Clough John Lesson 5

The Word and the Heathen – John 1:9-13

The first 18 verses of John 1 deal with the introduction to the Word of God. John the Apostle placed these 18 verses here to define his terminology, to acquaint you with his mode of argument, to show us an overall outline of what He was going to do. The first two verses of this prologue of John dealt with the relationship of the Word of God to the Creator, and we concluded that the doctrine of the Trinity is taught in those first two verses, that wherever men come and touch God, they come and touch God at the point of the Second Person. It is the Second Person of the Trinity that men know; it is the Second Person of the Trinity, not the First or the Third that men have always known down through history, even before the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then in verses 3-5 we said that was the relationship of the Word of God to the creation. And we showed that the Word of God was the light of the world, and by light we mean the light that is pictured in John’s Gospel to be given the interpretation of life. In other words, you have a man who is walking in darkness; he needs a light. Why does he need light? Because it is light that points his way, defines his way. It is a spiritual light and the Logos is the spiritual light that men need and have by grace. The work of the spiritual aspect is shown by a created light of Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” it says, and the first day He said, “Let there be light,” and that light was a physical light, it was a created light, but it was a light that was brought into existence a certain way that it could forever be a picture of the spiritual light. And in the future, God’s glory will reign in the new creation to such a degree that the spiritual light that we see now will become the physical light and no longer will the new heavens and the new earth be ruled by a created light but by the uncreated eternal light of God Himself; the unseen, physical that is, unseen light now, will become the seen then because God Himself will be seen then. But right now in history we have two lights, the created physical light and the uncreated spiritual light given to us by revelation. Then in the future we will have a physical light that will shine and illuminate the physical creation.

In verses 6-8 we said we have the relationship of the Word of God to the prophets. John used the most common example of the day, which was John the Baptist. For four centuries the nation Israel had not seen a living prophet; for four centuries the heavens were silent and no one heard a real live word from God. That was a whole new experience to have a prophet, and so John was foremost among all the prophets. Jesus said that he said he was the greatest of the prophets. And because He did the Apostle John uses John the Baptizer in verses 6-8 as an illustration of the Old Testament prophets, and he said now what is the relationship of the Word to those prophets? We know the relationship of the Word to God, the Godhead; we know the relationship of the Word in general to creation, but now in verses 6-8 we have the relationship of the Word of God to the prophets, and the emphasis in verses 6-8 was not what John was; the emphasis was not on his personality, his hang-ups in religious circles, that you have to act a certain way, you have to have a certain kind of personality, you have to pray with a certain spiritual accent or somehow your prayers never make it. You have to have this so-called model personality or you just aren’t filled with the Holy Spirit, and there’s kind of a bullying that goes on in religious circles to force everybody to act exactly the same, and that’s unscriptural because the emphasis here is not on the person of John, but it says in verse 7, “the same came for a witness,” it didn’t say he came to be a witness by his scintillating personality; he came as a witness, in other words, one who would be witnessing. So the emphasis is on the actions of John, not his personality.

It is also stated that the witnessing in John is not buttonholing someone; the witnessing in John was witnessing in such a way, it says, that all men might believe. Now how can you witness in such a way that all men might believe. We said what it means is by witnessing to the light so that men will be morally accountable to that witness. By that we mean that the effective witnessing will remove the legitimate obstacles to faith, it will lay a basis of credibility for our faith, so that every person who comes before the great white throne judgment can never say I never had a clear witness. The true witness will always provide a basis for faith and it does not provide a basis for faith by whipping someone’s emotions up, singing forty stanzas of Just As I Am, and inviting someone to raise their hand and roll down the aisle. That is not the basis of faith, never has been, never will be. It’s the basis for a lot of phony stuff that goes on in religious circles but true New Testament Christianity is always thinking men with their heads screwed on who see the facts and believe; and you can’t believe unless you see the facts and are convinced they are facts.

That’s why I was so careful during communion to point out this communion is not some spooky thing that we go through and you tough the piece of bread and you get some sort of a charge out of it. That’s the mystical sacramental view of communion; it’s unscriptural because it distorts the original concept of ceremony in Scripture. Nowhere do you have that ridiculous picture of ceremony in God’s Word. If you understand the Passover the communion is just simply a refined Passover. In the Passover no one ever thought that you got some spooky charge out of drinking the third cup of redemption or something. The only charge you got out it is if someone shifted the wine on you. The point of celebrating the Passover was simply a memorial, and you could celebrate in a bad mood, a good mood, in a shack or in a palace and it didn’t make any difference. It meant that you were focusing your attention on the work of Jesus Christ.

