Jesus, the Word (Part 1 of 2)

Music playing around the corner. So how do you prepare? Do you color eggs?

Do you fill baskets? Today on Truth for Life we begin a study that will help us rightly set our hearts on the resurrection of Jesus. Alistair Begg leads off by teaching us to take a closer look at one of the essentials of the Christian faith—the very name of Jesus.

Can I invite you to take your Bibles and turn to Luke chapter 22, the twenty-second chapter, and the thirty-ninth verse? We'll pause and ask God's help. Our God, we bless you for your faithfulness to us, and we ask now that there may be further evidence of that as we study the Bible together. Help us to pay attention, to understand, to believe, and to obey, and to rejoice in the immensity of who you are and what you've done. For we pray in Christ's name.

Amen. If you're using an NIV, you will notice that verses thirty-nine to forty-seven form a paragraph which goes under the heading Jesus prays on the Mount of Olives. When you read the verses, it seems as though the heading really doesn't do justice to the extent of the material that is conveyed. One commentator said, and coming to verse thirty-nine, here we find ourselves in the inner sanctuary of gospel history. And as we look at these verses, we find that on an evening that was cold enough for a fire, as we read in verse fifty-five, Jesus was sweating profusely. Here, while the disciples slept, Jesus is praying earnestly. Here, in the prospect of his cruel death, we find Jesus acting lovingly, concerned for his disciples that they may pray and not enter into temptation.

Here, we discover Jesus almost beside himself with the horror that he was about to experience. And it is to these verses that we need to come in the course of our studies. However, I find myself pausing in the very first word.

And I want to stay with the first word of this paragraph, the first word of verse thirty-nine, which is none other than the name of Jesus himself. I want to say to you that it's going to be important to take notes this morning if you want to actually stay with this. I'll be more lecturely than usual. I hope that it will not be the kind of teaching opportunity whereby the material that is in the notebook of the teacher is transferred to the notebooks of the pupils without it passing through the minds of any one of them. There is a great danger in the disbursement of information in that way.

I trust that will not happen. But I want to pause here, and I do so very, very purposefully. As I pay attention to what goes on—it may not always be apparent—as I listen and as I look, as I learn, as I read my mail, listen to telephone calls and answer questions, I recognize that in a congregation as diverse as this, there are a variety of views about just about everything.

And that is part of the intrigue that makes up Parkside. And where those views are in secondary matters and not of pressing importance, we can agree to disagree with one another on issues of marginal significance. But where those diverse views center on the very foundational building blocks of Christian truth, then it is imperative that those of us who are entrusted with the responsibility of teaching and preaching, that we would address those issues. And I'm not suggesting to you for a moment that there's a major issue here, but I am suggesting that it is vitally important that when we use the name Jesus, that we begin to understand just exactly who it is to whom we're referring, and that we do not fall foul of a kind of romanticism or sentimentalism that pours into the name Jesus—material that clearly should not be there—and allows to escape from that name the very essential truths that are so obviously there. So I say to you, this morning will appear to have more of a lecture to it than it will in terms of preaching, although I'm not just sure how always to distinguish between the two. This is in keeping with Luke's statement of purpose in chapter 1 and verse 4, where he says, I've organized my material and I have researched it thoroughly so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. And the presupposition is that there is a teaching ministry, and as a result of the teaching, there would be the discovery of its truth, and then there would be the conviction as to the very certainty of the truth conveyed. Now, the material that we're about to go through can be found in any systematic theology.

I can make no claim for originality in this. The study this morning is in concurrence with Paul's statement to the Corinthians, where he says, What I received from the LORD, that I also passed on to you. And I could say quite categorically to you, for what I read in my books, that I also passed on to you. And I would anticipate that you could go to Know the Truth, which you'll find written by Bruce Milne and in our bookstore, and say, Well, I think he got some of that out of there, and you would probably be right. Or you could go to the classic piece by Jim Packer, Knowing God, go to the section on the incarnation, and you may discover bits and pieces there.

And that's only to mention two of the many sources to which I am committed and upon which I am dependent. What I want to do is actually have you leave Luke altogether and turn two or three pages over to John's Gospel. Because in the prologue of John's Gospel, we have, if you like, a kind of theological statement which is an extrapolation from the word Jesus that begins verse 39 of Luke 22. And in verse 14, of course, we have the classic statement concerning the coming of Christ. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth. Now, the person of whom John writes, the Word, is introduced to his readers in the preceding thirteen verses. And he says a number of things in those verses which are not new to many of us but are important for us constantly to be refocusing on. And I want to give them to you as we go through.

