Clough John Lesson 6

The Incarnate Word – John 1:14-18

John 1:1-2 relate the Logos of the Word to the Creator; John 1:3-5 deals with the relationship to creation, that the Word of God is prior and above creation, contrary to pantheism. Verses 6-8, the Word of God is related to the prophets in that the Logos was the unified center of all the messages of all the prophets. All of them had a unity and the unity was there because they had the mind of Christ, and therefore one of the objective historic evidences for the Christian faith is the internal consistency of the over sixty books that have been written over 30 centuries of time. When you have a massive number of books written over such a vast period of time, and yet they maintain the same theology, the same consistency of dogma, they must be coming from the same source. And it is an evidence of inspiration. And John 1:6-8 tells us that the center of that unity, the center of the consistency behind the message is the Logos.

In John 1:9-13 last week we dealt with the relationship of the Word to humanity and Israel in particular. It was this passage of Scripture, so often used in evangelism that does not apply to the Church…well, it applies to the Church but primarily, verse 12, receiving Christ here has to do not with receiving Christ in His incarnate form but Christ in His preincarnate form and refers to the Old Testament dispensation. John 1:14 is the first time in the passage the Logos is spoken of as incarnate. And so this is an evidence that the remnant, the faithful remnant, “He came unto His own,” His own things, His own area, and His own people did not receive Him, did not welcome Him. [12] “But to those,” that is the spiritual remnant of the Old Testament that did receive Him, “to them gave He power to become the sons of God,” and one of the great arguments in John’s Gospel is that the reason people reject the Lord Jesus Christ is because they were never born again under the Old Testament economy.

For example, John 3:17-18, it’s not just talking about evangelism; the argument here is not just that people do not respond to Christ, but the argument is that these people were never plugged into the Old Testament to begin with; that’s why John said, “God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. [18] He that believeth on Him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. [19] And this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil,” and then he explains, those who historically responded to Christ’s ministry, verse 20, “For everyone that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. [21] But he that does truth comes to the light;” now “he that does truth” isn’t an unbeliever, “he that does truth is an Old Testament saint, and his argument is that if you really were born again under the Old Testament dispensation you would have responded to the Lord Jesus Christ, so don’t blame Christ that He did not present an inadequate revelation. The problem was you never responded, he’s saying, to the revelation you had. And this is why Jesus said everything I’ve said is in Moses and the prophets, you have them, they’re a testimony of Me.

So John is arguing this way about the Old Testament, but tonight we’re beginning in John 1:14 and covering the last four verses of the introduction. This entire introduction of 18 verses gives you the theological framework for the entire Gospel. Terms are defined, the worldview is given. If you cannot agree with the worldview then obviously there will be problems on through the Gospel. In fact, every incident in this Gospel is either proof of or illustration of the truths of these 18 verses. So we read in verse 14 the most profound statement, the simplest statement, the most concise statement ever made of the incarnation. “The Word became flesh,” now that’s very easy to say. It’s very easy for the average Christian to waltz through that thing at 90 miles an hour and never understand what has just happened, so we’re going to slow down tonight and we’re going to spend some time on that first phrase or that first clause, “the Word,” the Logos, “became flesh.”

The verb is important, it’s the verb to become, change of state, in this case, “The Word came into existence in flesh form.” He always existed, but now He came into existence in flesh form. Notice too that to deliberately to get across his point John’s Gospel speaks of flesh, not body, not man. He could have used those other two words, but to deliberately cut across the grain of the thinking of his generation he used the word “flesh.” And here’s why: there was developing, apparently around Ephesus and around that part of Asia Minor when this Gospel was written a latent Gnosticism; that was an early church heresy. There are several versions of it, but one of the tenants of this particular belief was that God really couldn’t show up in material way; it was kind of a follow-on from Platonism where matter is evil and if you really want to be spiritual you’ll separate yourself from matter. And so yes, we can buy the fact that the Logos appeared to man but we can’t buy the fact that the Logos really was flesh. So John says exactly, that’s the vocabulary I’ll use, the exact vocabulary that cuts completely across the human viewpoint of his own generation.

