The Cosmic Christ

God is coherent. God is consistent. God orders His creation in a meaningful way. That life and the universe is not ultimately absurd. It is not ultimately illogical, because ultimately there is the Logos. The culture's view of the world is that of chaos. An explosion, or the Big Bang as many people call it, just happened to form life.

But it was all a fluke, so in their view, life is void of any ultimate plan or meaning. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday. I'm Lee Webb, and today Dr. R.C. Sproul continues his series, Your Christ is Too Small. He's going to examine Christ as the Logos or the Word, and we will see that He is the ultimate meaning and significance of our lives. You know, it's interesting to me that when a person goes to an evangelistic meeting or something and makes a profession of faith, it's common practice in American evangelism to hand that new convert a copy of the Gospel of John and put that in his hand and say, now this is the first thing you should read as you get to know who Jesus is. Read John's Gospel. And there's a reason for that, because the Gospel of John is so delightful, and there's so many stories and dialogues with real people, and you get a feel for the earthly Jesus in John's Gospel.

And the irony is, at one and the same time, the Gospel of John is the simplest gospel of all. Yet, it's also the most difficult. It's the most profound. It's the heaviest, and it's the one that has preoccupied the theologians for 2,000 years. And where do you run into that heaviness but in the very opening verses of what's called the prologue? Let's look at it.

Most of you are familiar with it. You probably could recite it from memory that it begins like this. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. They have a literary award in publishing.

It's called the Dark and Stormy Night Award, which is given annually to the author who has the worst opening line in a book, and it's called the Dark and Stormy Night Award, because the joke among writers is that all the old thrillers would begin, it was a dark and stormy night. Well, I think in all of the annals of history, you know, you can think of Moby Dick starting out, call me Ishmael, or Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But never have I seen a book start with a more startling, confusing first sentence than the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word, okay, so far so good, and the Word was with God, still okay, and the Word was God.

Now that just doesn't compute, does it? I mean, how can something be distinguished from God, to be said to be with God, and then in the very next breath be identified as God? Well, you can see how the ancient philosophers and the ancient theologians would jump on this right away with this use of the term Word, and the Greek word for Word, the Greek word that is here is the word Logos. So it says, in the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.

Philosophers looked at that and they had a field day for reasons we will see in a minute. One of the interesting footnotes to church history is that in spite of the fact when the New Testament talks about Jesus, overwhelmingly the favorite title they use is Messiah, second one is Lord, and then Son of Man, way down at the bottom of the list in terms of frequency of titles applied to Jesus is this title Logos. And yet if you would study the early church fathers, the great theologians and philosophers of the Greek world and so on who were wrestling to understand the identity of Jesus, that the study of Christology in the first 300 years of church history was not only dominantly, but almost exclusively focused on this concept of the Logos. And there was a reason for it because the title Logos is one of the most philosophically weighted titles that you will ever find. But before I look at the title itself, let's look some more at some of the strange ways in which it's spoken of here. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. That with and was is the one that I want to look at for a second. If you look in your Gospel of John where it says the Word was with God, there's a harmless word in there, a word that we use every day. It could be on Groucho Marx, you bet your life, say the magic word, when a $100 a duck comes down and a $100 bill, the word there is the word with. Everyday word, nothing philosophical about that word, is there?

Here's the problem. In the Greek language, the Greeks had three words, three distinct words, each one of which is translated by the English word with. So the Greek mind understood that there are different ways that you can be with people, and those three words are the words sun, the word meta, and the word pros.

You don't have to remember them, but let me just illustrate them. The word sun you have heard in English this way. How many of you have ever been to a synagogue or syncopated rhythm? That prefix sin, which has come over into our language, comes from the Greek sun, which means with, synagogue, the synagogue was the place where people came together to be with each other. Then the second way in which one could be with somebody is the way the Greek used the term meta, and that means to be a long side of. When my wife and I walked down the street hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, she is with me.

