He Has Made Him Known

This transcript has been automatically generated

Chapter 1 and verse 18. I suppose you could say that these 3 sermons that I’m going to give on the theme of Revelation are a response from the Bible to that glorious prayer of Moses’s, Lord, show me your glory. And the first today is in the 18th verse of John 1.

No one has ever seen God. The only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has, he has made him known.

Now, as you can see by looking at it in the way that it’s been printed in your Bible, this verse is the marvellous climax and conclusion of the famous prologue. It comes, of course, from one of the great Christmas readings that you have probably heard a number of times in carol services in the last month. And I think we are struck again when we read it with the plainness, the simple words that John uses to express the most tremendous truths. I mean, look at that, that first phrase: no one has ever seen God. I think it really is impossible for anybody to come up to you after that and say, it depends on your interpretation.

There it is, absolutely plain and crystal clear. No one, no man has ever seen God. And yet, as I’m sure you know, and I think I’ve said a good many times before, there is a profound depth in the writings of John. He uses this simple language to deal with the most transcendent themes. So that I think the casual reader of John’s Gospel finds it rather hard going.

Certainly you find yourself gasping for air as you see the marvellous view from the top of the mountain, like the 2 bicyclists this last week, and you view things as John does from eternal heights. But I think for most of us it is sometimes hard going to know all that John means by his tremendous sentences without a good deal of careful study. Well, that’s what I want to do into this particular verse this morning. Now it’s one of the grandest statements about revelation in the Bible, and of course the whole point of this prologue is to talk about revelation. Jesus is described as the Word, which tells us that God has spoken in a mysterious universe.

Jesus is described as the true light, which means that God has shone into a dark world. Sometimes I’ve had reason to come down in the middle of the night, perhaps to turn the heating on, and I’ve come into this building and it’s dark and silent and slightly creepy. I’m glad, glad to go back into my house and to turn the light on and not stumble around anymore. And this universe is not just creepy, but it’s a very unkind universe, isn’t it? Without any words to guide us and without any light to shine.

And philosophically and in so many ways, that’s what the universe is in the 20th century. People don’t know where it’s come from and they don’t know where it’s going. But the prologue of this Gospel says that the light has shone, not just for an elite few, not just for very clever people, not just the students and people who can make their way in the world quite easily, but verse 9, the true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. It’s a light for everybody. And therefore a light for you and a light for me.

So in this revelation that Christianity gives us, we have an unveiling of things that have been hidden, a laying bare of things that have been covered up, a throwing open of doors that have been closed, and a breaking of the seals of things hitherto locked and barred. As I was preparing, I was reading the paper of the pseudo-excitement that some journalists managed to get in this rather dry season for news when the Public Records Office releases one more 12 months of news. There’s a good deal of excitement, isn’t there, as to what Winston Churchill said and what somebody else said to him. I think the best comment I saw last week on the opening of one more year in the 30-year-old rule was somebody said as they read what Churchill had been saying and others had been saying, which was rather surprising as it happened, He said in the paper, you— it just shows that you don’t know what’s really going on. Now I guess that’s so, isn’t it?

You may read your Mirror in the morning, or whatever your favourite paper is. You may be a good deal more sophisticated than that and feel that the old codgers don’t know much about the modern world. But whether you read The Guardian or The Mirror, you don’t really know what’s going on, do you? We don’t know what’s going on in the corridors of power. We don’t know what people are really saying to themselves.

It’s only 30 years later that these things are revealed and we know a good deal, a bit more than we do now. It’s revealed then later. Now as I understand the real tragedy of life, it’s here, isn’t it? That many die, I’m afraid we have to say the vast majority of people die and they never knew what was going on. What consciousness and understanding they have after death if they are not Christ, we don’t know.

But surely it must be an agony to look back And to realise that you missed the whole point of existence. You didn’t know there was a God. You didn’t know that this was the theatre of his activities, and you didn’t know what the Christian church was. You didn’t know that you could be forgiven. You didn’t know that your life could have purpose.

