SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/14/2015
9:12 PM
My Worship Time Focus: The Impact
of the Incarnation
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 1:17-18
Message of the verses: “17 For the Law was given through Moses;
grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at
any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”
I
want to remind you of the reason that John has written this gospel, and I will
probably do it in the future as well so that I don’t forget it, “30 Therefore many other signs Jesus also
performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book;
31 but these have been written so that
you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing
you may have life in His name (John 20:30-31).”
I suppose that all we need is verse thirty-one, but they seem to go well
together.
As
one makes their way through the Old Testament they will see things that come
from God in a progressive way, as God gave more and more evidences of who He is
and what it is He wants to accomplish.
When one gets through the book of Genesis they are left with the
children of Israel in Egypt after the death of Joseph and all the other patriarchs,
and then when Exodus begins the main focus will be on Moses for the next four
books and you will see the people of Israel come out of Egypt through ten
miracles that God did and then the go to Mt. Sinai where God gives them the
Law. Now in verse seventeen of our text
today we have this Law mentioned and that it was given through Moses, but then
the obvious impact was something monumental as we see that grace triumphed over
law. The law was imbued with God’s glory
and reflected His holy righteous character.
MacArthur writes “Therefore Paul could write, ‘What shall we say then?
Is the Law sin? May it never be!...The
Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good’ (Rom. 7:7, 12;
cf. 2 Cor. 3:7- 11). Yet though God was
gracious in the Old Testament the Law was not an instrument of grace. Rather, God granted grace and forgiveness to
repentant sinners who violated His Holy law, based on what Christ would do to
provide atonement. The Law saves no one;
it merely convicts sinners of their inability to keep perfectly God’s righteous
standards, and condemns them to the eternal punishment of divine justice; and
thus reveals their need for the grace of forgiveness. Paul wrote to the Galatians that ‘the Law has
become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith’
(Gal. 3:24).”
The
first then we need to see is that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son was over the
house in which Moses was only a servant:
“5 Now Moses was
faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those
things which were to be spoken later; 6 but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house-whose house we are, if we
hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end (Heb.
3:5-6).” The grace of God in the OT was
applied to the ones who believed in anticipation of the full revelation of His
grace in Jesus Christ. Now in Him God’s
salvation ‘truth’ was fully revealed and accomplished. We can see that the “truth” was fully
revealed and accomplished. We will see
from John 14:6 that Jesus is the Truth and Ephesians 4:221 say “if indeed you
have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus.”
The
next thing we want to see is that even though no one has ever seen God those
that had seen Jesus were actually seeing God the Father as Jesus pointed out to
Philip in John 14:8-10a) “Philip said to
Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." 9 Jesus said
to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know
Me, Philip? He who has
seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ’Show us the Father’? 10 “Do
you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” Also the letter to the Colossians speaks of
this “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation (Col.
1:15).”
John
MacArthur writes “The NASB follows the reading best attested in the Greek
manuscripts, ‘only begotten God’ (instead of the alternate reading, ‘only begotten
Son’ found in some English translations).
It is a fitting conclusion to the prologue, which has stressed Christ’s
deity and absolute equality with the Father.
The intimate expression ‘who is in the bosom of the Father’ is
reminiscent of the phrase pros ton theon
(‘with God’) in verse 1. It expresses
Christ’s shared nature with the Father (cf. 17:24).”
We
can see from verse 18 that the only we can know God is because “he explained
Him.” Jesus is the explanation of
God. He is the answer to the question, “What
is God like?”
MacArthur
concludes this section with an explanation of the word “Explained translates a
from of the verb ex-egeomai, from
which the English word ‘exegesis’ (the method of practice of interpreting
Scripture) derives. Jesus is the only
one qualified to exegete or interpret God to man, since ‘no one knows the Son
except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone
to whom the Son wills to reveal Him’ (Matt. 11:27).
“The prologue presents an
introductory synopsis of John’s entire gospel.
It introduces themes that will be expanded throughout the rest the
book. None are more important than
this: Jesus who existed in intimate
fellowship with the Father from all eternity (v. 1), became flesh (v. 14),
brought the full expression of grace and truth to mankind (v. 17), and revealed
God to man (v. 18). How He did so will
be seen in the remainder of John’s gospel.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I am thankful that Jesus Christ explains
the Father to me and am looking forward to the remaining sections in the book
of John.
My Steps of Faith
for Today:
I wish to trust the Lord to help me better understand what He wants me
to understand as I continue to study the book of John.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Philip” (John 1:45).
Tomorrows Bible question: “On what mountain did God give Moses the
commandments?”
Answer in our next SD. 12/14/2015 10:34 PM
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