So instead of saying, “The Word became a man,” or “The Word became a human body,” he says “The Word became flesh” to draw emphasis on the matter, the material, you could touch it. And John was continually pointing this out. Turn to 1 John 1:1 you’ll see that he begins that epistle with the same dogmatism, the same emphasis on the material nature of Jesus Christ. He is not an appearance, He is not a vision, He is not a dream, He is not an idea, He took up space. You couldn’t be more emphatic, you couldn’t be more empirically centered than this verse: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,” first input empirically, through the ear, “which we have seen with our eyes,” the second empirical input, through sight, “which we have looked upon,” and “looked upon” is to consider so there’s your mentality, your thinking, “and our hands have touched.”

Now many Greeks could have agreed that they heard the Word and the saw the Word, that would have set pretty easily, but to touch the infinite Creator was totally out of the picture as far as these people in that day thought. So the idea that we meet right off the bat is something that men cannot stand, to say that God could participate in matter. The reason for this, apparently because of man’s sin, one of the reasons for the hatred of this truth is the fact that if God can appear in human flesh it means that human flesh is not inherently evil, and then we bear responsibility. We can’t say oh, we’re just human. Oh no, oh no, because if we’re jut human and we’re using that as an excuse for our sins, then we do have problems. If humanity requires us to sin, then Jesus becoming a man is to be impossible since He was sinless.

So the fact that we have the incarnation of Jesus Christ becoming human flesh proves that humanity is not inherently sinful; it proves that humanity can be perfectly righteous. So if we’re non-perfect unrighteous humanity we’re rebuked by that truth. And so philosophically man has always expressed his hatred for this idea, God becoming flesh, the same kind of flesh I’m made of? Yes. Living a perfect life? Yes. Well, I can’t; that’s your fault. Now that’s the force that the incarnation has; it is a justification of the inherent worth of the human form; man is not junk, Jesus Christ has dignified man forever because God did not become a bug or an insect or a rock, He became man. He did not become an animal like the gods of the ancient world, He didn’t show up like some of the gods of Egypt, as a jackal; He didn’t show up as a falcon. He showed up as a man. Somebody once said, one of the famous novelists once said that the universe was made for man and man was made for God, and the reason he said that was that the whole n point of creation in Genesis 1 was man.

Why was man the highest part of creation; it’s not revealed in Genesis 1, it just says man’s to subdue the earth; man’s to rule, but it just turns out that man had something about him that no other creature has that qualifies him to be the form in which God comes. Several tings about man qualify him; for one thing man can die. Man has a body, that body, when in mortal form, is subject to death. This means that man can give his life, not his existence because man doesn’t back out of existence when he dies, but man can give his life which is his most precious possession. What is life Biblically? Life is no mere existence, life is that period of time, the normal term life, not eternal life, just normal temporal life is that period of time from the time you’re born to the time you die, when you have moral choices to make in history, when you have a role to play. That is a precious gift; that is why murder is such a horrible sin. Murder is, in God’s book, one of the worst sins because it destroys life. And today, of course, we could care less. Somebody goes out here with a machine gun and mows down a bunch of people we’re worried about how he was dropped on his head when he was a baby. The life, the damage that that man has done means nothing; life is cheap, and it’s cheapening every day that law and order is not put into effect.

So the incarnation is a tremendous statement and before we get into any of the details of all the problems, and we won’t even touch on all the problems, we can touch on some of them; before we get into any of that remember one thing always about the incarnation. It’s the ultimate dignification of man; when God became something He became a man. And that means when you look out and you see a person who is an unbeliever, when you see somebody who may be very gross, then you are looking at a person who potentially could be fantastic. You remember that; that person, as crummy as they may appear to you, is made in the form that God appeared when He walked the face of this earth. It dignifies humanity.

