Journey through John 1:14-18

Good Morning Church Family – Journey Through John

Read John 1:14-18

Devo Thought: This is passage is so full of deep theological meaning and insight. There is one verse I want us to focus on though. Look at verse 18. It is a statement of fact that has been radically altered by the arrival of Jesus. John says, “No one has seen God.” Not even Moses or Abraham, not Isaiah or Enoch, not David or Solomon. None of these men saw God the Father. They may have gotten glimpses of parts of Him, but they hadn’t seen him. John goes on to explain how Jesus altered this fact. He says, “The only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” In other words, God the Son has come from the Father’s side and made the invisible God visible to us. How does he do this? Let me use an analogy to explain how Jesus does this. If someone were to show you a picture of my oldest son and then side-by-side show you a picture of me when I was in high school, you might mistake us for the same person. In so many ways, he bears my likeness. To the point that if you’ve seen him, you’ve seen me. The author of Hebrews puts it this way: “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature…” Paul says in Colossians, “He is the image of the invisible God…” What these writers mean by this is that in the life of Jesus we see the heart of the Father. They aren’t saying that if we want to know what God the Father looks like, then we should look at the face of Jesus (there’s a reason we are never given a detailed description of Jesus). They are saying that if you really want to know what God the Father is all about, what He cares about, what He would do, then look at Jesus. This is why the Word became flesh. This is how we receive grace upon grace.

Let us thank God for his gift of the fullness of grace and that we can know Him because we know Jesus.