So we have the emphasis not upon the man, not upon his personality but upon witness, and this is why John is the Gospel for evangelism. I’ve said this before and will say it again, if you have a friend who is interested in the Christian faith, challenge them to read the Gospel of John in a modern translation, at a certain point when you’ve witnessed to them a little bit, refuse to talk to them any more until they read at least three or four chapters in John. If they forget your questions, I’m not going to answer them, you read this and when you’ve read the first three or four chapters then we’ll get back and discuss, and that way you can control the conversation and bring it back to Scripture. That’s what you need to do. You don’t need to discuss all the other questions; get back to Scripture. You can discuss all the other questions but discuss it within the framework of Scripture, not somebody’s opinion in this group and that group. Go back to Scripture.

Tonight we come to John 1:9-13. What does this section refer to? This refers to the relationship of the Word of God to humanity. Verses 6-8 the Word of God is relationship to the teachers and the prophets; verses 9-13 the relationship of the Word of God to the human race since Adam, all during history, what has been occurring. Verse 9, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. [10] He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.” So we start with verse 9 and those of you who have some Greek, if you pay attention to the text you’ll see some very interesting things. You’ll notice at the beginning of verse 9 there’s no subject to the verb. Those of you with King James will also see that the text is in italics, that means there is a supplied subject to that verb, but the subject of the verb really isn’t there; the translators have to guess. What is the subject? All the text says is “was the true Light,” so we have to guess that the subject can be translated as “that,” continuing the thought of verse 8. What was it that John gave witness to? That which was the Light, it was that light, he said, that was the true Light, not John, not any prophet, not the false Gnostics, they’re all spurious light, but that was the true Light, distinguished from false light. What would be a false light? Anything that claims to be light. In our own history recently, or in the last few centuries of the world we have had a movement called the Enlightenment. That was one of the spurious false lights of the world. It would be the true light, the Reformation, not the Enlightenment. Those of you who study history, it’s not the Renaissance at all; it’s the Reformation that counts. The Reformation is the true light, the Renaissance is the false light. The Reformation, that was the true light, “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” because it witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now we have to ask, what does it mean to enlighten every man…enlighten every man, every man, not some men, not just Jewish men but every man. This has reference to the concept of God-consciousness, that all members of the human race upon reaching the age of accountability, which we do not know exactly when it occurs, I would guess it would occur at the time when the child can master language, that is, when he can discuss various concepts. And when he is thinking in those terms and can use verbal language he is accountable, his conscience is fully functioning. At this point every member of the human race has a consciousness of God. It doesn’t mean they’re Christians, it means that they know that God is there in the same way that a child has no trouble recognizing a dog from a person, or a person from a rock in the back yard. We are born with categories and children grow up and they learn these categories. You don’t teach them those categories; no school teaches them those categories. Oh, we teach them the specific words, we teach them 2 + 2 is 4 but the very concept of number has never been taught to a child. The concept of a word, that has never been taught to a child; these are basic concepts that seem grounded and routed in the soul. And so the concept of God is just like all the other concepts, it is there from God-consciousness. No one teaches God’s existence to any member of the human race. God’s existence is innately known; the question is where is the God that I know exists? But never is the question does a God exist; that is a phony question. All members of the human race know that God is there, the debate is over which God is it that you are going to worship.

Now who is it then that brings this God-consciousness into the soul of every man? Whether the person is in the dark of Africa or the dark of middle America, it doesn’t make any difference, his God-consciousness, John says, has been brought to Him by none other than the One who had become incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity. And therefore who works with the heathen from the time they are children? The Lord Jesus Christ. Who works with the sophisticated person in the major metropolitan cities? It is the Lord Jesus Christ. John says it is the Second Person of the Trinity that lightens every man. So it means that what God-consciousness exists exists because of the work of Christ. John has such a magnificently large view of Jesus, he doesn’t think of Jesus just beginning the work at the point of the gospel hearing, not just when the evangelist or missionary comes but far before that, years before that, God was working, and not just the Father but the Son, the Word, the Light of the world, He was working on these people.

John also makes the claim here by enlightening every man that this God-consciousness gives somehow a light to man. What kind of light does God-consciousness give to the man who is out, say in the middle of heathen culture. Well, it would mean that it gives at least a sense of morals; a moral sense, and no men are without the moral sense. A common prostitute would complain that you have wronged her if the check bounced. She has a sense of morality. The communists, who deny that God is there, have a sense or morality. Read the front pages of the newspaper about how they’re griping about don’t act like Americans, the first great pronouncement from the South Vietnam communist government, we don’t want anybody acting like Americans around here. In some way they’re smart, they want smart people and because they’re saying don’t act like Americans they’re drawing moral categories. Strange, isn’t it, people who are atheists, drawing moral categories, what is good for man and what is not good for man. Where are they getting that sense of morality, the atheist. Where does the prostitute get her sense of morality. They get it all from the same source, God the Son, who enlightens every man.