Let’s look again at this phrase, what it doesn’t say. It says, “The Word became flesh,” and it doesn’t the word came into flesh; notice, “became,” not “come into.” Let’s try to diagram these two to see the difference. If I used the word “become” here in the stream of time is the eternally existent Logos; the Logos goes on in the stream of time, always existing, existing, existing, existing, existing, and then at the incarnation the Logos becomes flesh. So there is a transformation of the Logos, not in His inherent character, but it “becomes flesh,” that’s what the Bible is saying, so that the flesh you could have touched if Christ were in front of you, that was part of the Logos. It wasn’t that the Logos was kind of a seed and it went inside a human body. That’s not what this verse says. It’s more powerful than that; it isn’t that you cut Jesus’ leg off and cut His hands off and not really touch the Logos. No, any time you touched His body you touched the Logos; that’s what this is saying; “the Logos became flesh.” So it is very powerful. It means, then, when men drove nails into Jesus Christ’s hands they were not driving them into the body in which there was indwelling seed of the Logos. When men drove nails into the hands of Christ they were driving nails into the hands of God Himself. And it makes, then, the crucifixion very important. You are not just destroying the tent in which Jesus dwelt; you are attacking personally God Himself. So the incarnation becomes a direct personal violence by the human race against God. When God got close enough to touch, they killed Him, we killed Him because we’re all corporately responsible.

So “The Logos became flesh,” now there’s always…a person who thinks always wonders, suppose there was another planet. I remember discussing this with somebody, we were discussing the hypothetical race of widgets, just a name we made up for this hypothetical race, out on planet XYZ some place, and the question was whether if God showed up on that planet would He show up in the form of a widget or would He show up in the form of a man, and the answer is that He shows up in the form of a man. When God makes His appearance He never appears in anything but man form. The reason we know this and can dogmatically say it is because creation is an all inclusive philosophy. It means there are no higher creatures than man in the entire universe, that this planet earth, we have the audacity to claim, is the location of the creatures that rule the entire universe. There are no other creatures higher than man ultimately. The only creatures that are higher than man ultimately… there are no creatures; there are creatures that are higher than man temporally right now, angels, and that’s only temporary according to the epistle of Hebrews. So man has a certain eternal position.

“And dwelt among us,” the word “became flesh” and “dwelt among us,” the word “dwell” is a word that comes from the verb that is used in the Greek Old Testament for the tabernacle and this draws our attention back to this strange building called the tabernacle. This is a building that’s we’re building a model of and you’ll be able to see it and point out various points of the Gospel in this building; inside there’s the Holy of Holies, there’s the Holy place and there’s various furniture in that building and the reason that this is on John’s mind is because the design for that building was the Word of God. It wasn’t that the Word of God was one part of the furniture, the whole building was the Word of God. It is the only piece, apart from the temple in a modified version, it’s the only piece of godly directly designed architecture. So it’s important, the most important piece of construction that man has ever seen in history, the tabernacle. Now that was just a building. But John says Jesus, as God-man, as true humanity, undiminished deity, in one person, He is looked forward to by this tabernacle; he says it’s true, the tabernacle was made of material things; so was Jesus’ body, but nevertheless the entire tabernacle itself, John argues, is the Word of God come into physical touchable existence. It was a plan, Moses saw the plan, he built the building, you could touch the building and enter it.

So we find in John 1:14 that “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us,” and his Jewish readers would have immediately picked this verb up and said oh, yeah, that reminds me of the tabernacle. He “dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory,” now “us” and “we” are a problem in this text. Us-we, he’s using it again and again and again and again. Now the word “us” and “we” refer to the witnesses of this data. John’s Gospel is written, actually for a lawyer, apparently, just from what we can see, he’s emphasizing over and over the evidence, the evidences, the evidences, the evidences, the evidences, so that “we” are the people who saw the evidences, not all Christians. Keep that in mind as we go on; it may apply but he’s saying, “He dwelt among us,” he means “us,” the witnesses of this thing who are now teaching this Gospel throughout the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” Now “beheld His glory” is a phrase that we have to stop and analyze because this word “glory” is used in a peculiar way; I’m going to show you how he uses it, and this completely… or at least when you first see it, if you think like I do this completely jars you in your usual concept of glory is God’s majesty and for example, you think of the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus is glorified in front of these disciples and you have a tremendous image there of His glory, or you get the idea of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, great glory. Now that’s the way the Synoptic Gospels treat the word doxa, but John doesn’t do it that way. He has another terminology in mind; in fact, John’s Gospel never once mentions the Mount of Transfiguration. John never mentions these, what we’ll call the fireworks kind of revelation, he never mentions those splendorous revelations. He seems to just concentrate on these kind of mundane miracles. Why?

