My friends, let's hear the word of the Lord for us this morning
from John chapter 1. The true light, which gives
light to everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet
the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own
people did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him,
who believe in His name, He gave them the right to become
children of God who were born not of blood, nor of the will of
the flesh, nor of the will of man, but born of God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen
His glory, the glory as the only Father from the the only Son
from the Father, full of grace and truth.
And this is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. Dear God, we ask as always that
you would grant us the ability to understand well Your Word
before us, to be transformed by us.
Shake us Lord, we pray through Christ our Lord, we ask.
Amen. Please be seated and if you
would grab your Bibles, be helpful to have them available
open at chapter 1 of John as we can work our way through this
passage together. If you, unless you were
absolutely sleeping by now, you have noticed that it is the
first Sunday of Advent. Dan mentioned that earlier.
We've had all of the reminders of that all the way around.
Lots of indications. It is the first Sunday of
Advent. Advent is that time of
anticipation, is that time of looking forward.
It's the time where we begin to anticipate the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ. All the good things of
Christmas. One of the things that we
anticipate or one of the things that we hear around this time of
year that we don't often hear about is the word Emmanuel.
By the way, Emmanuel with an I or Emmanuel with an E, they're
the same thing. We're just trying to keep track
of the way in which we articulated well.
So Emmanuel with an I, Emmanuel with an E, it's the same thing.
And it's right and proper for us to remind ourselves of that at
this time of year because of course it occurs both in the Old
Testament and in the New Testament.
The prophecy that we have that the virgin will give birth to a
son and he shall be called Emmanuel, God with us.
Now lots of us know that the name Emmanuel is not necessarily
attached to Jesus. When we think about Jesus being
born in the Manger, etcetera, we don't he reference him.
We don't hear in the scriptures ever him reference as Emmanuel.
He is Emmanuel, but we don't hear people calling out, hey,
Emmanuel, stuff like that because the name is different.
If you've been involved with the worship here at heaven at any
point in time or if you've been involved in Bible studies,
etcetera, you will recognize that the word, the name, a name
means something different in the scriptures and it often means
for us today, for us, the name is a label.
I am Henry, that is Brendan over here, the leads of America from
etcetera, etcetera. But the names are different in
that they often have are rooted in a title or in an expectation
or in a description. That's what the names originally
intended to mean. And in the same way, Emmanuel is
not necessarily a label or an identifier.
It is a description. It is a description that marks
God with us. Brendan, incidentally, is from
the Celtic, the old Celtic identification.
It's not a name at all. It is a title.
It means the Prince. And so whenever you reference
Brendan, you're referencing Prince.
We've had Robert back here on the drums today, and I
appreciated the fact that the light was red on him, beaming
red. And then beaming green kind of
light lit him up because Robert is from the old German, and it
means the shining and brightness.
And so, you know, hey, that guy who's shining in brightness, you
would use the term Robert. Now it eventually, of course,
merges into a name itself. Henry, by the way, is from the
old German through French, which means ruler of the household.
Something gets lost in translation, but there you have
the idea. In the same way then, Emmanuel
means God with us. It means God with us and that
you can see the appropriateness of it, say in our core verse
today in verse 14. And the Word became flesh and
dwelt among us. And for if you've been a part of
a Christian worship services for some time, if you understand the
Christian Gospel, you know that that is a reality, the core
understanding of the incarnation, the incarnation God
himself in heavens becomes in fleshed, becomes a man and
dwells here in this world as as a human being.
And so we have the dwelling with us aspect of God.
And so you have the Emmanuel, God with us, kind of as a
description of reality. But if you look carefully at the
text and if you read through the Scriptures, well, you understand
that it's not just a description of reality.
When we talk about Jesus coming and it's Emmanuel, God with us,
we don't simply mean that God is present with us.
We are actually capturing a long biblical tradition of describing
the desire of God himself. It is God's desire that he dwelt
with us. It's not just the reality that
God dwells with us in Jesus Christ, though God is present
and with us now, but rather the Emmanuel sense, God with us is
not just an expression of the reality of God's presence with
us. It's a description of God's
desire and passion for us. And this has been captured all
the way through the Scriptures from the very beginning.
It is Emmanuel, God's desire to dwell with us, that is a goal of
the Garden of Eden. Now for many of us, when we read
the Garden of Eden story in the first couple chapters of
Genesis, we are struck by the beauty of it, by the majesty, by
the perfection of of the Garden of Eden.