This has a very interesting and very powerful application for those of you who are studying to be teachers. What this is saying is that every time a student learns something Christ has been at work, even though that pupil may never know the gospel and may never become a Christian, the degree of truth of the real world that he knows is there because Christ has done a work in his soul. You are on speaking terms with the enlightener of the classroom; use your relationship accordingly. You have a handle that no non-Christian teacher ever had because you are personally on an intimate relationship with the Man who enlightens every man, the God-man who enlightens every man. And this can be used as a prayer promise for Christian school teachers. It can be used as a promise for Christian parents. You can know that Christ, even though your son or your daughter may not have yet personally accepted Christ, He will enlighten them; enlighten them in every area and the fact that they will come out knowing any degree of truth is only testimony that the light has been there all this time, quietly, maybe unseen to you, enlightening them, enlightening into the lessons of every day life and experience, the moral sensation, the idea that man has a destiny, the fact that there is a purpose to life, and that purpose can’t be filled by anything other than Jesus Christ. And that hunger that every person has that their life has got to make sense, it just can’t go this way with pieces here and pieces there.

That sense of frustration is God-consciousness; that’s what it is. That’s why you have the sense of frustration, because God has made you for Himself and He’s deliberately put a mechanism in your soul so that you won’t be happy unless you’re rightly related to Him, no matter what you do and no matter what substitute you invoke. Every man is enlightened by God the Son, John says. Do you see what a magnificently big Christ John has? And you notice how he started this whole chapter off? With creation, precisely the area that you’re told, oh don’t talk about creation, just keep the conversation over to the simple Jesus. Now if that were legitimate wouldn’t you think that John would also do the same thing. It’s funny how the Apostle John doesn’t heed these pieces of good advice. For some strange reason the Apostle John doesn’t seem that that advice is correct because he begins with creation, because it’s there where the essence of God is laid down and then he goes through history.

Notice he can’t even introduce the Word of God, verse 14 in this chapter is the first time Jesus Christ is in view, the first time! Every verse before verse 14 has nothing to do with Christianity or the Lord Jesus Christ. Even though verses 11 and 12 you have heard time and time again used in an evangelistic context and time and time again people have interpreted verses 11 and 12 to refer to the incarnation, the incarnation does not start until verse 14. However we interpret verses 11 and 12 they cannot refer to the ministry of Christ; the rejection is not the ministry of Jesus either. There must be something else because the passage is chronological and logical in its development. John spends considerable detail to lay the foundation before we ever get down to the point of talking about Jesus.

This is why I’ve said this and will say it numerous times, when you are involved in evangelistic work with some group, some Christian group, would you please make sure that whoever it is that you’re talking to understands who God is before you start talking about Jesus Christ. If you have a group of children and they’re in a Bible club or something in your home, you do not start talking t them about Jesus; that’s not the place to start, and that’s utterly without precedent in the Scripture. The more enlightened of the Wycliffe translators today are realizing this, we have made a mistake in missions because we’ve always translated the Gospel of Mark first. Wrong! The first Scripture that ought to be translated in the missionary enterprise is the first 10 or 11 chapters of Genesis. Then we get to the gospel, but not until. And John follows the same methodology here, he develops it very slowly, very carefully.

Verse 9 he’s dealing with the whole concept of truth before he gets to Jesus. He says this word that became flesh and dwelt among us, He was active in history all the way back to Adam, that any piece of truth that any man ever knew at all was due to the Logos, acting on his soul before the incarnation, “that was the true Light.”

Now we have a problem at the end of verse 9; what does the clause, “that comes into the world” refer to? Does it refer to the Light, or does it refer to man? Should we read verse 9, “That was the true Light that was coming into the world which lighteth every man,” or should we read it, “That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world?” We take the interpretation that the last part refers to the Light, not to man, for the following reasons: (1) John never anywhere else in this Gospel speaks of men coming into the world, His emphasis is on Christ coming into the world. For example, if you turn to John 4:25, this is the woman at the well, and John notices something on this woman’s lips, the saying that she says, “I know that Messiah is coming…” “I know that Messiah is coming,” there was an expectation in the ancient world and John knew that expectation and His words for that expectation is Messiah is coming and so that’s a theme of this Gospel.

And so now in John 1:9 when it says “the Light is coming into the world, that’s a Johannine expression, it’s a typical expression of this Gospel and it fits with his overall theme. It also fits not only with the theme but with verse 8, for who was it that the prophets were talking about, John being one of them. Who was it they were really talking about? This is the Lamb of God which was coming into the world; the prophets all looked forward to the One who was coming, was coming, was coming, was coming. Greek students you’ll see that it is a present participle, was continually coming. So therefore we find that verse 9 should read not like the King James, “He was the true Light, that was coming into the world, the Light which lighteth every man.”

