So Why Does God Self-Select "Us" as God's Pronoun? Also, the Origin of Father and Son?

John 1: 6-14                                                    February 1, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            So here is the transition from Creator to Creation.  And the Word became flesh.  The Word, that was with God and was God in verse one.  The Word, through whom all things were made.  The Word, who brought life into being, who brought the light into the darkness.  I have named him Jesus from the very beginning.  John has not, because John has been building up to this.  Here is the ministry of Jesus.

            Jesus because flesh and lived among us.  That shall be the bulk of the gospel account, Jesus as flesh ‘among us’.  And now the witness of John, the gospel writer, of the disciples, “we have seen his glory”-eyewitness account-“as of a father’s only son” who is “full of grace and truth”. 

            “…as a father’s only son…”  I think John here is establishing the human metaphor to describe the relationship of God and the Word.  They are equated, but they are also distinct.  The Father and the Son, this is how God reveals God’s…what is the word?  Essence? Structure? Or is it more basic than that?  To structure it in time and space, where we humans are bound, was there a discussion that went something like,

“Okay, we are God and created the hairless monkeys…how do we explain what they can never comprehend?  Their brainbox is a fine bit of creation, but it has its limits, no matter what they believe,  What, in their relationship, can we use to explain what we are?  Because, in the human language, if we are to give them a pronoun to describe us, it will be ‘we’ and ‘us’.  What about husband and wife?  Well, they are going to screw up that with their sins.  Father and Son…they are going to be gender limited in their perceptions of authority, but that is what we have to work with, and in the progression of revelation, they should catch up that gender hierarchy is the result of sin and they can, in the Holy Spirit, overcome it.  Until then, we will have to work double time on them through the Spirit so they don’t get caught in thinking that the Father is some old white guy up in heaven and the Son is some blond, blue eyed Scandinavian suddenly born in the Middle East…”

            Yes, I know God loves us, this whole Gospel is an accounting of that.  But given how we humans are, I cannot help but think that if there is some kind of divine expression of frustration, we humans were enough to make the Lord express it.

            What I see John establishing is how it is we, as humans, as those who have believed in His Name and been given power to become children of God, how then we can understand not only our relationship with the Creator, but the Creator’s self-understanding, expressed to us hairless monkeys (for any Young Earth Creationists reading this, consider this to be anthropomorphizing satire of how God would consider the pinnacle of God’s creation-in light of the reality that we fell from grace). 

            But the takeaway is not trying to label the relationship of God and the Word, but on the content of that relationship, that content which is there for us, “grace and truth”. 

            These two sections, vss. 1-5 and 6-14, they form the introduction to John’s Gospel.  He takes us from the Word that was ‘in the beginning’ to the Word ‘made flesh’.  Transcendent power to imminent relationship.  That means God all-powerful to God down close and personal.  Tomorrow will be a summary before we move forward with the next verses on Wednesday.

Sidebar: Dividing up the verses in mini 'chapters', this is what I am doing, not what John has done.  As the Greek has no punctuation, neither does it have chapter and verse.  This is a human construct to facilitate quoting…chapter and verse…  As with anything, we do the best we can, depending on the Spirit of God to lead us.

Pastor Pete