📖 The Gospel of John — Unit 1: The Word Made Flesh

Introduction — In the Beginning Was the Word

Every other Gospel begins with a manger or a genealogy. John begins before the world began. While Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham and Luke back to Adam, John reaches past creation itself and opens his Gospel in eternity: "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). He is deliberately echoing the first words of Genesis — "In the beginning God" — and he is telling you, before he tells you anything else, who this Jesus really is. This course will walk through John's seven signs, his seven great "I AM" sayings, and the parade of witnesses he calls to the stand to prove one thing: that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life. But it all rests on this first claim. Get the Prologue wrong and you will get the whole Gospel wrong. Get it right, and everything else opens.

I. The Word Was God

Read the verse slowly, because John packs three eternities into one sentence. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). The Word already was when the beginning began — He did not come into being; He simply was. The Word was with God — face to face, a distinct Person, not merely an idea in God's mind. And the Word was God — not a god, not a junior deity, not the first and finest of God's creatures, but God Himself. Some have tried to soften that last clause into "the Word was a god." But John will not allow it. The same Word who was with God was God; full deity and distinct Person, both held in a single breath. This is the seed of the doctrine of the Trinity, planted in the first verse of the book.

Why does John, who knew Jesus, who leaned on His chest at supper, who watched Him weep and bleed, begin so high? Because he had come to know that the carpenter from Nazareth was the eternal God. He is not building up to that conclusion at the end of his Gospel; he announces it in the first line and spends twenty-one chapters showing it to be true.

II. All Things Were Made Through Him

If the Word is God, then look what follows: "All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made" (John 1:3). The One who would later be too tired to stay awake in a boat is the One who made the sea He slept upon. The hands that would be pierced with nails are the hands that flung the stars into the dark. There is not a single created thing — not an atom, not an angel, not a galaxy the telescopes are only now beginning to find — that He did not make. We will meet this divine-and-human pattern again and again in this Gospel, for it runs through the whole of who Christ is. As a man He grew weary, but as God He upholds all things by the word of His power. As a man He asked for a drink at a well, but as God He is the spring from which every river was poured. As a man He died, but as God He could not be held by death. The Maker entered His own making.

III. And the Word Became Flesh

Now comes the verse that should stop your heart. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The eternal God, who made all things, did not merely visit His world or send a message into it. He became flesh. The word John uses for "dwelt" means He pitched His tent, He tabernacled among us — the same God whose glory once filled a tent in the wilderness now wrapped that glory in skin and bone and lived on the same dust He had made. Think of what that means. The infinite became an infant. The One who holds the oceans in His hand was once too small to lift His own head. The Word who spoke creation into being learned, as a boy, to speak His first words at His mother's knee.

Let me put it to you the way it has always struck me, brother. As a man He hungered in the wilderness, but as God He is the bread of life. As a man He slept in the storm, but as God He walked out upon the waves. As a man He wept at a grave, but as God He is the resurrection and the life. As a man He bled and died, but as God He came forth on the third day with the keys of death in His hand. Fully God and fully man — not half of each, not God in a costume of flesh nor a man promoted to God, but the whole of God and the whole of a man, joined forever in one Person. This is the mystery the whole Gospel of John circles around, and we will never get to the bottom of it. We are not meant to. We are meant to worship.

IV. There Was a Man Sent From God: The First Witness

Into the middle of this soaring hymn about the eternal Word, John drops a single human name. "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light... He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light" (John 1:6–8). Here is the first witness in a Gospel full of witnesses, and notice how carefully the writer guards him. John the Baptist was great — the greatest born of women, Jesus said — and crowds streamed into the wilderness to hear him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to keep them. Instead he kept pointing past himself: "He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me" (John 1:15). Think of that — before me, though He came after me, because He was from the beginning.

That is what a true witness does. He does not draw the eye to himself; he draws it to the Light. A finger that points at the moon is a poor finger if people study the finger and never look up. John the Baptist understood this so deeply that when his own followers fretted that the crowds were leaving him for Jesus, he answered with the freest words a leader ever spoke: "He must increase, but I must decrease." Every witness this Gospel calls — and there are many — serves that one purpose: to point you away from themselves and up to the Light.

V. He Came to His Own — But As Many as Received Him

Then comes the heartbreak of the Prologue, in one short line: "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him" (John 1:11). The Light came into the world He had made, and the world He had made did not know Him. The Maker walked among His creatures and they turned away. There is no sadder sentence in the New Testament. But it does not end there, and the next verse is the hinge on which your whole life turns: "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name" (John 1:12). Did you hear the door swing open? As many as received Him. Not as many as deserved Him, not as many as earned it, not the worthy or the religious or the clean — as many as received Him. And these, John says, were born "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13). A second birth, a birth from above — which is exactly where Jesus will take Nicodemus in the very next chapter, and where we will go in Unit 2.

VI. And We Beheld His Glory: Full of Grace and Truth

John ends the Prologue as a man who saw it with his own eyes: "And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). We beheld it. This is not theory to John; he was there. He watched the glory of God walk through Galilee in a man's body, full of grace and full of truth at once — never grace at the expense of truth, never truth without grace. And then the final word: "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18). The word "declared" is the word from which we get "exegesis" — Jesus is the explanation of God. If you want to know what God is like, do not guess, and do not only look at the sky. Look at Jesus. He has explained the Father to us.

So we begin where John begins, brother — not at a manger but in eternity, with the Word who was God, who made all things, who became flesh and tabernacled among us, full of grace and truth. Hold that, and every sign and every "I AM" and every witness still to come will land with its full weight. He is the Christ, the Son of God. Believe, and have life in His name.

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