John 1:10, “He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.” Superficial students always take verse 10 to refer to the incarnation, “he was in the world,” that’s Jesus, that’s the gospel. No it isn’t, verse 14 is the gospel. Verse 10 is an imperfect tense in the Greek, it means He was continually in the world, and it refers back to verse 4, “In Him continually was life; and life continually was the light of men. [5] And the light now shines in darkness; and the darkness has never comprehended it.” So it’s that shining of the light that’s still the theme in verse 10, the light, he, not Jesus, the light, the phos, the light was continually in the world. How was it continually in the world? It was continually in the world before the flood; it was continually in the world after the flood with men like Melchizedek; it was in the world during the Old Testament; it was in the world always. Why is John so careful to do this? He wants to build a base for the Christian message. He says what we come to you when we tell you that Jesus is the Messiah, what we come to you is not a radically new message that is totally unfamiliar to your soul; he says you’re part of the human race, you’ve already had contact with the phos, with the Logos, all the truth you’ve ever learned in your life so far has been through him so let’s take one more step along the line of enlightenment and meet the Lord Jesus Christ. So it places the gospel into a continuity with what preceded it, and so this way the gospel doesn’t suddenly confront someone with a radically different message than all the rest of life. He plugs it into history; “He was constantly in the world.”

At this point we might summarize the doctrine of heathenism; what about those who haven’t heard? We’ve got a lot of information in this passage about those who haven’t heard. The first thing we can say about those who haven’t heard is that all men are God-conscious in the same sense that they’re conscious of people, rocks, and everything else. There’s no difference, the soul is made for these things, perception, and all men are God-conscious. A Biblical text would be John 1:9-10 and Romans 1:18 and following, those, particularly the Romans passage is your major passage that explains what about those who have never heard. The answer is they have heard, they are God-conscious and they are held accountable for what they have heard.

A second truth about heathenism is that God has revealed extra truth, doctrine, to the human race through Noah, through the Melchizedeks so that even mythology in the world is not purely error; it has pieces of truth in it, distorted, yes, but if you study mythology you understand these various things that keep cropping up, why you always have a woman who is the fertility goddess, why in the ancient architecture you’ll always have a woman goddess and surrounding her there’ll be a serpent. Why is this? You can go to India, you can go to Sumer, you can go to Egypt, you can to go some of the Indian tribes, you’ll always have that fertility goddess with a serpent. Now why did all the nations of the world have particular myth? Do a Christian’s ears doesn’t that sound something like the protoevangelium, with Eve and the serpent? Of course. The constellations of the zodiac and their form can be traced; how were they named? Do we have in fact pieces of Biblical history in the very signs of the heavens? Yes, men have named them that way. So there’s lots of evidences that the human race has not been without truth.

A third point, besides God-consciousness and subsequent historic revelation is that men have corporately refused to give thanks toward this God-consciousness and therefore they have been allowed to swallow human viewpoint by the ton, and therefore we find terrible distortions in the way men think all over the face of the earth. But it’s because men are in rejection, not because they are innocent. Certain theories of education argue that man comes into the world with a blank slate and that what education does is put good things on the slate and erases bad things. The Scriptures say nonsense; man is born into the world with a slate with the basic categories already laid down and he’s rebellious against those categories. That is how he comes into the world, and so therefore education is not always fun. Ultimately it is fun but it can’t be made fun every hour of the day. And theories that argue that you must entertain in order to educate fail to recognize the sin nature of man; you have to come to those times when as my history professor at seminary said, you have to knock Adam out of them, and that comes to the point when we have to deal with the sin nature.

The fourth thing we want to say in the doctrine of heathenism, besides the fact that men are God-conscious, that God has historically revealed information to him, that men have corporately refused that information and have refused relationship is that when God’s spirit works on a man to bring him to Christ, always there will be a witnessing believer or the product of a witnessing believer brought to that person, either a missionary will come to him, a page of Scripture will come to him, somehow that person will get information. Now that’s not denying that we have responsibility; that’s why the Christian church has always been for missions, because we want to part of the spread of the Word of God. But the point is that God doesn’t leave it up to fail humanity to get the truth out. He has His plans.

John 1:10, “He was in the world,” John says, the Logos, and then he adds a very poignant phrase, “and the world was made by him, and world knew him not.” In other words, whenever the Logos revealed Himself to men, whether it was in Africa, Europe, North or South America, thousands of years ago, whether it was the Aztecs, the Incas, the Apaches, or to whether it was to the tribes in Europe, the Celts, the Visigoths, whatever it was, when the Logos came to them in various ways, either in the Melchizedekian way or through their traditions, through their myths, through some means the truth came to them, they never could say it didn’t fit the real world. John says the Logos was in the world and the world was made Him, it fits, the world was not something strange in that Christ was off here some place and He fit the world like a square peg in a round hole. That John denies; he says the mystery is that the Logos fit, fit the way men are made to be. When men realize what God is, that He’s a God of love, something in their soul says yes, that seems just intuitively obvious that that’s the way God should be. That’s what it means, we’re made, we fit together.