I won't have time to give them all to you, but we can at least make a beginning. First of all, we need to notice that the Word is eternal. The Word is eternal. When you think of Jesus, many of you will think instinctively and immediately about Bethlehem, and understandably so, because there, from our earliest years, many of us have recognized that in the story of Christmas we think of the arrival of Jesus. And it is right for us to think of his arrival, his coming to earth. But if we think of the beginning of his existence in terms of Bethlehem, then we think wrongly. And the existence of the Word does not begin in Bethlehem.

Nor does the existence of the Word begin in creation. Throughout the years, the theologians sought to hammer this out and to come up with pithy statements that made sure that no one would be in any doubt concerning verifiable truth. And they said concerning the Word, there was never a time when he was not. There was never a time when he was not. Conversely, the people who opposed the view used to say, there was when he was not.

And the response was, there was not when he was not. There was never a time when the Word did not exist, because the Word is the eternal being. When creation took place, the Word was already in being. And the theological terminology or the words used by theologians to underpin this are straightforward. They speak in terms of the Word as being unoriginated, uncaused, and independent of any other form of existence.

And so, when you think in terms of the Word, you need to think and remember those kind of words. When your children ask you these deep questions as you're falling asleep lying on their bed in the evening, you're gonna have to tell them that this Word was unoriginated, uncaused, and independent of any other form of existence. And then, of course, you're gonna have to tell them what unoriginated means and what uncaused means and what independent of any other form of existence means. And by the time you've been successful in conveying that to a seven-year-old child, then you will have grasped something of the truth of it for yourself. But until you are able to communicate it to a seven-year-old child cogently, you and I probably do not understand it. Think about it.

If you cannot take a complex idea and break it down sufficient for the most limited intellect to grasp, then either you're just pathetic at communication or you do not have a solid enough grasp of the concept yourself. The incarnation, writes McLeod, was the intrusion and eruption of the eternal into the existence of man. The intrusion and the eruption of the eternal into the existence of man. Not the creation of the existence of the Word, but the perforation, if you like, of the line between time and eternity as the eternal Word appears.

The Word is eternal. Secondly, the Word was creator. John chapter 1 and verse 3. Notice, Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made. John, the Holy Spirit directing John, closes the back door on any kind of loophole to the notion that all things were made by him. Now, this is a vital phrase for not only understanding who Jesus is but also for understanding our world and where it came from. And again, when our children and our grandchildren ask us, Where did the world come from, Grandma? Where did the trees come from? We were reading about the continental divide in school, Grandpa.

Why do you think it is that the rivers drain in that way? Grandpa, why is it that we revolve this way and that way? And all those vast questions—which, of course, have answers that intersect with science and with cosmology and with physics and everything else—but at the end of the day, you need to be able to say to your grandchildren, Well, the Lord Jesus made all of this, you know. He is the Creator.

The Word is Creator. Sounds bizarre, doesn't it, in the twenty-first century? Because we come out of a week in which just about everything that we find on the secular newsstands and gushing at us from the sources of intelligent communication challenge this very idea and make the Christian feel as if somehow or another we are obscurantist, we are the silliest of all people, to believe such a notion as this—that the eternal God created the universe.

I don't think we need to be pinned back in the corner at all. I think we should go out—not bombastically, but certainly cheerfully and boldly—and challenge the silly ideas. May the 9th, New York Times picked up a piece from Associated Press. It had come out of England. It was under the heading, Monkeys Typing is a Mess.

I spend my days, my early mornings, ripping up newspapers. If you've seen me, you know that's true. Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Isn't that what they say? You're just a turbocharged monkey. And frankly, we could put monkeys in here, and they could do just about anything. I'm sure they would come up with Shakespeare. Well, says the article, give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that monkeys left alone with a computer failed to produce a single word. They pressed a lot of S's, said Mike Phillips, the researcher in the project, which was paid for by the Arts Council. It's the same in Britain as it is over here. If you can't find money for dumb stuff, you'll get it through the Arts Council. You can't get research money for diseases that involve only a small number of people but are killing them, but you can get money for stuff like this. But that's a separate issue. That's almost political.

Never talk about politics or religion. The researchers left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo. Paignton is in Devon in southwest England. It's a lovely place. It's the home to six Sulawesi crested macaques, which I imagine is a very fine form of monkey. And having given them the computer, then they waited. Eventually, the monkeys produced only five pages of text, primarily filled with the letter S. At the end, a few As, Js, Ls, and Ms were struck. So you got half a dozen monkeys and a computer, and they're just in like this.

And if you'll pardon me, the final sentence is, and another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard. You get the point fairly clearly, don't you? Monkeys left to themselves make a mess. Now, when you read that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were created by him, it clearly, categorically flies in the face of contemporary notions of cosmology. And there is no reason to stand back from it, there is no reason to recoil from it. Frankly, there is every reason to stand up and affirm it, to say that we are not here as a result of time plus matter plus chance.