That's meta. But the Greeks had a third way of speaking about withness, and for that they used the little word in Greek called pros. Now what's interesting in the language is that the Greek word for face was the word prosopon. And what pros means is to be with someone in a relationship of face-to-face intimacy. It's the closest possible relationship that people can have, to be in a pros relationship. And so what John is saying is that in the beginning there was the logos, and the logos was pros, God, face-to-face, so close, so intimate, so narrowly connected that they could barely be distinguished.

In fact, not only were they with each other, they were each other. Now that's a philosophical concept of the highest possible magnitude. I might just take off on that for just a second because not only do we see the relationship between God the Father and God the Son in this kind of a pros face-to-face relationship, but also the relationship between the human nature of Jesus and the divine nature was that kind of intimate face-to-face relationship. Now think like a Jew for a minute. The greatest future desire of a Jew is to be able to see the face of God. One of the biggest problems we have as Christians in living out our faith is that God is invisible.

We can talk about him and we can talk to him, but his face shall not be seen. And when the Jew would express his hope, he would do it by way of benediction, he would say, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. The Jew is saying, I want to be so close to God that I look him in the face. And what the Scriptures are saying about the Logos is that that's exactly the relationship that the Son has to the Father face-to-face. Now the flip side of that, the worst thing that could ever happen to a Jew in the Old Testament was to have God turn his back, for God to turn out the lights of the light of his countenance. And in graphic terms, the worst thing that could happen to a Jew, in fact the worst image of damnation for the Jew, would be for God to turn his back to that person. Now think for a moment of the cross. What happens on the cross when Christ calls out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken? What happens to the earth?

It's like a solar eclipse happens in the middle of the afternoon. The record teaches us that suddenly darkness came upon the earth. And I don't even think Jesus noticed that darkness, because there's a very real sense, dear friends, that on the cross, if Jesus was to be forsaken, truly forsaken by God, God had to turn his back.

That cross relationship had to be broken for an instant. And if you think about that in any depth, you'll get a deeper appreciation for the cosmic drama that was going on at Calvary. Well, what was it that the philosophers found in this title Logos that preoccupied? Probably the oldest question of man, the oldest philosophical question that there is, is what's it all about?

How does it all fit together? It's the philosophical problem of unity and diversity, and I won't get abstract, I'll get specific. You look at your life in a given day, look at the places where you go. You go to the market, you go to the bank, or even just go in the market and you see apples and you see strawberries and you see lettuce and you see cheese and you see roast beef, and you say, oh, I've got to have a varied diet. And that's just one part of your life. You have a biological dimension to your life, a psychological dimension to your life, a medical dimension to your life, a social dimension to your life. Life is full of variety. There are oak trees, there are elm trees, there's peanut bushes, there's kangaroos, there's tweedy birds, there's chocolate chip cookies. All these specific particular parts, little data bits of human experience, the question the ancient philosopher would ask is this, is there any rhyme or reason to life?

How does this stuff fit together? How can we make sense out of all these different parts of human experience? In other words, they were asking this question, does life make sense? Is there any ultimate coherency? Now you're living in a time when the average answer to that question is no, there is no ultimate coherence. It's all meaningless. There is diversity but no unity. You ever wonder why the universe is called a universe?

The very word is a mongrelized word. The word universe comes from two separate words, unity and diversity, and you sort of squish them together and you get universe. And when you study about the universe, where do you go?

To the university, where you try to find some kind of sense or coherence out of diversity. But the skepticism of our age says there's nobody home up there. There is nothing that will bring ultimate sense or coherence out of these individual pieces of our experience. And so the ultimate answer is we live in a universe that is not a universe, it's a multiverse, and it's ultimately chaos.

And if you think about that for five minutes, just for five minutes, it doesn't take any longer, you'll understand the bottom line. That means that your particular individual life is utterly meaningless, that you are just one single data bit of ultimate incoherence, ultimate disunity, ultimate diversity. It's what existentialism is all about as a philosophy. But the ancient thinkers weren't quite that cynical. They were convinced that if science was going to be possible, if human progress was going to be possible, there must be something that makes sense out of this. And so the early philosophers were seeking for what they called ultimate reality, ultimate unity. So some of them speculated about how the world was put together and some of them say, well, the whole world is made up of seeds or the whole world is made up of atoms or the whole world is made up of water or the whole world is made up of air, or they'd pick a substance and you have a piece of air that looks young and pretty over here and you have a piece of air that's not so young and not so pretty up here, but it's still all air, you know.