“He was in the world, and the world was made by Him,” but says John, the strange thing is, “the world has never known Him.” Now this is corporate, and John is insisting on this throughout his Gospel, that the kosmos, the word which means order, actually it’s the human good order, that’s the way he uses the word kosmos, if you forget the name think of cosmetic, it brings order out of chaos. Kosmos is a word that refers to Satan’s order; Satan has imposed his scheme, his plan upon creation. And John says this kosmos is wholly hostile to the Logos, it has always been hostile, never has the overall scheme of the world fit and recognized Jesus Christ, never he says! The world has been totally divorced and in total antagonism to Jesus Christ.

So verse 10 speaks not at all of the incarnation; verse 10 speaks of the eras of history prior to the incarnation, and in particular verse 10 would speak of the witness of Jesus Christ to the heathen; He was always in the world, the imperfect sense, He always was there, all the heathen heard, He was with them and the problem was not that they didn’t hear but that they never knew Him. They never came into a relationship with Him. Three times in John’s Gospel he says this; here he says the world never knew the Logos, or the Son. In John 17:25 he says the world has never known the Father. In John 17:25 Jesus prays and He says Father, they have not known Thee. It doesn’t mean they didn’t know of Him, but the word know means to enter a personal relationship with Him. They’ve never known you. The Spirit, in John 14:17, whom the world knoweth not, says John. So John is insistent that the world has known neither the Father, the Son, nor the Holy Spirit.

Now keep that in mind because John has a tremendous point he’s going to make. Picture all of men, just one big sea of humanity and picture them as marching in ranks so that there’s an order to their march and picture Christ off to one side of the column, beckoning them to come to Him and the march, the column keeps on marching by, the world has never known Him, they have never known the Father, the Son or the Spirit. Now take that verse we’re all familiar with in John, John 3:16 and then think of the column marching by, even though the word never responds to the Father, Son or Spirit, God continues to love the world. There’s the picture of the God of grace and truth in the New Testament. There’s John’s picture, men reject and reject and reject and reject and reject, and God keeps on loving and loving and loving and loving and loving. God loves the world, not that He loves its orientation, but He keeps on beckoning; that is grace.

So for John it was just continual amazement, and maybe John knew a little bit about this because you know it was John who, during Christ’s ministry was walking down a hill one day and they had just been through a town where they had preached the gospel and the people rejected, and it was John, this gentle apostle, that called fire, said Lord, call fire down and blast them, and Jesus replied you don’t know what you’re made of John. And that apparently so etched, those words haunted that man, so in his later years, 90 or 95 year old man when he wrote this text, it was most on his mind, that the world rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, but God keeps on loving, loving, loving, loving. I don’t understand it but John made the point very clearly.

Now in John 1:11 he takes us one step further, “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. [12] But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His name;” it’s easy to read that in terms of the incarnation but again, the incarnation isn’t mentioned until verse 14. You see, there, in verse 14 is when the word became flesh, so the “he” in verses 10, 11 and 12 isn’t the incarnate word, it’s the preincarnate word, and if verse 10 refers to heathen history then what does verses 11, 12, and 13 refer to? Israel’s history. Verses 11-13 are a synopsis of the Old Testament and proof, by the way, that in the Old Testament how are men saved? By being born again, just as we are. “He came unto His own,” Greek students, you’ll notice a neuter plural, not His own people, not His own people, He did not come unto His own people, it says He came unto His own possessions, He came unto His own things. Well, what were His own things. The temple, the things that He had set up in the Mosaic Law, the nation, the property, the places, He came there, He came unto His land, He came to His own temple, He came to His own tabernacle, He came to His own priesthood, over and over He came, summarized by the aorist tense. In that era “He came unto His own, but His own never received him.”

And so he heightens the contrast; this is a contrast that will be repeated time and time again in this Gospel. He says doesn’t it amaze you that the Logos comes and He comes and He comes and he comes and he comes and people say no, no, no, no and they reject Him. “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” And then in verse 12, “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” Now again, if you’ll notice in the original text there are two words for “receive.” One word to receive is lambano; a second word is used with this prefix, paralambano. The paralambano is used in verse 11, but just plain lambano is used in verse 12. Is there significance to John’s selection of the Greek verb? Yes, and it’s a very interesting point, one of these fine points where it pays to pay attention to detail. “He came unto His own and His own never welcomed Him,” paralambano is to receive to you, to receive along side, he says His own people, the people that were there in his possession, they, those people, the people around His temple, they never received Him nationally and corporately as their own. This is the same theme that has been promoted in Hebrews, it is the same theme in the Gospels, when Jesus gives a parable He says the owner of the vineyard sent this man, you kicked him out, you kicked him out, you kicked him out.

