Revealing the Divine: Understanding God Through Jesus

In this sermon, Don Carson explores how we can understand and perceive God. He discusses how God, as revealed through Jesus Christ, transcends common human conceptions of deity. He emphasizes that the Christian perspective, grounded in the Bible, portrays Jesus as the living Word, showing God’s communicative nature and His desire to be known by humanity. The sermon delves into the theological implications of viewing Jesus as both divine and a revealer of God’s character.

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How shall we think about God? We cannot ignore the plain fact that there have been many mutually exclusive understandings of God. Many have thought of God as spectacularly great, above space and time, transcendent, but infinitely far away, not really caring what a little bit of organic material does on the third rock from the sun, a minor star in a medium sized galaxy somewhere in space.

Others, the ancient Greeks and Romans for example, have thought not of one god but of many, many gods, and with all due respect they’re sort of like souped-up human beings. They have similar fears and hopes and loves and lusts and hates and jealousies. They have certain domains. If you want to have a sea voyage, then you solicit the help of Neptune, and then you have Venus and Aphrodite for love, and you have Mercury, Hermes, for communication. You have Bacchus if you want to get drunk.

But, of course, there are still other views of God. Some follow something called pantheism in which everything is God and God is everything. There is no distinction between God and everything else, and in that view you can find actors coming out of a pantheistic school saying, “I am God.” Well at least part of God, I suppose, if everything is God and God is everything. These views eventually become mutually exclusive. How shall we think about God?

It is worth reckoning with the fact that this is not merely a theoretical discussion, because what you think about God will inevitably shape you. If God is really understood to be that which you hold to be the most important thing, the thing that you pursue, the highest good, the goal, the passion of your life, then inevitably you become like what you worship. So it’s not merely a theoretical distinction; it ultimately becomes something that shapes what kind of human being you are, too.

The same is true with making a thing god … let’s say, pleasure. If you make pleasure god, you will have many pleasurable moments. You will become a pursuer of pleasure, but there will be entailments in all of that too somewhere down the track. It’s one of the reasons why the Bible can actually go so far as to say that covetousness is a form of idolatry. That is, what you are most desirous of having, what you want the most, becomes, for you, god. That god displaces the God who is there.

So how shall we think about God? Undoubtedly, we could at this point proceed through lengthy comparisons of views of God and world religions or adduce philosophical arguments of one sort or another. Of course I’m a Christian, and you expect me to present a Christian answer. There are a lot of different ways one could go about tackling this, but the best Christian answer relies on Christianity’s foundation documents. There are 66 of them. That’s all. None of them is very long. Some of them are very short, and they can all be bound together in one fat book, which we call the Bible.

The word Bible simply means book.

It’s really the book of Christianity’s foundation documents. Thirty-nine of them cover time before Jesus lived on this earth 2000 years ago, and the other 27 cover from the beginning of Jesus’ life for just under a century. That collection is called the New Testament. The first four of those focus on Jesus’ life, his origin, his ministry, his teaching, his works, and ultimately his bloody crucifixion and his return from the dead. There are four of them. They are commonly called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John after the names of the people who wrote them.

Now in this series what we’re going to do is look at five passages from the fourth of these. That is, the book written by John. We can’t go through the whole book, but we’ll pick up five passages. The first that we’re looking at is the one that was presented to us just a few minutes ago. It’s often called the prologue of John. It’s the first 18 verses of the book. It’s called the prologue simply because it really announces just about everything else that’s coming up in the book in one fashion or another.

To make sense of this passage just from the reading that was already done, there are three words you have to think about right off the bat. The first is God, the second is Word, and the third is flesh. You cannot possibly understand the prologue without understanding what John means by these three.

When John says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” he already has in mind a certain view of God. It’s not one that he is defining or making up. He comes from a long heritage of all the self-disclosure of God in the earlier books. He comes from a Jewish heritage. That’s where these books were formed and written.

The God that he is thinking about, the God that he knows to be there is one God. Powerful. He can do anything he wants. Sovereign. Utterly good. Just unimaginably, unequivocally, irreducibly good. But also holy, honest, true. He is righteous, to use an old-fashioned word. Moreover, he is a communicating God. He actually communicates with human beings, not only in events that he controls but in words. He is an eloquent God. He is a talking God.

Of course, because he is presented as immaterial, he is a spirit.… He does not talk the way I talk where I have to have vocal cords and a tongue, and cavity in my mouth to produce certain kinds of sounds. So undoubtedly he is accommodating himself to us in some ways, speaking through people whom he inspires to write certain things and say certain things. Nevertheless, he is a God who has actually spoken to us, disclosed himself to us, and all of this John presupposes.

He’s not just being pulled out of the air. He’s not a pantheist god; he’s not Venus. He is the God who has nurtured the Israelites before John through a long, complex history and has come up to a certain point in time after having many, many times predicted the coming of a hero, of a Messiah, an anointed person, a king, someone who would change everything with many antecedent promises looking forward to that time. That’s the God he’s talking about.

Then the second word we need to think about is simply the word Word.

