of John. We actually see how this is completely different from the Essenes.

[27:49] Because the Essenes don't talk about the Logos. Remember I talked about the Logos earlier. And this is an important philosophical category. Here's two ways that is understood at least in Greek speaking. And since the Gospel of John is written in Greek, they use this Greek word. And this Logos is a philosophical term which there's two, at least one, here's one Greek philosopher for Heraclitus. That the Logos is this eternal underlying law or divine intelligence. Governing all things. And though often hidden from human comprehension. So there's this sense that the Logos is this thing that holds the whole universe together. Well, that's what John himself says. That everything kind of exists through him. Nothing came into existence that was not made through him. And then there's also this rational structure that organizes the universe. And that was a concept later developed by the Stoics as the divine mind within nature humanity. This is a Greek category of thinking. This is a philosophical Greek category of thinking. Why does John associate Jesus with it? This is a very good question. Why is John pushing Jesus into this Greek philosophical category? Well, the answer is the Gospel was written in Greek. A lot of the people around there were Greek was a language they knew.

[29:19] It wasn't necessarily their native language. Greek was sort of the... Even though this was under the Roman Empire, Greek was the language of that area. And all the New Testament, pretty much the entire New Testament was written in Greek. Everybody had to speak Greek to do business. The marketplace, that was in Greek. And so John, as a Gospel writer, says, I need to help the Greek speaking world understand who Jesus is. And Greek philosophy actually... Sort of without knowing it, I think, discovered that there is this thing called the logos. And John says, this thing you've been looking for and wondering about what it could be... And to the Greeks, though, it wasn't a person. It was sort of a principle or a force.

[30:08] John says, that's actually Jesus. That's actually Jesus as God. And so there's this sort of beautiful kind of way that if you kind of compare it, say, to Paul goes to Athens. And he finds a statue or sort of a shrine to an unknown God. And he says, I'm going to tell you who this unknown God is. God really exists. He created everything. So this thing that you've been kind of... You don't know. You don't know if this is a real thing. This is a real thing. And it's located in the person of Jesus. So this is really exciting.

[30:46] And this is how... How I would say this is different from the Essenes. Two ways. One is that Jesus is connected to the logos. So this Greek philosophical idea. This idea that Jesus himself is the organizing principle of the entire universe. That through him, the entire universe was created. And through him, the entire universe is held together. Which is amazing. So that's really interesting, the thing about Jesus. But then the second thing that... That the Essenes wouldn't have seen coming is the incarnation. Not just that Jesus... I don't think it'd be too hard for anybody to say, okay, that logos could be God. Not a problem. Because God could definitely be the creator and the organizing principle of the universe. But the real sort of twist that the Essenes didn't see coming or the Greeks didn't... And the Greeks didn't see coming. Nobody saw coming. Is that this word is incarnated into a human being. In the form of a person who walked the earth and lived among people. And that's what we call the incarnation. We spoke about it last week. We talk about the incarnation all the time. Are you sick of the incarnation? Please don't be sick of the incarnation. It's so amazing. It's so good. God coming into the flesh is not just for Christmas.

[32:04] But it is Christmas. God coming into the flesh into the world. As God. But to live a human life. And so this is the verse that we need to memorize. Verse 14. And if you can go back to it, Steve, at all. Although I'm going to read it to you in the NIV. Just the first half of it. Is John chapter 1 verse 14. Take this one home and memorize it. The word, logos, the organizing principle of the universe that created everything and holds everything together. The word became flesh.

[32:38] And, and made his dwelling among us. That's the incarnation. Not just that God came in the flesh. But this thing that the Greeks were looking for. This thing that the Essenes were looking for. Became a human being. And walked and talked and lived with us. And broke bread with us. And gave his life for us. And his life meant a lot. When he gave up his life, it meant new life for everybody else. It meant new birth and new growth.

[33:13] So this is putting together the logics. The word, logos, and the birth of Jesus. So this is, this is God in his wisdom taking the organizing principle of the universe without nothing, without which nothing could be made. And, and putting it into the flesh to enter into humanity. That's, that's what's happening here in John chapter 1. Which is very exciting. So that's, that's John's Christmas story. Like I said, it's weird. No stockings. No angels. No trees. No shepherds in the field. Right? But that's, Merry Christmas. Like really, Merry Christmas to you. The word became flesh. And made his dwelling among us. Let's pray.

[33:59] Heavenly Father, thank you again for this third Christmas story. This interesting Christmas story. Thank you for the incarnation of your son coming to the world. To dwell among us in the flesh. To die for us on the cross. To save us. Amen. Amen.