Here is no sin, here is perfection, Here is everything
you could possibly want. And God has created humanity to
be in the Garden of Eden and to experience all that joy and all
that wonder. And all of that is true.
But the essence of that wonder, the reality of why the Garden is
so perfected and so marvelous, is the presence of God.
The Garden is where God himself intends to dwell with his
people. He created the garden.
He created humanity so that he would dwell with us.
And so you have Emmanuel, God with us, The very goal of the
Garden of Eden. It is Emmanuel, God with us.
It is God who desires to dwell with us that reveals the
consequences of our sin when Adam and Eve fell, when Adam and
Eve took from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Of course there are huge consequences that are described
in the Scriptures. And so you have the discussion
of death. Of course, a major 1.
You have childbirth. You have a rupture of our
relationship with God. You have our rupture with our
relationship with creation itself that now work is going to
be late laborious. You have a rupture in our
relationship with one another. Husband is going to turn against
wife, wife against husband. You're going to have a rupture
in our relationship with our own selves, the way in which we feel
about ourselves. But the greatest rupture is
pictured in Genesis 324 where God drove out man from the east
of the garden and place a cherubim with a flaming sword,
turning this way and that way to guard the way of the tree of
life. You have the anti Emmanuel, the
upside down Emmanuel. What is sin?
Sin is that which has separated us from God.
And God actually cast out Adam and Eve from that spot which was
created so that God could dwell with man.
Instead, man is cast out into exile away from Emmanuel, God
with us. It is Emmanuel, God's desire to
dwell with us, which prompts the call of Abraham and the call of
Israel. Now, if you know your
scriptures, you know that at one point, in the midst of this
exile from God's presence, God calls out to Abraham and says to
Abraham, hey, leave where you're at right now and come to this
new place where you will be, and I will bless you.
And through you the whole world will be blessed.
And of course, we get excited thinking about what it means
that we are blessed in God and that Abraham was blessed in God.
And then the Abraham, through Abraham that blessing pours out
to all of us. And all of that is very true.
But what marks the great blessing is not that God is
pouring out good things upon Abraham, not that through
Abraham good things pour out to us.
All of that is true. But what is essential, what is
what is central to the blessing is captured well in Genesis 26
where God says dwell in the land in which I shall tell you
sojourning this land and I will be with you and I will bless
you. The call, the essence of the
call of Abraham and Isaac, through which of course we get
the coming of Jesus Christ and the Israelite people and the
whole Old Testament, all of which evolves from the call of
Abraham. The motivation for this is
Emmanuel, God's desire to dwell with his people.
It is Emmanuel, God's desire to dwell with his people, that is
at the core imagery of the Tabernacle.
So after 400 years of slavery, bondage in Egypt, the Israelites
are released from Egypt and they wander through the wilderness.
And the central feature of wandering through the wilderness
is the Tabernacle. Now we don't, we're not familiar
with that term. So you got to flesh it out a
little bit. A Tabernacle is a massive tent.
It's a massive mobile worship center which you can break down
and and put back together fairly quickly.
It was this beauty. It was this most marvelous and
central feature of the Israelites as they wandered
through through the wilderness for 40 years.
They carried this glorified tent with you and it really was this
spectacular marvel and it was filled with gold and tapestries.
It was everything that you would be attracted to in life, but the
wonder. And wherever you set up the
tent, wherever they set up the Tabernacle, the Israelite people
would build their camps around it.
So at the very core was this Tabernacle.
But the beauty of the Tabernacle is not how wonderful it is or
how central it was to the Israelites.
It's the fact that once the Tabernacle was built in Exodus
chapter 40, then the cloud covered the temple, the tent of
meeting the Tabernacle, and the glory of the Lord filled the
Tabernacle. Here you have the glory of God
himself settled down over top of this Tabernacle.
So you have this beautiful, wonderful tent where the
Israelites were to worship God. And in the midst of that, here
comes God's Shekinah glory, the physical manifestation of God's
very presence settles down over the Tabernacle.
And for 40 years, that physical manifestation, the pillar of
fire, the pillar of cloud, never left the Israelites.
At the very center of the Israelite community was the
Tabernacle. And at the core filling the
Tabernacle was the God's very presence, the Emmanuel dwelling
with his people, God with us. And it is Emmanuel, God's desire
to dwell with us, That is the promise of Canaan land.
So after wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, the
Israelite people then crossover into Canaan land.
Now, some of you will have remembrance of Canaan land.