You just didn’t know what was going on. That future day, the Bible says, is going to be a day of great revelation. It’s only partial revelation today. On that day, it’ll be a day of great revelation, and we too shall know much more of what is really going on. But at least we know something.

Whereas our friends and neighbours know nothing of what it’s all about.

Now with that in mind, let’s come to this verse which is a great introductory verse on Revelation and let’s look at the 3 phrases because they are, I think, luminous and we’ll start with that first phrase, no one has ever seen God, and I’ve called it an uncompromising negative.

For myself, I discovered or rediscovered these negatives about 2 years ago when we did a series on John on Tuesdays. And I was very struck then again, and I’ve remained so, with the fact that John is never satisfied simply to be what is sometimes called a positive teacher. That is, he’s not satisfied to say things in a positive and ordinary way without adding a number of negatives in order to clarify what he’s really saying. I don’t suppose it interests you, but there are some pundits who love this kind of thing. The little word not comes 286 times in John’s Gospel, which is more than any other book in the New Testament and more, I think, than the other Gospels combined.

That means that he’s not only a plain speaker in the sense that he uses ordinary words, but he is a plain speaker in the sense that he is uncompromising and he is often telling us that when something is true, something else is not true. Shades of Francis Schaeffer.

Let me give you an example of that in the prologue. Look at verse 3: All things were made through him. What a tremendous positive statement, but it’s followed with a negative: Without him was not anything made that was made. Now that’s not just a purple passage, not just because John realises that the English literature of the Elizabethan age will turn that into a rather marvellous English sentence.

Now he puts the negative therein for a purpose. Possibly it was that in his day matter was regarded as evil, and they— well, indeed we know that it was so. And many people thought that a good God couldn’t have anything to do with evil, and therefore there were various emanations from God, various spirits. And as they got further and further away from God, there was one of these emanations that had the idea of creating things, but it was a bad thing, as the authors of 10:66 and all that would say. Foolish to create matter.

That’s why everything was evil around us. It wasn’t us, it was the world in which we lived that was evil. Now against that, you see what a magnificent negative this is: without him, without Christ, was not anything made that was made. So you can’t say that matter is evil because the Lord Jesus Christ has had his hand on all of it. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

Again, there may have been some people then, as there are now, who thought and think that matter is eternal. Anybody who runs his life by an evolutionary philosophy believes that matter is eternal, and therefore everything that we are doing here this morning actually emerges from our own social condition, that we feel the need to have some reassurance that there’s somebody out there, and so we meet together and invent a religion. In other words, if matter is eternal, matter is the source of everything. And so everything that we do today emerged from a piece of slime many millions of years ago.

But you see, this tells us that matter is not eternal, that long before the immemorial hills were made, Christ was, is.

I can’t stop to tell you how important those things are. There are many of you who’ve read some philosophy and some sociology who will know how important those things are. The negative is as important as the positive. What he is saying is that everything came from the hands of Christ and everything is for the purpose of glorifying Christ. Nothing came from the hand of God that did not come through Christ and for his glory.

That’s a tremendous statement but you wouldn’t get it without the negative.

Now a much better case, and I think it’s just worth flipping over to it, you know it so well, Here’s John 14:6. It’s worth turning over in case there’s just one person in church this morning that doesn’t know it. John chapter 14 verse 6 starts with a magnificent positive statement. Here is the statement. Jesus is speaking, verse 6: I am the way, the truth, and the life.

And it may be, I am the true and living way.

I vividly remember sitting listening to the radio one day when a well-known speaker was expounding that sentence, and he gave a marvellous exposition of it. And then we stopped, and I waited for him to go on to the second half, but it was the end of the programme. She’s never the end of the programme with John. It isn’t enough to say that Christ is the true and living way. He has to add the negative, which is profoundly disturbing and extremely unpopular.