Go back to the speech in Acts 7 of Stephen, three verses there and we can picture what John’s talking about. This was the theme of the early Christian church. Stephen, in Acts 6 had been elected deacon; he’d been selected by the people. Stephen had done well as a deacon and he evidently had become an elder by at the last part of Acts 7, at least he’s being hauled in in a martyr type situation, he’s recognized by the opposition as a leader. Acts 7:51, he gives this magnificent speech, and he concludes it with a nice sweet invitation, “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do ye. [52] Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them who showed before of the coming of the Just One,” see the word “coming,” the same theme John is saying, “He came unto His own,” “the coming of the Just One, of whom you have now been the betrayers and murderers, [53] You who have received the Law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it.” It doesn’t sound like it’s designed to please too many people who hear it because the Word of God is never designed to please apostate man; it’s designed to irritate him, to make him mad, because when you make people mad then you move them off center and they do something, and that’s what the Word of God is designed to do. Stephen is a very effective user of the Word. But that’s what’s talked about, that complete apostasy over and over and over again.

So John says, “He came to His own,” His own area, His own possession, “and His own received Him not.” …”His own received Him not,” those are the people. Now John 1:12, “But as many as did receive Him, but now he drops off the para prefix, “as many as simply took Him.” Now what does John mean by that? A great truth we’re going to see in this Gospel as it unfolds. He’s going to say that Christ is so gracious that people are born again into the kingdom of God who very unemotionally and matter of factly believe on Him, that’s all. He said… verse 11 would be they didn’t receive Him, they didn’t have a parade for Him, they didn’t receive Him in glory as the King of the nation, but John says those humble people who received Him in an almost casual way, those He made “the children of God.” Without fanfare, without power and glory, without praise, just a simple act of trust; a person does that they become the children of God. So he says though the nation didn’t give Him a parade, and He came and His own received Him not, there were some in the nation Israel who did receive Him, the faithful remnant. “And as many as received Him, to them gave He power,” and notice it’s the word to give, which is the word of grace.

Again notice John is a great apostle of grace. These people have authority not because they earn it; not because they qualify but because they are given it. “To them gave He the authority,” the word “power” isn’t power, it means the legal right… the legal right; it’s John’s way of referring to justification. That we understand justification, remember what it is? Here’s your top circle, here’s your position in Christ. Jesus Christ, by His perfect life and by His perfect sacrifice has generated absolute righteousness. Adam was given the opportunity to be perfectly righteous Himself; Jesus Christ had to not only be perfectly righteous Himself but as God and man He generated absolute righteousness that was historically visible, that qualified Him as a Savior, and qualified Him as a source of righteousness for us. So we now have righteousness in our top circle or our position because of what Christ did. Jesus Christ brought into existence righteousness that becometh man because man is created to produce and to subdue the earth righteously. Jesus Christ perfectly did it, Christ’s righteousness then becomes available to our account. At a moment in time if we could divide up the second that you believe here’s what would happen; it’d be a very complicated second. If we blow that second up into a large circle so we can see what happened the second someone becomes a Christian.

One thing that happens is that Jesus Christ’s righteousness is credited to your account; that’s happened at a microsecond, that righteousness is credited. Now you can’t feel it, there’s no way you can empirically observe it, you are stuck to trusting Scripture because it’s occurring in heaven. It actually is occurring, but it’s occurring in a place that you have no visibility into; it’s occurring in heaven. And somewhere up there God has a little record change, there’s actually a change in record and Christ’s righteousness is immediately credited to your account, perfect righteousness, righteousness to which you cannot add one thing. You can’t subtract from it, Jesus Christ did it all.

Next, a few microseconds later God the Father declares you justified; justification is an act, not of the Son but of the Father. Righteousness and imputation comes from the Son, not the Father. And once the Son says My righteousness is available to that one, then the Father says that person is justified and He declares them as in possession of legal righteousness. Not declares them perfect in His eyes yet but He declares them with the right and the authority now. [Tape turns]

“As many as received Him, to those people, to that remnant, He gave authority to become the children of God,” [can’t understand words] that John uses the word different than Paul; Paul uses the word Son but it’s huios in the Greek; that is not John’s word; tekna is John’s word. “Children,” [can’t understand words] why does John use tekna and Paul uses huios? [can’t understand small section] We don’t know, maybe Paul was adopted himself, we don’t know what his background was but he’s very fond of adoption and he brings this out time and time again in his writings. But John is different; John, over and over keeps thinking of the nature of man, and so the tekna is the emphasis upon like Father, like Son, the transmission of nature. So when he says “you have the authority to gain God’s very nature,” the authority that you have gained to become God’s sons is given to you in the first place, so it’s all grace.