What is Canaan land? Canaan land is that wonderful
area. It is flowing with milk and
honey. Now, I don't know how you feel
about milk and honey, but you're supposed to have this picture
that the milk and honey is representative of the wonderful
abundance that Canaan land has. And not just abundance, but
extravagance. It's this extravagant beauty of
the of Canaan land and you're supposed to be marvelled by it.
And every time the Israelites were exploring it Canaan land,
they came back with these massive grapes and this
wonderful food and this marvelous description of how
glorious Canaan land was. And Canaan Land was wonderful as
soon as the Israelites people for 40 years being led by the
pillar of fire and pillar of clouds, the Shekinah glory of
God. As soon as they cross going to
Canaan land, guess what happens? The pillar disappears.
After 40 years of having the the physical manifestation of God
present in the center of their community, now suddenly that
pillar of fire in the pillar of cloud disappears.
Why? Because Canaan Land is marked by
abundance. Canaan Land is marked by its
extravagance, not in what Canaan Land is, but in who is there.
It is there at that spot where God promised to meet with his
people, to dwell with his people.
Come to Canaan Land. It's the promised land, not
because of how wonderful it is, but because of who makes it
wonderful. It is God himself, Emmanuel,
God, dwelling with us. It is Emmanuel, God's desire to
dwell with us. It is behind the beauty and the
majesty of the temple. After 400 years or so of living
in Canaan land, the Israelite people conquered Jerusalem and
David. King David desires to build a
temple for God. He is ultimately prevented to do
so, but his son ultimately builds his temple.
Now it's impossible to describe the majesty and the beauty of
the temple. It was massive.
It was huge, it was gold covered all over the place.
It was everything that you could imagine is beautiful.
It was not one of the seven wonders of the world, but it is
often listed with the seven wonders of the world when
they're articulated. It was this beautiful,
magnificent artifice. I mean that you again, it's hard
to describe how beautiful and wonderful it is, but its beauty
doesn't come from its majestic character or how big it is or
how glorious it is or anything like that.
The beauty of it comes when the priest came out of that holy
place, the cloud filled the House of the Lord so that the
priest could not enter into it and minister there because of
the cloud. For the glory of the Lord filled
the House of the Lord. Once again, the picture that you
have of the Temple of the Temple is that it is a dwelling place
of God. And so in the middle of
Jerusalem, in the middle of their nation, this land, Canaan
land itself, which represents the presence of God.
Once again you have this physical manifestation of God,
the cloud, the pillar of fire, the pillar of cloud that fills
the temple. And every time you want to see
and experience Emmanuel, God with us, you look at the temple
and you see the pillar of fire, the pillar of cloud that is
indwelling the temple and is that is present there Emmanuel,
God with us. It is Emmanuel, God's desire to
dwell with us, that is vividly portrayed in the reenacting of
the exile after 400 some years, after the creation of the temple
and once again God's physical manifestation and presence there
with the people. The people have sinned
consistently against the Lord, and after 400 years you have the
loss in battle, the capture of the Israelites, and they are
dragged away to Assyria first, and then they are the remainder
are captured and taken to Babylon.
And you have the Babylonian in exile.
And this is a disaster for the Israelite people.
But the disaster is not simply being separated from the land.
The disaster is not simply the loss of militarily what takes
place. The disaster comes when the
glory of the Lord, this is Ezekiel has this vision and what
he sees is the glory of the Lord that it inhabited the temple,
rises up and leaves the temple and instead settles in judgment
over the Israelite people. Instead of God dwelling with the
people now, because of their sin and brokenness, the dwelling,
the very physical manifestation of God, gets up and leaves the
temple and leaves the Israelite people bereft.
Emmanuel, God's with us. It is Emmanuel, God's desire to
dwell with us, that finds its yearning in the second temple.
This is the text that Dan read for us early, earlier.
So about 50 years later or so, the Israelite people are
released. 70 years later, the Israelite people are released
from their Babylonian captivity and they come back to Canaan
land. They come back to Jerusalem.
They rebuild Jerusalem. And of course their intent is to
rebuild the temple. So they build up the temple once
again. They build the temple and you
have people gathered around it. When they dedicate the temple,
you have all the Israelites gathered there to celebrate the
forming of the temple. And all the young people are
excited and they're all cheering and all the old people are sad
and mourning because they remember the old temple, the
former temple. And this new temple is a small
shell. It's, it's a small bit of the
former glory of the glorious temple.
And so Haggai and the other prophets say you're sad.