It says no one— another no one, he’s very fond of that word— No one comes to the Father but by me. Now my friends, you can teach, if you’re a teacher, that Jesus is the way and the truth and your headmaster or headmistress will not object. But if you say that no one comes to the Father but by Jesus, they will object because that is a very offensive thing to say today. Do you see, it’s an uncompromising negative.

Well now let’s come back then to this great statement in John 1:18. It is an uncompromising and intolerant statement. It says quite plainly that no one has ever seen God. Don’t apologise for proper Christian intolerance. I need hardly say that there is also a proper Christian tolerance.

That’s not our theme this morning. But there is a proper intolerance in all of life. The intolerance of the surgeon or the theatre sister with germs in the middle of the operation. The intolerance of the foreman in the Jaguar car factory as they clock up bigger and bigger records in export as he searches out faults. He’s intolerant of them, the intolerance of the concert pianist with any note that’s out of tune.

So the last time I was at the Barbican, just before Christmas, listening, I think, to a young Hungarian pianist, just before— we know how the, at the Barbican, the piano emerges, uh, from the, uh, bottom somewhere through the little hole and then is shovelled out to the front. And of course, if you shovel it, there’s a few phrases to the purist, those few paces to the purist, you got out of tune again. So everybody was waiting and suddenly a funny little man came with a bag rather like the gas man, opened it, started screwing around. He was obviously the personal tuner of the great pianist who was to follow, or at any rate somebody who heard whenever he came to London. So we had to wait for 5 minutes while clock, clock, clock went on and pushed the notes a little bit more.

Now that, you see, you may say is pernickety, it’s intolerant. But if you’re a great pianist, I suppose you’re naturally intolerant of sounding out of tune. You don’t want the Times critic to be able to say that the next morning. So you see, that was very unpopular. The pagan world of John’s day was very hospitable to all kinds of religions, which is why when Paul went to Athens, they were glad to have a sermon from him.

It didn’t matter what he had to say as long as it was new. There was room for everything and everybody.

But with Christianity, from the beginning, this intolerance has been one of its most important points. Now let me tell you that this great negative that is in front of your eyes— will you put your eyes upon it again— destroys many things. Let me give you— I haven’t time to comment more than a sentence— let me give you some of the things that this great sentence destroys. They’re worth noting down on your cuff or whatever you do. First, it destroys the claims of the mystery religions of the days of Paul, the cults in other words of his day, too numerous to mention.

And at the climax of the activities that you went to, if you joined one of the little mystery religions and were initiated by a priest, there was a kind of enlightenment, just as one used to get in the Hare Krishna thing here a year or two back if you joined that. That was a mystery religion. Freemasonry is another mystery religion, and it’s rather gone bad.

Now, they were very popular. There was one on every corner of the street in the ancient world, like there’s a pub in every corner of an English street. And into these you went to drown your sorrows and to find the answer to life. And each of them claimed some new insight into what life was all about. And each of them claimed to be able to make you see the divine.

And the Christian preacher walking along the road in those early days, as he looked at each one of these, would say— and how offensive it must have seemed— no man coming out of that door has ever seen seen God.

Secondly, it destroyed and destroys the claims of Judaism to be the final word. That’s why the contrast is put with verse 17. In giving the law, Moses had given a true revelation of God. But it’s essential to say that the theophanies, as they’re called— that is, the visions people had in the Old Testament— were very partial. They were not immediate visions of God, which is why we had that marvellous lesson when God says to Moses, I’m afraid you can’t see me, for no man can see me and live.

But you’ll just see— and actually what he saw in the end was to hear certain words, very wonderful words about God. And so John very clearly, and making the contrast here with verse 17, is making it clear that as far as Christianity is concerned, Judaism is now not the final word. Very striking, that, isn’t it? As we’ve watched these rather pathetic but remarkable people from Ethiopia being airlifted. What an astonishing thing it’s been, hasn’t it, this week?

