Dr. Sproul introduces us to the Gospel of John and immediately launches into a discussion of the meaning behind the Logos. He then goes into a discussion of the titles given to Jesus. Dr. Sproul parallels the introduction of the book of John as being an echo of what was in Genesis chapter 1.

Our Scripture this morning is taken from the gospel according to Saint John. I will be reading from John 1:1–18, which is that section of John’s gospel that we call the prologue. Hear then the Word of God:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’”

And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, we stand in awe at the words we have just heard from sacred Scripture. None of us has the capacity to penetrate the depth of the riches contained therein, but as we contemplate them briefly today, we beg for the assistance of Your Spirit of truth, that He might illumine these words to our understanding. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Theological Gospel

It is my hope and intention to preach through the gospel of John. I will not be doing it verse by verse as I usually preach because I doubt the Lord has prepared enough days for the rest of my life to complete that kind of exposition. But I will look at the major themes that come to us in this gospel in the weeks and months to come.

For that reason, I wanted to begin by looking at the prologue, which I trust at least some of you may recall. I want to look at it from a different perspective today as we prepare for the weeks and months ahead of gleaning the riches of this gospel.

It is customary in New Testament studies to distinguish between the gospel of John and the other three Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels for the simple reason that they give us a synopsis of the life of Jesus, an overview of His ministry on earth.

It is not that John is uninterested in giving us biographical details of the life and teaching of Jesus, but he proceeds in quite a different style. His is the most theological of the four Gospels, and he devotes almost two-thirds of the material in his written account to the last week of Jesus’ life.

John is putting a spotlight, as it were, on the critically important redemptive-historical activities Jesus performs during His stay on earth. In John’s gospel, we find the most extensive revelation from the lips of Jesus about the person and work of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, as found in the Upper Room Discourse on Maundy Thursday.

Jesus’ Ultimate Credentials

We must ask this question: Why the prologue? Why does John not begin his gospel like Matthew and Luke do, by telling us about the circumstances of the conception of Jesus and His birth to a peasant girl? John begins his gospel with Jesus already an adult, but he first gives us this brief prologue of eighteen verses.

Before I try to answer the question, let me also say that no portion of the New Testament captured the imagination and attention of the Christian intellectual community in the first three centuries more than the prologue to John’s gospel. In an attempt to understand the person of Christ in Trinitarian terms, the church was preoccupied with the high view of Christ that is expressed in the prologue. They sought to develop what was called Logos Christology, or the understanding of Christ as the Word who is introduced in the opening words of John’s gospel.

If I can guess at the reason for this, I think that John, throughout his gospel, is trying to make a case for the identity of Christ. In fact, he later says that these things “are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name” (John 20:31). John is not interested in being a detached observer and chronicler of the life of Jesus. He is trying to persuade us of the truth of Christ so that we might be His disciples.

Before John enters an overview of Jesus’ life and His encounters with various people along the way, he gives us a quick look at Jesus’ ultimate credentials. What John is telling us in the prologue is an answer to those questions we often ask people when we meet them for the first time. We say to them: “What’s your name? What do you do? Where are you from?” John is answering those questions here with respect to Jesus. Where is He from?

Son of Man

In the New Testament, there are many titles used for Jesus. As I have told you before, the title that occurs more frequently than any other for Jesus is the title Christos, or Christ. Christ is the New Testament word for Messiah. It is used so often that we think it is His last name, Jesus Christ. No, His name is Jesus; His title is Christ. The church is saying that Jesus is the Messiah. That is the number one title, in terms of frequency.

The second most frequent title given to Jesus is Lord, which served as the earliest Christian creed: “Jesus is Lord.” In third place, behind Messiah and Lord in frequency, is the title Son of Man. It is only used about eighty-two times in the New Testament. But the remarkable thing about its frequency is that even though it is third in terms of the preference of those who write about Jesus, it is by far Jesus’ favorite self-designation.

If you were to ask Jesus, “Who are You?” He would answer most frequently, “I am the Son of Man.” That is significant because we tend to read the title Son of Man simply as an expression of Jesus’ humility, His identification with our humanity. It does involve His identification and corporate solidarity with our humanity, but that is not its primary emphasis.

When Jesus identifies Himself as the Son of Man, the Jewish people of the first century understand what He is saying. He is identifying with the person described in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament—the One who comes from the very throne of God, who is a heavenly being, and whose mission is to be the judge of the world. When Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man, He is describing Himself not only in terms of His activity, but also His origin. He is telling us where He comes from. He will say, for example, on another occasion, “No one has ascended into heaven but He who came down from heaven” (John 3:13).