Now we’re gong to see further why this tekna, or children imagery occurs to John; there’s a reason for it. One day something happened and John was forever a changed man after that one day. See, you can understand the prologue if you understand John’s life. “As many as received Him to them gave He the authority to become the tekna of God, to them that believe in His name.” So he wants us to understands what is it to receive Christ? What is it to receive Christ? Now here we must be precise. In our day people have all sorts of images about receiving Christ. Receiving Christ means I sit and I say Lord Jesus, come into my heart. That is not what John’s talking about here. Just read the Scriptures, and it will save you from a lot of just sheer meaningless jabber; that’s just meaningless jabber. What does it mean to invite Jesus into your heart? Where in Scripture do you find that phrase, invite Jesus into your heart? I challenge you, find it for me, from Matthew to Revelation, and then go to the average evangelical message, or something else, and count how many times “Lord Jesus, come into my heart” is used. Now either modern evangelism is right and the Scriptures are wrong or the Scriptures and modern evangelism is wrong, but they both can’t be right. This phrase is wrong. Now we might have come to Christ by the use of that phrase; fine. Water came out of the rock too when Moses hit it twice, it doesn’t make it right. So just because you have personally been blessed or led to the Lord by this means is not enough…that is not enough justification to continue to use that terminology. We must have it justified on the basis of the text of God’s Word. And here you come the closest you ever come in the New Testament and still it shies away, nowhere here does John say “invite Jesus into your heart.” It says “receive Him,” and what does it mean? He adds an explanatory clause that we understand exactly what John means when he says receive Christ. When John said have you received the Christ, the synonym would be have you believed on His name. That is what John meant.

Now let’s look at this phrase, “believe on His name,” notice it does not say believe in His name. The Greek preposition is forceful, believe into, it’s eis, believe into His name. Now we have other instances where John uses believe and he doesn’t use eis, and I’m going to show you those later on, but the Greek preposition for on is eis, and usually it’s used with a verb of motion, to go toward something or into something. It’s a verb of motion, not something static, motion. It’s a motion preposition, and it’s not by accident that John uses a motion preposition here with the verb to believe. You say, I don’t understand, how can the verb “believe” convey motion? What motion is involved in believing? The last part, the “name.” The name in Scripture is a picture of God’s essence. When Adam named the animals he wasn’t going around with a tail on the donkey pinning labels on all the creatures that went before him. Adam, it says, conducted the first zoological investigation. He was looking for companionship in the Garden. He had a motive for looking at these animals, he was looking for his right woman; this four-legged hairy thing would come up and he’d say naw, that isn’t it, can’t be it. Something else would crawl along on the ground and no, that isn’t it. And he would comment on the nature of that which he saw, and then he would label it, but he would label after he saw what it was like.

So the first man’s search for his right woman was the first zoological research project in history; Adam named the animals. And as he was naming them he was knowing them, and that’s the point. Forever after that in the Bible when you see the word “name,” name does not mean what Americans think, just casually name somebody. People have babies all the time and they gee, I never thought of a name, have to look through a book to get a name, this kind of real casual thing. The ancient people never did that; they named their children after much, much thought. In fact, we have evidence that they gave several names to their children. They gave a birth name, and then later on in history when they saw what kind of a character it was they would give another name to the child. Some of you parents might want to change the names of your children because now you’ve seen the sin nature. Actually the sin nature you see in them is yours, you just gave it to them and you just don’t like it when you see it coming out in them. But names mean essence.

So John says, “receive Christ” means to “believe on His name,” which, therefore, must prove that before you can become a Christian you have to know what God is like. You can’t lead someone to Christ who has a thoroughly unbiblical screwed up picture of God. And the modern naturalist and the modern kind who has been raised in the public schools, you have to work with them, many times, weeks, months, before you get through to them what kind of a God it is the Bible’s talking about and you’re foolish to try to press for a decision until that understanding comes. You work, work, work, work, work, work, until that understanding comes. Until that child with good conscience is able to believe knowing what God is like, because again remember, this is not Jesus even here; the remnant that’s believing in verse 12 don’t know who the physical Jesus is. They’re believing in the essence of God in the Old Testament economy, it refers to the attributes of God. They know Him.

Now they believe, John says, “into His name.” I said that was a preposition of motion, but how do you combine a preposition of motion with a verb to passively believe. How do we put those two things together. The word “believe” to John, when used with this eis, means to trust, to trust into His essence. The movement is you; that’s what John’s saying. When you become a Christian you move from the platform of trusting in your own works over to the place where you trust completely in the nature of God Himself. That’s the motion, that’s the shift; nothing is mentioned here about how you feel, nothing is mentioned about signing cards; nothing is mentioned about being baptized, you didn’t have baptism in the Old Testament. And here people are becoming children of God and they didn’t even get baptized. So we have people at one point going into the essence of God; John says that’s what I mean when I talk about receiving Christ.