You've got to find some way to work it out, to try to find the order behind the facts, the logic of the facts, if you will. And that assumption, in spite of the skepticism of the philosophers, is still the daily working assumption of every scientist. It's a necessary assumption of every scientist for science to even happen.

Without it there could be no science. And the early philosophers understood that. And so they kept looking for what they called ultimate reality, and they would give different names to it. One ancient philosopher by the name of Anaxagoras said, the point of unity that makes everything hang together we call nous. That's simply the Greek word for mind. They said there has to be some principle.

They didn't think of a person. They thought of some abstract principle that would bring order and harmony. You're familiar with Greek painting and Greek art. The Greeks had a passion for order, for harmony, for coherence. And so very early in Greek philosophy with the work of a man by the name of Heraclitus and later on through the Stoics they came up with an idea that the ultimate principle that ties it all together is what they called the Logos. How many of you have ever heard this expression, there's a spark of divinity in everybody? Do you know where that comes from? It comes from the Stoics. The Stoics believed that ultimate reality was fire and that every little bit of reality, you as a person or a piece of reality, they said every person has a spark of that ultimate fire in them. They called it the Logos Spermatikoi because the ultimate fire was the Logos Spermatikos. Now I use that term for this reason. They were calling it the seminal Logos, sort of like the ultimate genetic code that makes it all work and put together.

But again, that's what people were interested in. How does it fit together? And so the Greeks developed sophisticated philosophies where they had this principle, abstract principle of unity, of order, of harmony, of beauty, of coherence, and it was called the Logos. So do you see the bombshell that fell on the playground of the philosophers and the theologians of the first century when John picks up a pen and says, in the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God and the Logos was God, and then he goes on to say what? All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. It's the cosmic Logos.

You could translate it this way. In the beginning was logic, and logic was with God, and logic was God. Now, boy, that would cause a reaction in the church, right? If I said God was logic, boy, I'd get killed. But really what that means is God is coherent. God is consistent.

God orders His creation in a meaningful way, that life and the universe is not ultimately absurd. It is not ultimately illogical because ultimately there is the Logos. But the thing that is so radically new here in this teaching of the Jews that no Greek ever dreamed of – there's two things that are radically new – the first thing is that the Logos is a person. The Logos is not just some abstract principle or impersonal force. The Logos is not an it. The Logos is a he.

I have a hard time relating to its or to seminal fires. But this Logos who runs everything has personality, which means I can have a personal relationship to him. That's the radical innovation of the Christian concept of the Logos. That's radical innovation number one. Radical innovation number two was this, as you read further on in the text, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

If you talk to a modern person about the claims of the New Testament for Jesus, the first thing they're going to ask about is, hey, what about the resurrection? I think the teaching of Jesus is incredible. It's interesting. It's fascinating.

It's wise. It's profound. But you're not really asking me to believe a guy's dead for three days and comes back walking out of the grave. The scandal to modern intelligence and to modern sophistication is the scandal of the empty tomb.

We just cannot get past the idea of the finality of physical death. That's not what bothered the Greeks. It wasn't the resurrection of the body that drove the Greeks up a wall.

It was the incarnation of the Logos. If you know anything about Greek philosophy, you know that the Greeks had a rather disparaging view of anything physical, and it was utterly unthinkable to the Greek philosopher that the supreme idea, the spiritual being, could ever stoop so low to risk the pollution of his purity by taking upon himself a human body. That's why there were those who said that Jesus didn't really have a body. The so-called Docetists who came by and said, well, he just was a phantom. He looked like he had a body. He seemed like he had a body.

He appeared like he had a body, but he didn't really have a body. Why does John say elsewhere in his writings, he who denies that Jesus came in the flesh is the Antichrist? That's what that verse is all about, because that was the Antichrist mentality of the first century.

