John

The Incarnation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: John 1:11-14, The Incarnation

Genre: Sermon

Lesson: 16 of 16

Track: #16

Year:

Dictation Name: RR308H16

[Unknown Speaker] Let us worship God.

Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. It is better to trust in the Lord then to put confidence in man. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man that trusteth in Him. Let us pray.

Our most gracious God and heavenly Father we come before You now in praise and thanksgiving for Your goodness’s to us which are more than we can number. Of course at this Christmas eve we especially remember the gift of Your Son Jesus Christ who came as the incarnate Son of God so that He might be truly God and truly man and pay the penalty for our sins through His atonement on the cross. We thank You that our life has purpose and direction and hope and relevance because of the word of Jesus Christ and His work in restoring us to fellowship with You and we are grateful that you have not just saved us but you have adopted us as Your children so that we might share in the inheritance of Jesus Christ and spend all eternity with You. We pray that You would help us to show our appreciation for what you have done for us eternally by our response to You here and now in the temporal. Teach us to obey more, teach us to more and more direct our lives around the fact that we serve the living God. Help us not to be distracted by the things of the world but help us stay focused on the reality that You are the Sovereign Lord of the universe and that one day we will live eternally with You and that You judge all things by Your righteous standard. Help us to live our own lives according to that righteous standard, and help us to exemplify that in all we do.

We think of all that gather together in Your name this Lord’s day, we pray that You would encourage them, we pray that You’d sustain those who are suffering because they are believers, because they are Christians in a non-Christian world. We think of all those who are assisting to give them immediate and long term assistance and we pray that You would bless those efforts. We pray that we would see renewal in our churches, in our families. We pray that You would bring people eve closer to You and we pray that we would live to see the time when Your kingdom is greatly multiplied and the influence of Your goodness and grace in people’s lives is more and more apparent. We pray that you’d bless this time that we have together in Your word, we pray that You would use is so that we might better understand and appreciate what you have done for us and know our responsibilities and response. We ask this in Christ’s our Savior’s name, amen.

The scripture for this morning’s lesson is found in the gospel of John, the first chapter, verse 11-14, and our subject is the incarnation. John chapter 1, verses 11-14.

“11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

12 But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

[Rushdoony] In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but man fell into sin, his sin was his desire to be as God. As a result, the fallen world had to be redeemed and God sent His only begotten Son, the second person of the trinity, Jesus Christ, into the world to redeem it. He was sent not with any great fan-fare, he invaded this world in the form of a baby. He experienced all the experiences we do, and he set forth God’s purpose for us. Although he came unto His own,” that is Israel, “and his own received Him not, but to all those who did receive Him He gave the power to become the Sons of God, even to those who believed on His name.”

Now verse 13 is one of the most remarkable verses in the whole of the New Testament. It reads, “13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Now, all you have to do is to change the verb there from were, plural, to was, and you have a reference clearly to Christ and His virgin birth because He was born not of blood nor of the will of man nor of the flesh, but of God. This therefore is one of the most remarkable statements in the whole of the Bible. We in Christ are no longer a natural people, but a supernatural people. We have a particular purpose given to us by God and therefore this verse is a very, very important one. Moreover it tells us that our salvation was not our doing, it was God’s doing. A baby does not choose to be born, it is born, but it has its origin in the purpose of its parents; and so John tells us God has a purpose, He created us, He cause us to be born for His purposes.

“14 And the Word was made flesh, {God became incarnate} and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” Now the Christmas story is a tremendous miracle. God who created the world and saw it fall into sin, purposes to re-create it through God the Son, so that He is sent into the world, he comes as a babe, why? Well a baby experiences a great many different things. As we grow up, or have grown up, we find that the world is a problem very often, and we are strangers to it. But Jesus Christ, made flesh, grew up we are told in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. So that He comes into this world to re-create it, he meets it head-on, he meets all the grief’s that flesh is subject to. He is crucified, dead and buried, but he overthrows in His life the power of sin and death so what He tells us about His life is that this is your life, that we are called not to be blind, senseless, and meaningless in our lives.