We are not turbocharged monkeys. We have our own individual DNA. We were purposely fashioned by our Creator God, and the Word was there in the act of creation. So, in the songwriter's questions, who made the mountains, and who made the trees, and who made the rivers that run to the seas, and who placed the moon in the starry skies? The Christian doesn't say, not some impersonal, blind, capricious, even malevolent force. No, the Christian says in answer to that, the Word did it.

The Lord Jesus did this. The same one who now kneels in the garden is the creator of the garden in which he kneels. Everything in the universe is ultimately a coherent expression of the Word's creative power.

That's what this phrase means. Through him all things were made. There is nothing beyond the control and power and creative distinctiveness of the Word. And it is this Word who, along with his disciples, prepares to go to the cross, commends them to the love of his Father, bows down before the sovereign plan of his Father, anguishes in the garden.

It is immense. The creator of the universe stoops in wonder. Thirdly, the Word is eternal. The Word is creator. The Word was and is God. That's what it says there in verse 1, isn't it? The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

This is the baseline. This is the core of Christian faith. To say less than this is to deviate from Christian truth. This week, I noted that in a small parish—I think it was north of Copenhagen, in Denmark—a Lutheran pastor was not defrocked but was granted a leave of absence. The church and the state are trying to work out exactly what to do with this individual. The bishop suggested that it was time for him to stop going into his pulpit. And what was the concern that gave rise to this? Well, he told his congregation over a period of time that there is no God, that there is no such thing as the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, that there is no reality known as eternity, and there certainly is no heaven to which men and women may go.

Pretty tragic stuff, isn't it? Except that at least he was honest. At least he told the truth. That is the only commendable feature I can find in that, as opposed to others who refuse to tell the truth to their congregations, who use the terminology, Christianese terminology, while in their hearts denying the very realities which the truths are intended to convey. Watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing. Listen carefully to every word I say. Pay attention, lest you would be led away by foolish men who would distort the truth and draw people away after them.

To say less than this, that the Word was God, is to move beyond the realm of historic orthodoxy. Growing up as a boy in Scotland, I can still remember singing a song that we've never managed to get off the ground here for a variety of reasons. Some of you may remember it from your past as well. Standing in a vast congregation, my tiny voice mingling with others as I held the page of my father and sang, Who is he in yonder stall? At whose feet the shepherds fall?

It was usually Christmas time we sang it. And I can still remember the feeling of the resounding response of the congregation, particularly the voices of men, affirming in the refrain, "'Tis the Lord, O wondrous story! "'Tis the Lord, the King of glory! And at his feet we humbly fall, and we crown him, crown him, Lord of all!"

Now, I'm only five years old or four years old or six, I don't know, all of the above and beyond. I wasn't able to process all of the theology, but I had a sneaking suspicion that those around me had determined that what they were giving voice to in their songs was that which had taken hold of their minds and transformed their hearts and filled their lives. Who is he who stands and weeps at the grave where Lazarus sleeps? And then they're afraid, "'Tis the Lord!" I'm saying to myself, God cries? God weeps? Who is he who from the grave comes to succor, help and save? "'Tis the Lord, O wondrous story!" You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life with the messy cheese titled, Jesus the Word.

We'll hear more from Alistair on Monday. As you begin preparing for Resurrection Sunday, let me encourage you to benefit from the book, O Sacred Head Now Wounded. This is a rich collection of daily readings.

In fact, there are 48 readings in this book. They begin just before Easter Sunday and continue all the way to Pentecost. Each day you'll read passages of Scripture from both the New and Old Testaments. You'll recite historical prayers, creeds, and catechisms. You'll pray the Lord's Prayer, and then you'll wrap up your time of personal devotion with a benediction. You'll find all the readings provide a deeply moving time of reflection on the saving work of the Lord Jesus. And many of the prayers and hymns were written throughout the centuries by men like Jonathan Edwards, J.C. Ryle, Isaac Watts, Thomas Watson. This is a book that we believe everyone will appreciate.

It comes in a beautiful presentation with a golden-bossed cloth cover, three silk ribbons for keeping your place. If you own the Liturgy books, Be Thou My Vision or O Come O Come Emmanuel, you'll want to add this third book in the series to your collection. Ask for your copy of the book, O Sacred Head Now Wounded, when you give a donation to support the Bible Teaching Ministry of Truth for Life. You can donate through the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can give us a call at 888-588-7884. If you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth for Life at Post Office Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for studying along with us this week. Hope you have a great weekend and are able to worship together with your local church. Join us on Monday as we'll learn about the deeply personal way our triune God is involved in our salvation. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.