Let’s trace the word “glory” as he uses it. He says here, “we beheld His glory.” Fortunately for us he repeat this at several other points in the New Testament. In John 2:11, “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana, of Galilee, and manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on Him.” Now what does it mean to manifest His glory? What had happened in John 2? Had Jesus been transfigured in front of everybody at the party? Not at all. Here’s what John means? Jesus was invited to a simple Hebrew wedding; he went to the wedding, He and His disciples, apparently friends of the family, and they ran out of wine. By the way, it wasn’t grape juice it was wine. People always read grape juice into this thing. You can’t have grape juice in a hot climate, the thing would mold before you could get it to your mouth; they didn’t have ice cubes you could drop in and keep it nice grape juice, this is wine, the real stuff. And Jesus Christ made it. Now the point that John is making is instead of showing forth His glory John says I want you to reexamine your whole concept of glory. He says consider this simple humble Hebrew marriage wedding feast. At this feast they run out of refreshments; Jesus provides for those refreshments. True, there’s a lot of theological significance in how He supplied the refreshments, but John’s whole point is that it was done in the context of a simple every day wedding, and it was over a very simple human need for refreshment. That’s where Jesus glorified Himself with John, and he says that’s what I want you to start looking at. Instead of just thinking of the splendor, think of the fact that God chose to manifest His glory in the mundane things. He was as interested in that bride and that groom who had run out of refreshments at their wedding feasts as He would be interested in the more spectacular things.

In John 11:40 we have another time he says “we beheld His glory,” and again it’s not a spectacular thing. Again you can argue, there’s no Mount of Transfiguration experience here; there’s a miracle but somehow it’s just not that kind of miracle. So in John 11:4, Lazarus is sick and Jesus says, when He heard it, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might b glorified by it.” And then we see in John 11:40 the phrase “glory” used again in the same story, let’s look at verse 39 first to get the context, “Jesus said, Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto Him, Lord, by this time he stinks for he’s been dead four days.” And when we get there we’ll go why He waited four days. “And Jesus said to her, Said I not unto you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?” Now you can see the rest of that passage and Martha doesn’t see any big spectacular glory of God. She doesn’t have a Mount of Transfiguration experience. Well, then what can John mean by “Martha, if you believe you’re going to see the glory of God.” What’s the glory of God? Just the same kind of glory of God shown at the simple Hebrew wedding. Here it’s a simple Hebrew funeral and people are bereaved over the loss of a loved one. That’s where Jesus shows the glory of God. This time it’s not refreshments, the first time it was for refreshments to provide for happiness; this one it’s the resuscitation of a loved one to provide for happiness.

John 12:23, there’s a whole cluster of verses but this is typical of the rest of the cluster, “And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man must be glorified.” Now what does He mean that; He’s not there talking about the Mount of Transfiguration experience; He’s not going to appear to the people like He did to John on the island of Patmos; what does He mean I will be glorified? He means I’m going to be crucified, I’m going to die the death of every man. That’s what I’m going to do and that’s My glorification.

So do you see that from this use of doxa in this Gospel John has something different in mind for us than what the other writers of the other Gospels had. They want to direct our attention to the fireworks and the splendor, and John says yeah, but when you do that, don’t forget Jesus shows His glory daily in the mundane things of life; that’s where to look for most of the glory. Apparently by this time the Christians would concentrate on the big spectacular stories and so John says now as an old man I’ve taught many, many believers and I know as young believers there’s always a tendency to glorify and gravitate to the spectacular. So John says what I’m going to do when I write my Gospel, I’m going to feed you the things I saw Jesus do to a bride, to a woman who lost her brother, that’s where the glory was manifested.