Anyone who has grown up on a farm has seen the cycle of life and death among animals, meaningless. Therefore they die, they’re gone, their life has no meaning in any transcendent sense, but we do. We have an eternal purpose, the new creation by God is our eternal home, and therefore the birth of Christ celebrates the beginning of the new heavens and the new earth. He is a totally break with the old world of sin and death. His life transcends this world, and so we are told, shall we.

Now what we must remember is that we still live in this world, we are still subject to it. At my age and in my condition I am failing in every area, I’m a dying man. The doctor has said two months, maybe two years, who knows? Well that’s how exact science is, but what I do know is that while I am still a part of this world of sin and death, because Jesus Christ was born and broke that cycle, there’s more to my life then what the doctor predicts for me. There is an eternity with Christ, that’s the glory of this season. Christ has come and all things are different now. But the world doesn’t like his coming, nor Him. You can, as I have, listen by the hour to television hoping to hear a statement of the gospel, hoping to hear that the meaning of Christ’s coming is His victory over sin and death; but they don’t even mention Him. In fact they prefer other terms for Christmas because the word Christmas has Christ in it, and so it becomes “the holiday season” “yuletide” and so on and on, but that doesn’t alter the fact.

We have before us a choice, the world of sin and death on the one hand, and on the other the world of righteousness and life eternally. “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” We should not be dismayed when we are bypassed and rejected, when people resent us because our faith, our character, the world supremely resented Christ, so why shouldn’t they reject His people? But we know this, because of the babe of Bethlehem we have eternal life, we have the remarkable and eternal assurance that because He has come, we have another world, one in which there is no sin nor death, reserved for us, one in which Christ is king.

Now the interesting thing about Christmas when you try to read the history of it, the nonsense that is written. We do not know of it, according to the records, until the 3rd century, and yet when it appears suddenly everybody seems to be celebrating it. Why? Well in antiquity people did not celebrate their birthday, in some parts of the world to this day people cannot tell you the day of their birthday, but they did celebrate the birthdays of kings. Every Roman empire, for example, was on His birthday celebrated throughout the Roman empire. Now it was a dangerous thing for anyone publicly to celebrate Christ’s birthday, that’s why until the persecutions ended it was unknown, because it was treason. To celebrate it publicly was to admit you had another king than Caesar, so it was very secretly celebrated, but the minute the persecutions ended it was a glorious, public, fact.

If you go outside the Christian world to this day there are no birthdays celebrated among the pagan peoples, but Christians celebrate their birthdays because in Jesus Christ we are priests, and kings. Remember, the next time your birthday comes and you observe it, or your family observes it, that it means because you are a Christian you are a king, your birth counts, it is important in the sight of God, so that the Christmas celebration means your celebration because in Him we are priests, kings, and prophets.

It was a glorious day when Christ was born, it is a joyful day when we are born. If you go back to pre-Christian times and read the letters of people, pagans, who have a baby born to them it is very sad. They love their children, they love them, but there was also a lack of the joy we know. All they could think of was all the trials, the evils that that child was going to endure, because the world as they knew it was a world given over to sin and death, so what future did a baby have? One the other hand, when a baby is born to us it is an occasion of great joy because with us if that child grows up in the faith throughout all eternity we shall be the Lord’s. We are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Our regeneration, our re-birth in Christ is comparable to the virgin birth, now we rarely ever talk about that but it’s one of the most glorious facts of the Bible. The virgin birth was a great miracle, our regeneration unto Christ is a great miracle, and therefore we can rejoice.

We have in effect two birthdays, the day of our birth and the day of Christ’s birth because it meant for us eternal life. This is the glory of Christmas; this is why Christians over the generations in the most difficult circumstances, when everything seemed to be against them, were still a people who could rejoice because they were the people of God, the people with eternal life. This is the glory of Christmas; it is a glory that begins with Christ, and a glory that resounds in all our being. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father who of Thy grace and mercy hast remade us in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee for the eternal inheritance which is ours in Him. Oh Lord our God make us truly grateful so that all the days of our life we may serve and praise Thee as we ought, that we may see that there is more to life than being born and dying, for we are Thy people and we have eternal life, and ten thousand times ten thousand years from now we shall be alive with Thee forever more. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep You, guide and protect You, this day and always, amen.