Who but the State of Israel would attempt it? You know, they win our admiration, don’t they, by this? And as we see the television pictures of these people worshipping in their little tiny synagogues in some poor part of the Sudan or Ethiopia. It’s hard, isn’t it, to say as a Christian, of all that, no man has ever seen God. It superseded.

Thirdly, it destroyed then, and it destroys ever since, the claims of the mystics. Some of you may have read of the mystics, people who by prayer and contemplation and asceticism seek to be united with the ultimate in life. The Indians are very fond of mysticism, and you’ll see in any film of the Ganges mystics. But it also has come into the Christian church down the ages. Julian of Norwich is a famous name, Madame Guyon.

You may have heard of those names, of the great Christian mystics. And they of course had more truth in their understanding because they had the Bible. But basically the claim of mysticism is to be able to get to God without the mediation of the Bible. And the preaching of the Christian church. And John, it seems to me, destroys the claim of the mystic.

He says to them that whatever they do, however ascetical they may be, how many years they may spend alone in prayer in some monastery, yet the word is quite plain: no man, no woman has ever seen God, whatever they may say, whatever books they may write.

Fourthly, of course, it destroys the claims of the ethnic religions. Christianity is not regarded as a religion in the Bible. Indeed, the word religion is not a biblical word. You won’t find it in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament it doesn’t mean what we mean in everyday language in the classroom. Christianity is not considered by John to be one of the world’s religions.

It’s a unique and final revelation. It says that God has spoken through Jesus Christ, but apart from that there is only darkness. It’s hard to say that as you go back to the London Hospital and pass this new and rather magnificent mosque. What group of Christians in the East End of London could put together a church building as modern as that today?

And yet John’s statement is absolutely plain about that mosque, that all that they do there is in a sense to be frustrated because no man that way can see God. And then of course, fifthly and lastly, it destroys the claims of all the super spiritual down the ages, all the leaders of every cult and religion, like Joseph Smith, that young, feckless boy from a large family in Vermont in the early 19th century who was converted in a religious revival, I think about 1830, and then later on claimed— a man of no education— claimed that God had revealed his truth on golden plates. And if you’ve ever talked to a Mormon, you’ll know how Firmly that belief is still held despite the fact that Joseph Smith ended up in prison and was killed in a murderous brawl. Yet that religion has swept the world, and they would claim through following that revelation of Joseph Smith that they see God in a way that other people don’t. And against that, what does John say?

No man, no Mormon, has ever seen God.

Now this negation of all other claims to find a knowledge of God outside of the biblical revelation, outside of Christ, this denying of any possibility of success in man’s search for the ultimate, this refusal to take seriously the words and works of so-called religious geniuses in history and in literature, this rejection of holy men and of asceticism in whatever clime and whatever culture, this rejection of all spiritual arrogance, this denying, this negation, this refusal is the very stuff of apostolic Christianity.

And it barred the way into the early church for multitudes who would have come if they could have brought their own suitcase with them, carrying their own ideas of God, but the gate was barred. One remembers the traditional storey of John flying from the bars. Do you remember when Cerinthus, the great heretic, walked in to have his shower, or whatever they had in those days? That was the spirit of the early church, you see. The great apostle getting up and flying out because they would have nothing to do with a heretic.

They were intolerant. They were exclusive. They began their religious teaching with this tremendous negative: no man has ever seen God.

Now, in these few minutes, I don’t think I can drive that home enough into your mind, but I hope at least I have awakened you to the tremendous claim that is made there, the negative. Let’s look now at the next phrase: the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father. We turn now to an incomparable person, and I must be very brief here because it’s familiar, I think, to all of us.

It’s very fascinating in this prologue to see how John prepares the way for the name of Jesus. He doesn’t actually mention the name till verse 17. Before we get there, we hear about the word, which is a revelation, isn’t it? A revelation word. Because there may be something going on in my head.

I hope there is on this cold morning. I wondered when I got up. And I hope there’s something going on in your head at the moment. I’m not sure. But all I know is that whatever’s going on in your head and whatever’s going on in my head, unless I speak a word, nothing’s going to happen.