So now let’s turn back to John 1; that’s what John says, “we beheld His glory,” not that we saw it glow but that we saw Him meet every day situations in life. Why does John say that’s glory though? That’s the second question we have to ask; what does he mean. We can see what he means, the satisfaction of these seemingly mundane things. You know, I don’t know all went to that party in John 2 but you know afterwards if any of them became believers, certainly at least His mother did and many of the disciples did and they walked away from that party and when they finally realized the significance of what happened at that wedding, they must have asked themselves several times at least why did Jesus pick a wedding to do that, that’s so insignificant, why didn’t He go right out in the middle of the crowd and do it in public, why’d He just do it in a wedding? Because to Jesus that counted, that’s part of genuine humanity. And in this Gospel the glory refers to the common every day things that a human being would do, and John says man was created… see it’s all tied with the incarnation.

How did we start out? The incarnation dignifies man and when Jesus Christ become man He is interested in weddings and funerals because that’s part of humanity. That’s where He chooses to glorify Himself, so He fulfills, you might say, manhood perfectly. He is a perfect man in His humanity and John says that’s what I mean by glorification, because man was created to glorify God so if you have a perfect man, perfectly submissive to God, you must therefore have him perfectly glorifying God. And you know, the human being is the only creature that can do this. Your dog can’t, your cat, your horse, your plants, no matter how productive they are or how beautiful they may look, there’s no way they can glorify God. Only people can do that. And so this is why this truth is tied into the incarnation. This is a great thought of this gospel.

“We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.” Now the word “only begotten” has been used by Jehovah’s Witnesses and other people who deny the incarnation to mean that Jesus began in a point in time, but the word, monogenous, which is used here does not come from the Greek word to begat; it comes from ginomai, to exist, and monogenous means uniqueness; it doesn’t refer to generation. You can test this meaning out in Hebrews 11:17 because there Abraham’s son, Isaac is called his only begotten. That wasn’t his only son; Ishmael was his son too. The point there was that Isaac was his only child of promise, he was unique in that respect, so monogenous is a term referring to uniqueness, not just physical generations.

So he says, “We beheld His glory, glory as you would expect of the unique person from the Father, full of grace,” he says, “and truth.” Now that is the ideal statement of sanctification of any member of the human race, to marry the two qualities of grace and truth in perfect balance. In one phrase John summarizes every bit of sanctification the Holy Spirit could possibly work into our souls. “Grace and truth” perfectly combined and balanced. Not so much truth and too little grace, and not so much grace that you compromise truth, but in perfect balance. Jesus Christ is the only man who ever lived, who ever walked the face of the earth that had these two qualities in perfect balance at all times. In other words, what he’s saying here is that by being a perfect man He was a perfect reflector of God’s character. That’s the power of the incarnation. Our God was meant to be revealed through men, not through an angel, or through an animal; man is tremendously significant.

John 1:15, he says, “John,” he goes back to John now, but this time he goes back to John not as the Old Testament prophet but to John as the king-maker who announces the new dispensation. “John” he says, and in the Greek he is “bearing witness,” it’s present tense, He is bearing witness, and these are many decades after John has been beheaded, but nevertheless it says John, today, people, he’s saying to his readers, today, after 30 or 40 years, I know John is dead but John keeps on bearing witness because he has said, “he has said,” perfect, that means the announcement has been made, the king-making prophet has made his decree, and that decree still stands. It’s also a gentle reminder to perhaps a John the Baptist cult that might have been forming in the city of Ephesus at this time as we discussed earlier. It’s just a warning to them that your leader, he still bears witness because he has said. And then what did John say about Jesus? Unmistakably John grasps Jesus’ character.

It says, “John bore witness of Him, saying, This was He of whom I spoke,” this one, but when he uses “was” we’re immediately struck with it’s the wrong tense…it’s the wrong tense John, what are you using the past tense; can you imagine John standing at the bank of the Jordan, Jesus standing in front of him in the present tense and he says “this was the one I talked to you about.” Why does John use the past tense when he’s talking about somebody standing right in front of him on the River Jordan. “Was?” We know what he was using, he was investing the Hebrew imperfect with the sense of preexistence. We see this, for example in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We find the phrase used in verse 2, “The same was in the beginning.” Verse 4, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Verse 9, “That was the true Light….” Verse 10, “He was in the world,” and so when John says “This one was He of whom I spoke,” he is pointing to the Jewish carpenter from Galilee and saying that one, He is the preexistent one. That’s the only way you can say preexistence, He was already existing. That’s what John the Baptist is saying and this is proof that John the Baptist understood Christ’s nature and communicated it to His disciples and there was no excuse later on in history for the separate cult that grew up around John the Baptist; no excuse for it whatsoever, John had made the issue perfectly clear. This man, he says, “was” the One I have been speaking about all this time, the one who “was” to come into the world, the One who preexisted throughout the entire Old Testament.