They were denying the fact of a physical incarnation, that God could take upon Himself a human nature and enter in to the scene of history. I love the way John says it there, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That word dwelt among us is a mistranslation. It literally is, and the Logos became flesh, marks, and pitched His tent in our midst. He tabernacled among us.

That's the way a Hebrew semi-nomad talks, not the way a Greek philosopher talks. But God came down and pitched His tent in our village where we could see with our eyes or we could rub shoulders with. He put Himself inside our body. Now, if you see what it says earlier in the text, in Him were all things.

Nothing was made that was made except by the Logos. Do you see that John starts his gospel with exactly the same words that the book of Genesis began, in the beginning? And the astonishing thing that John is saying is that the Logos is the Creator of the world. Not only is He the ordering principle and the one who brings harmony and coherence to all things, but He is the actual creative force of the universe. Now, usually we think of creation as being exclusively the work of the Father, but if we look at the whole teaching of Scripture, we see that the work of creation is Trinitarian, just as the work of redemption is Trinitarian.

Not only does God the Father, is He active in creation, but the Son is active as well. The Logos is the one in whom, by whom, and for whom all things exist. You want to know the reason for your existence. Do you want to know the goal of your humanity? It's Christ.

That's what the Bible is saying. The Bible is not introducing Jesus as a religious teacher, or even as a prophet, but the very ultimate meaning and significance of your life, that the meaning of the universe is found in the Logos. Dr. R.C. Sproul helping us see the majesty and glory of Jesus. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind as we air the series Your Christ is Too Small. He taught these lessons in 1986, and we've never aired them before, but they're a great example of the depth that R.C. always brought to his teaching series. You know, it's been such an encouragement to hear from so many of you who tell us of the impact of R.C. 's teaching. For example, Brian remembers the first time he heard R.C.

on the radio. He was talking about what no one else was daring to talk about, which was predestination or election. It was incredible. And it sparked an interest in me. I started reading Romans, particularly Romans 9 and Ephesians 1, and I started reading things like A.W. Pink and all these other formed theologians. And he ignited a passion in me, and he helped me understand the historical context of why Protestants separated from Catholicism and how I could side with Luther, because I had a similar conversion experience as Luther.

And I became really passionate, and it wasn't for R.C. Sproul and his teaching, his theology. No one else was teaching theology on, I mean, everyone else teaches the Bible and goes through the Bible and so on, but no one was teaching systematic theology.

No one was telling you what to believe and why and apologetics. The Bible college and seminary came through the airwaves and reached me, even though I never went. And I've been eating his material up ever since, and I still tune in.

I still purchase material, and it really keeps me rooted and grounded and passionate in my faith, keeping me growing so that then I can disciple those around me. And Brian's story is possible only because of the financial gifts of listeners like you. The series we're hearing this week is part of a large library of exclusive messages reserved for Ligonier's ministry partners. It's a good example of the extra discipleship resources that are made available to those who commit to supporting Ligonier's gospel outreach on a monthly basis. Their steady, dependable giving means that this teaching continues to expand and reach more people year after year. And as a way of saying thank you, we provide extra resources to our partners each month, including the teaching series we're hearing this week. In our 50th year of ministry, would you consider committing to a monthly gift of $25 or more? When you do, Dr. Sproul's series Your Christ is Too Small will be available immediately in your learning library online, along with the entire ministry partner library. That includes exclusive monthly messages. You'll also receive Table Talk magazine every month, discounts to attend Ligonier conferences and events, exclusive resource offers, and a copy of the Reformation Study Bible. So sign up to become a partner now when you go to renewingyourmind.org slash partner, or you can call us here at Ligonier.

Our number is 800-435-4343. Well, tomorrow we will wrap up Dr. Sproul's series Your Christ is Too Small. We've seen Christ's majesty and His divinity, but tomorrow we'll see what the Pharisees thought of Jesus. And the title of the message ought to grab your attention, Jesus the Glutton and Winebabber. That's Friday, here on Renewing Your Mind. God bless you. God bless you.