What an extraordinary thing it is, isn’t it? Air going over my larynx and taking my mind into your mind. What would life be without words? What would it mean for Robert and Beverly to join us this morning if we couldn’t talk to them and they couldn’t talk to us?

Why, it’s the very stuff of life as we reveal one another to each other. Indeed, we sometimes reveal too much by our words, don’t we? The word. The light. Again, what a marvellous revelation word.

Now this then is the one who has come. He is, verse 6, sent from God. Not in the sense that John was sent from God, for he is greater than the greatest preacher that ever came. He comes from the other side. John comes from our side.

John emerges from the wilderness, from a family that we can recognise. But he comes from the other side. One of you was telling me at school last term that James Irwin appeared, you know, the Christian astronaut, and he holds in his hands a lump of moon rock. It’s actually a phoney plastic bit, of course, because a lump of moon rock would be far too valuable and no one would insure it. But there it is anyhow, and all the children goggle.

And James Irwin gives his lectures and testifies to his faith in Jesus Christ. But though James Irwin and his friends stood for an hour or two shivering in the moon’s atmosphere, they came from our side. But this one comes from the other side. He is the only Son of the Father who is in the bosom of the Father. This phrase, the only Son, again I would commend to you— there isn’t time this morning now to look at it.

You’ll find it again in verse 14. But the point of it is to show that he is unique.

I wish that word meant something, don’t you? Doesn’t mean anything today. These words are overused. They even appear on cornflake packets, don’t they? We’re told it’ll be a unique experience in the Evening Standard to go to a particular West End play.

Or we enjoy in our holiday at Christmas time looking through travel brochures and hear that it’ll be a new unique holiday if we sign up with Blunderbuss Travel. Our motto: our coaches get you there whatever the opposition.

Now those words unique, of course, are absurd, aren’t they? Blunderbuss coaches and West End plays are not unique.

But he is unique. That means literally he is without an equal and there is no one like him.

There is an alternative reading, as you will see in your margin if you have a modern translation. Which is marked B in my version. No other son, other ancient authorities read God. Now I must confess that I understand why the Revised Version translators preferred son.

God there is a minority version, that is to say the number of manuscripts that have God rather than son are in the minority. But you may know that it’s a rule of those who translate that the minority reading is nearly always right. Because no one would have changed Son to God, but somebody might well in copying have changed God to Son, since the phrase the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father is a rather harsh one. The possibility is, the probability is, however, that that was the original reading. So it is even more striking: the only God, the only Word, the only Light, the only Son who was in the bosom of the Father, the closest possible place of privilege and union, like a child at the breast, with the undertone of affection and love and total dependence.

The only God begotten of the Father, Word, Light, Son, in the bosom of the Father. This is the one who’s made him known.

Now it seems to me that what we want to say today to educational authorities, for example, is to say, yes, we are happy that you should study in schools comparative religion as long as it really is a comparison. My experience and that of many of my friends is that actually Jesus is not allowed to speak for himself, because if he does speak for himself adequately, There’s no comparison.

So although people claim in fact to give fair shares for everybody, you will find that there isn’t fair shares for this one, this only one, this unique one, because in fact there’s nobody else like him, nobody who spoke like him, acted like him, lived like him, died like him.

Now we must hurry over that because that’s fairly familiar and our time is flying, and I want to say something about the last phrase. First we start, you see, with an uncompromising negative. Then we look at this unique person who comes from the other side, comes from the affectionate home of God, comes from the Father. And what does he do? Well, the last phrase is he gives us a certain knowledge.

He has made him known. What a lovely phrase. Just look at it. Pinch yourself. Do you believe it?

Isn’t it a wonderful phrase? So simple. He has made him known.

The original word there is a striking one. It comes very rarely in the New Testament. It’s the word from which we get the English exegesis.

What he is saying is that the Son exegetes the Father.