Now he goes on and clarifies it even further; he says I want you to understand, and remember this is primarily directed toward Jews, I want some of you Jews to understand something, so he goes into John 1:13, when you were born this way, you are born of God, But you “were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Now we have the new birth in view. John is talking about new birth or regeneration. Now can you think of an incident in the Apostle John’s life where he was confronted with this? Maybe if we could go to that it’d clarify this whole deal of why he speaks in verses 11, 12 and 13 of the Old Testament… the Old Testament, in terms of new birth. You say I thought the new birth was New Testament truth, and yet here it seems to be Old Testament truth.

Let’s go to the classic passage, John 3. In John 3:3, John obviously wasn’t there but Jesus told him about it after it happened. “Verily, verily,” Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Except a man be born” and the Greek word, as we shall see, is very, very cleverly arranged, it can be translated born again of one from above, and John leaves that to you, “Except a man be born, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And Nicodemus is thinking in Jewish terms, “How can a man born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” That’s being born of blood, that’s being born of the will of the flesh, that’s being born of the will of man. And Jesus says no, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Now Jesus is not teaching a new truth because in verse 10 He insists upon the fact that Nicodemus ought to have known this all along.

Now if this being born again bit is new truth, peculiar only to the New Testament, how do you explain the fact that Jesus holds Nicodemus responsible for not knowing it? Obviously if Jesus is to hold Nicodemus responsible for knowing this business about being born again it must have been a truth that was known and taught in the Old Testament. And sure enough, when we get in John 3 I’ll show you the passage where it all came out. We’re not talking, incidentally, about baptism either. The water in John 3 is the water of the covenant of Ezekiel 36, and he said look, as a master of Israel, as a rabbi, and you don’t know these things; you ought to know this Nicodemus, it’s elementary. That this is a nation physical yes Nicodemus, but always remember that there has been the faithful remnant within this Jewish nation; not all Jews have been Jews. And that faithful remnant, how did they become faithful? They were born again, and Nicodemus you ought to have known that. All this time you ought to have known that, what I’m teaching you here is not new truth. Now it’s true, Jesus did teach a lot of new truth but being born again was not one of the new truths; it was a repeated truth out of the Old Testament. And He held that generation responsible for knowing it.

Well, this certainly made some impression on John, but then other things made impressions on John. Turn to John 8, John was there when this one happened. John 8:37, this is a rather violent exchange between the Lord Jesus Christ and the religious people of His day. He said, “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. [38] I speak that which I have seen with My Father, and ye do that which ye have seen of your father.” See, the father/son relationship; John picks this up, it means a lot to him. Remember, John is being taught here what he’s giving us in chapter 1. [39] “They answered, and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said unto them, If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham.” See, like father, like son, the children bear the nature of their father, and if you really were Abraham’s children you’d do the works of Abraham. [40] “But now you seek to kill Me, a amen that has told you the truth, which I have heard of God; this did not Abraham. [41] You do the deeds of your father,” and then they say to him, because they are getting suspicious of what He’s saying, “Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.” [42] Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, you would love Me; for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of Myself, but He that sent me. [43] Why do you not understand My speech? Even because you cannot hear My word. [44] You are of your father, Satan, and the lusts of your father you do.”

Again not quite a nice invitation calculated to win friends and influence people but Jesus made the point, like father, like son. And John was standing off at the side as young man while all this was happening, and he kept looking, and he says you know, every time we do this Jesus talks about this Father business, and that so ingrained itself on this man’s vocabulary now in John 1, when he goes to teach us about how men become Christians or believers, he reverts to the imagery of the Father and Son, not the same way Paul does, the way Jesus had taught it. Remember Paul never saw Jesus except that one time on the Damascus Road, and John saw Him many, many times. So John’s vocabulary reflects Jesus’ vocabulary.

So finally in John 1:13, this remnant, the faithful remnant of the Old Testament, they “were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,” it’s all Jewish racial pride. He says it wasn’t the race. He would tell us I heard Jesus on that occasion, He told them that they weren’t the children of Abraham, so it can’t be that we were born of blood, and the will of the flesh, but they’re born of God. So he says that’s what made the difference in the Old Testament. There were some, those who were born of God, those who were not born of God. To go back to the theme, what then is the relationship of the Logos; simple, those who receive the Logos were the remnant in the Old Testament. So John says when we go preaching Jesus we are preaching Jesus not as something radically new, but as something connected with that faithful remnant of Old Testament doctrine, connected with the pre-flood Gentile revelation. Jesus stands in the historic stream of revelation; you are the people, John says, that reject Christ, the non-Christian who rejects Christ, you are the people that are out of line with history. We stand in the stream of history; our message is grounded in the very heart of history. And when we teach Jesus Christ we teach the logical extension into the present of the past. The same light that shined then shines now and the darkness has not overcome it.