When Jesus heals people on the Sabbath, and they cry out against Him because He is violating their rules, He says, “I do this that you may know that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” That is when they picked up rocks to stone Him, because they got the message. Jesus was saying, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” and they understood that the Lord of the Sabbath was the Creator.

Elsewhere, when Jesus forgives sins, He says, “I say these things that you may know that the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins.” These are not statements of humility. These are statements by which Christ openly declares His authority as the One who has come down from heaven.

The Word Was God

Before we get a glimpse of the earthly visitation of Jesus, John tells us where He is from by saying, “In the beginning.” Here he is echoing the opening words of the Old Testament, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

That sentence alone was enough to keep the theologians busy for three hundred years. The Word is distinguished from God, and then, from a different perspective, identified with God. Since we have looked at that before, I will remind you that it is there, pregnant in significance, and it is the basis for the church’s confession of the Trinity.

We read: “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Jesus, who came to this earth, is identified as the incarnation of the member of the Trinity for whom, by whom, and in whom all things were made. What John is saying, in an extraordinary way, is this: “The One I’m going to tell you about, the One that I want you to believe in, and the One in whom there is life, is the One who created you in the first place. There was nothing made that was made except through Him.”

Life and Light

We will see that two words appear in John’s gospel again and again. Those are the words life and *light.*He says in verse 4, “In Him was life, and this life was the light of men.” So often, when Scripture describes the natural fallen condition of this world, it uses the antonyms of these words. It speaks in terms of death and darkness.

As I was reading through this for today’s sermon—I do not know how many times I have read the prologue—as I came to this verse, “In Him was life,” my own soul responded. When I go back over my lifetime and rehearse the meaningful moments of my personal experience, clearly the most defining moment in my entire life was my conversion to Christ. That was the moment when the lights went on. We sometimes maybe even speak of people who have “seen the light.”

Beloved, that is what John is saying in this text. He says later, in John 1:14, “We beheld His glory,” referring to the Mount of Transfiguration where Christ began to shine as His divine nature broke through the veil of His humanity. John is saying: “We saw it! We saw His glory, the glory of the monogenēs, the only begotten God Himself. In Him is life.” Conversely, outside of Him there is no life. There may be biological life, but not this kind of life that He came so we might have. And this life, John says, “was the light of men.”

In the second century, Christian philosophers and apologists sought to define the Christian faith against the pagan world and answer the critics from Greek philosophy. Justin Martyr, for example, argued that the great truths discovered by the genius of Plato and Aristotle were not discovered by their own power. Whatever light they found was borrowed from the light that comes into the world, having its basis, origin, and fountainhead in Christ, who is the fountain of all truth.

John says, “And the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it,” and then introduces John the Baptist and says, in essence: “John came for a witness, to bear witness to the light. He wasn’t the light, but he was witness to the light, the true light that gives light to every man, that came into the world.” Then we get this awful judgment: “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.”

Love Light, Not Darkness

Many years ago, I was being interviewed by Dr. James Montgomery Boice for his radio program in Philadelphia, and we were talking about John 3:16. Everyone knows what that says: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Dr. Boice said to me, “R.C., everyone knows John 3:16. What does John 3:17 say?” John 3:17: “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”

The examination kept going. Jim said, “Let me hear John 3:19.” I said, “This is the condemnation: that men loved darkness rather than the light.” He said, “Why is that?” On his radio program, I said, “Because their eeds are deevil.” That was the end of the interview. I can hardly read that text anymore without flinching. “Because their deeds are evil.” The world is already exposed to the condemnation of God because we prefer the darkness to the light.

Let me tell you my prayer for the weeks to come. I do not know the state of anyone’s soul who is hearing this sermon. We judge on outward appearances. Only God can look at the heart. But if we go by the odds, the probability is extremely high that there are people hearing this who do not know Christ, who are still living in darkness. Darkness covers their hearts and souls, and they have never experienced the life that only He can give. It is my earnest prayer, as we look through the pages of this gospel in the days to come, that God the Holy Spirit will make us see that light clearly, that we would be like those whom John said did receive Him. To them God gave the authority to be called His children, who were born not of the flesh, not of the will of man, but of God Himself.

My prayer is that through this Word, through which faith comes, you will come to know that light and that life. If you already have His life in you, and you already have seen the beauty of that life and been rescued from darkness, I pray that you will move from light to light, from life to life, from faith to faith, and from grace to grace, as we learn of Him. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, how is it that You could call us Your children and that You would allow us to catch even a glimpse of the light that has come into the world. Father, forbid that we should stay in darkness. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, in whom there is life and light. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.