And then he adds something else, “He that comes after me is preferred before me; for He always was before me.” There is an amplification of the first imperfect “was” of the statement. “He that comes after me in time” is actually “preferred,” or holds rank, “above me;” “before me” means above me, “He holds rank above me, because He always was above me.” So John makes no distinguishment between this preincarnate Logos and the Jewish Galilean carpenter in front of him; there’s continuity, there’s flow between the Logos, which wasn’t a principle, an it, a seed, a spooky spirit, not at all, the Logos in one continuous stream becomes a man and now we can shake His hand. That’s how powerful the incarnation is and we as Christians have to be reminded again and again what a powerful thing we’re really confessing when we’re confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. That’s what we’re confessing, that you could have shaken God’s hand; that God had fingernails. God appeared as a man, and when you touched Jesus’ human body you were touching God.

“He was of whom I spoke, He that comes after me is preferred before me; because He always preexisted, [16] For out of His fullness,” not “and” as in the King James, the best text reads “because” and this apparently is John the Apostle now commenting; John the Baptist has ceased speaking at the end of verse 15 and now the commentary is picked up by the apostle. And the apostle says I can explain John’s words, and this is what John the Baptist meant and why he said what he said. Why did he say that Jesus always existed in a rank above him? “Because out of Jesus’ fullness have we all received, and that grace for grace.” “Out of His fullness,” out of His pleroma, this is an ancient world that was used for the beams that were in the transition between deity and men. In the ancient world they had the idea of emanation, and you’d have a beam that would emanate out from God and then one would emanate out from him and one would emanate out from him and one would emanate out from him and you have a whole series of these emanations, and the idea of course is much like Jehovah’s Witnesses teach Jesus was Michael the archangel, kind of an emanation of God; it’s just a 20^th century version of Gnosticism, and so you have this emanation business out from God’s character.

Now that whole series of emanations out from God’s character, between God up here and man down here, these intermediate chain of command, intermediate being, that whole chain was called pleroma. Now to show you how the early Christians thought this, turn to Colossians. We’re going to get some background for John 1:16, Colossians 1:19, Paul faced the same thing in the same area. Apparently the people in this area were fouled up on this point, it kept coming up, and so these apostles, when they wrote the New Testament had to keep dealing with the issue over and over again; the pleroma, there’s no such thing as pleroma, they said; if you’re dealing with a creature above man you’re dealing with God Himself and God Himself is in Jesus. So in Colossians 1:19, “For it pleased the Father that in Christ should all pleroma dwell,” in Christ He says all pleroma dwells. There are no intermediate interpreting angels halfway between God and man; you can’t mar the Creator/creature distinction. The pleroma, he says, dwells completely in God. It doesn’t ooze out of him.

In Colossians 2:9, “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” what is the practical application of this pleroma business? Is this just an ancient heresy? Or does it have some very serious implications for Christians in their daily walk? It has some very serious implications; here’s why. If the pleroma isn’t really in Jesus you need something besides Him, but if all the pleroma is in Christ, and you are in Christ, you don’t need anything else; that’s the argument. Is Christ or is He not sufficient? Or do you need something in addition to Him? Do you need this post-salvation experience of pouring water in the bathtub at 70 degrees and letting your tongue flap at both ends and so on; is this needed? No, if you have been born again in Christ at the point of regeneration you are “in Him,” and “in Him dwells all the pleroma of God.”

Turn back to John; John says here is why John the Baptist could argue that Jesus Christ outranked every Old Testament prophet, “because out of His fullness have we all received,” out of His pleroma we have all received something and no prophet ever gave us something out of their soul. What Christ has given to us came from His own character. What the Old Testament teachers and prophets gave came ultimately from God through them. [tape turns]

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