You're sad because this temple isn't as majestic as the other
one, but its majesty is not in its size, its majesty is not in
its beauty. Its majesty is in the the first
temple. God's presence came and dwelt
it. And here we have dedicated the
second temple and there is no presence of God.
And so there's a yearning, a desire that the Israelite people
are saying, no matter how big the building, no matter what,
how wonderful the building, what we're really looking for is the
presence of God, Emmanuel, God with us.
And the fact that God didn't indwell the Second Temple
creates that yearning, that moving forward for Emmanuel, God
with us. And it is Emmanuel, God's desire
to dwell with us that finds its culmination in the coming of
Jesus Christ. Look again at our text here.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen
his glory, the glory as of the Son of the of the Father, full
of grace and truth. And we have seen his flesh.
The word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.
That word dwelt there. It's actually a noun that the
author uses as a verb. And we do this sometimes, you
know, when you say I'm going to Google you or, or let me, let me
friend you on Facebook. And, and for us who are old, you
sit there and say, that's a noun.
Quit using it as a verb kind of a thing.
And so here what we have is, is the Word became flesh and
tabernacled amongst us. Tabernacled.
He he built. He built his Tabernacle there.
His expression of the desire, not just the reality of God's
presence, but the desire of God to be present with his people.
He tabernacled with us, He tented with us.
And here you have the the culmination of all of the
passion and all the desires of the Old Testament, all of from
gardening, even the Eden, all the way through where God's
passion is to dwell with his people.
And finally here the culmination, the fullness of it,
the completeness of it comes in Jesus Christ as Christ comes to
dwell with his people. But as many of you know, Christ
ascended to the Father and so you have Emmanuel, God with us.
And it is a manual, God's desire to dwell with us that is
continually expressed in the corporate filling of the body of
Christ with the Holy Spirit. Here, of course, we are
referencing the Pentecost moment where the body of Christ, the
disciples all gathered together and the Holy Spirit fell upon
them when the Holy Spirit came down upon the body of believers.
And in the same exact way, the Holy Spirit is present here with
us today. And we have a manual with us
right now, God with us, because of the presence of the Holy
Spirit filling this place just as He filled that place in Acts
chapter 2, the tongues of divided fire appeared before.
For them and rested on each one of them, and they were all
filled with the Holy Spirit. It is a manual God with us that
we sense in God's presence here among us.
And it is a manual God's desire to dwell with us that is
expressed personally too individually.
It's not just His corporate presence with us here, it is his
individual presence with us. It is a marvel of the New
Testament that tells us that when the Jesus want to be with
the Father that he promises disciples that he would not
leave us as orphans, but rather that he would come with us, that
He would come to us as the Holy Spirit.
And so the Holy Spirit comes and indwells every believer.
Paul captures this when he says, do you not know that your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from
God? You are not your own, for you've
been brought with a price. So glorify God with your body.
It is our very bodies individually that are the temple
of the Holy Spirit. Individually we have that
expression of the Emmanuel God with us.
But of course, the culmination of this, the ultimate expression
of this is in the new heavens and the new earth, John writes.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the
dwelling place of God is with men.
He will dwell with them. They will be his people and God
himself will be there with them, as is God, heaven, the new
heavens, the new earth, that which we are all shaping for the
fulfillment of God's desire in the Garden of Eden throughout
Israel's history, finding its culmination, its pinnacle in the
in Jesus Christ, the the incarnation of Jesus Christ and
then expressed in each one of us individually comes to its
fullness in heaven where we dwell in the presence of God.
There will need to be no more sun.
There will be need to be no more moon.
But I didn't say that very clearly.
There is no sun. There is no moon in heaven
because God himself gives us his light.
God is present continually and forever in that moment.
When we talk about Emmanuel, when we talk about Christmas, we
are often talking about the great things that God gives us,
the presence of God and the presence of God is fulfilled
completely to us through Emmanuel, God with us.
And it's not just the reality of God presence that's wonderful.
Think about how glorious it is that God is present here with
us. That's a marvel and it's a
beauty. But realize this, that from the
beginning of scriptures to its at the very end, it captures not
the reality of God's presence with us, but the desire of God
to be present with us In your brokenness, in your joy, in your
sorrow, in your love, in your care, in your sin, God desires
to be with you. Emmanuel, God with us.
Dear Father in Heaven, we do pray again that You would
strengthen us and bless us with the fulfillment of Your
presence. Now and forevermore.
We pray. Amen.