That is, the purpose of my coming into the pulpit is not to tell you what I’m thinking about when I got up this morning. But to exegete the Scriptures, to tell you what is in this sentence, to go through it step by step, word by word, sentence by sentence, as we’ve done this morning. Not to tell you what I think, but to tell you what is there in the verse. The authority lies not in me but in the verse, doesn’t it? In the truth.

Now is it not a striking thing that John says that the Son is the exegete of the Father? It was used technically in the religions of the way— of the day of interpreting sacred laws that were handed down by tradition. There were many such oracles in the ancient world, and I did some reading yesterday afternoon of some of these oracles. There was an oracle at Delphi. I didn’t— nobody knows quite how they did it.

It was some kind of machinery. You put your question in, you got your answer out. But the amusing thing is, if you read the Greeks when they went to their oracles, that if they didn’t like the answer, they shoved another penny in and said, try again. It’s really most amusing. They’re most amusing people, the Greeks, at times.

When they were going to be invaded, the Greeks, so they went to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi and they asked for an answer and they got a dusty answer that they’d certainly be beaten. So they said, we don’t accept that, we want another answer. So they got a better answer. Isn’t that just like modern people with the Bible? They don’t like that.

Go into another church, you’ll get a better answer. I’m gonna stay in this church that sticks to the Bible.

Now what does he exegete? Well, I suppose I can say one thing here, and that is he says that God is the Father. One of the striking things about the heretical book that you may be too young to remember, Honest to God, written by a radical theologian in 1963, is that he talked about God for 6 or 7 chapters without once calling calling him Father. I preached about it for 2 Tuesdays. Unknown to me in the congregation was Dr. Elsie Chamberlain, a very, very formidable Free Church leader of a past generation.

She was waiting for me when I got outside the church, and I got a rocket. I was told that I, as a young man— I was young then— I, as a young man, shouldn’t dream of taking offence at what such a great and learned man as Dr. Robinson had said. I felt slightly taken aback by this And I said, well, Dr. Chamberlain, isn’t it interesting that he never calls God Father in the whole of the book? And I never forget her face. It really did, as they say, fall.

And she said, I never noticed that. I must go and read it again.

How can you write a book about God if you’re a Christian without calling him Father? I mean, that’s the whole point of it, isn’t it? Turn over to chapter 5, verse 19.

Truly I say to you, the Son does nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. Verse 20: For the Father loves the Son and shows him all things. Chapter 6, verse 46: Not that anyone has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father. And therefore, one more only, chapter 14, verse 9, that familiar conversation between Philip and Jesus. Verse 8 of John 14: Philip said, Lord, show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied.

Jesus said to him, have I been so long with you and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Do you see the wonder of that? No man has ever seen God, so you’ll never find God that way.

But you can see me. That’s the great message of John’s Gospel. Look, look and listen and learn. Look, look at the Son. Look at what he does.

Listen to what he says. See him, and in seeing him you have seen the Father.

So I want to start the first of these sermons on Revelation by saying the very close link that they have with preaching.

Jesus is the supreme exegete. He is the preacher. That’s why I asked that that lesson should be read from Romans 10:17. There isn’t even time to turn it up now because our time has run away. But in that it says that faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ.

And what that literally means is that faith comes by hearing Jesus Christ speak. How do you hear Jesus Christ speak? You hear him speaking by the preachers he sent. That is the view of preaching that the New Testament has, that Jesus was the great preacher of the truth by word and deed, and that those who pass on to people the knowledge of those words and deeds are bringing face to face with the contemporary world the word of Christ. And it’s from that that faith is born, that people see the Father.

One of Lord Baldwin’s sons, deeply grieved at the way his father’s reputation was destroyed soon after his death, wrote a biography to defend his father, and he called it My Father: The True Storey. Jesus came into the world to do just that, to say to us, my Father, the true storey. There is no other account that is true. And God still calls people today to preach that storey, and as they do, people’s eyes open and God gives them a revelation of truth. He makes it known.