John uses the word in different ways. Sometimes, it simply means message. A little farther on, for example, Jesus says, “If you adhere to my word …” What he means is his message. “… then you are truly my disciples.” Here he uses word in a way that, as far as we know, no one has ever used it before him. It almost might be rendered “In the beginning God expressed himself …” He spoke. “… and this self-expression was with God …” That is, God’s fellow. “… and this self-expression was God.” That is, God’s identity.

At that point, quite frankly, your brain starts to hurt. How do you say someone or something is with God and yet is God? But that’s the way John dares to begin his book, and he is going to apply this title, this word, to Jesus Christ a little farther on in the prologue. He’s going to say that this Word that God spoke that was with God and is God actually becomes flesh. That’s the third word; he becomes a human being.

In John’s time, to say that something was flesh was to say that he was a human being.

This Word, one with God yet distinguishable from God, actually becomes a human being, and later on in the prologue he’s called Jesus. Jesus, Messiah. Jesus, the promised hero.

I’m sure some of you have kicked around Christianity a while.

You hear Christians talking about the Trinity.

That’s simply a word that was invented later to say that, although there’s only one God, this God is complex. He’s a complex God with (Christians have always wrestled with how to say this) three persons in the one God. Father, and this Word (or the Son), and the Holy Spirit.

If you try to add them up to make three gods, that’s not what the Bible says. If you try to reduce them to just sort of different manifestations of the one God, that’s not quite what the Bible says. I acknowledge that this very first verse in John’s gospel is stretching our imagination to the absolute limit to think of one God but so complex that somehow he is a vital fellowship in himself that already an eternity passed before anything else was.

The Father loved the Son, and the Son loved the Father. Already a loving relationship, not solitariness, not loneliness but already one God yet somehow complex, and this God comes to us and manifests himself in flesh, in a human being. So the Word who is with God, the Word who is God actually becomes one of us. That’s why Christians have, for centuries, referred to Jesus, on occasion, as the God-man.

We’ll think about that in a moment, but let me run through the passage really quickly so that you can see what things are predicated of this Word, and then we’ll come back to the question.… What does it mean to think about God, to see God in a fashion? What does the text say?

The first thing it says is that this Word creates us. This Word was one with God and creation. So you pick up he was with God in the beginning. Well that was already established. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In other words, this Word that was with God is bound up with God on the creation of everything in the first instance.

Now this is not interested in exploring exactly how this was done or the like. What it means, however, is that God is different from the created order. He is the Creator, but the created order is different. More importantly, in the Bible, that is what grounds human responsibility.

It’s easy to say, “You know, Don, if you find this Jesus attractive and that’s the way that you achieve your form of spirituality, that’s fine. I’m happy for you, you know, but we have different ways of finding out spirituality, and quite frankly I don’t mind listening to a bit about Jesus, and I want to listen also to what Hindus say. Quite frankly, I’m also attracted to flat out philosophical materialism, but at the same time I really don’t like it when somebody pushes your Jesus down my throat. That just seems a bit narrow minded.”

What I am supposed to say by way of comeback? “Oh, you’re quite right. You’re quite right. You do your spirituality, and I do my spirituality.” Except that if this God really has made us all, then the ground of our responsibility to him is that we owe him. We have our existence, our life, from him. Instead to sing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way” is already in a sense poking a finger in his eye. It’s already a form of idolatry. It’s de-Godding God. It’s dethroning him.

If I understand the Bible right, what I want to say is that’s dangerous for me. It’s dangerous for you. It’s ignoring the God who is there. There’s a sense in which the creature’s first responsibility is to recognize his or her “creaturely-ness.” We’re not self-existent. We’re dependent on others, on our parents and, finally, on God. So the reason this is put at the beginning of the book is that it grounds the whole storyline in the Bible. It grounds the whole storyline in this book by John. So the Word creates.

Secondly, the Word gives us light and life. Now it might be helpful to back off a wee bit here. Supposing you get on an airplane at Melbourne Airport. You’re flying to Christchurch, New Zealand. You have a few hours in the air, so you stop and you pick up a book in the airport book stall. It might be a whodunit.

You’re just killing time. You may be in business or you may be a student, and normally you’d take out the laptop and hammer away at things, but this time you’re tired and you’re in the cattle car section in any case and don’t have much room for your laptop, so you get out your book and you read.

By the time you get to the end, you’ve read the whodunit and discovered whodunit, and it may be a book where you don’t really even want to add it to your library. It’s not quite worth it, so you just stick it in the seat pocket in front of you, and it’s picked up by the cleaners and gets recycled somewhere. It may even be that next year when you make the same trip, you’ll pick up the same book in the bookstore and read it again because you’ve forgotten whodunit. So it’s not a book on which you’ve pinned an awful lot of advanced literary analysis.

Alternatively, you read some books, even some of the better whodunits, and they are so well written and they might be grounded at a certain time or place in history where you know what’s going on. You read it through quickly the first time. You’re just following the plotline. This story is drawing you on, and once you’ve discovered whodunit, you think, “Oh, I’d like to keep that. There were some really interesting descriptions of the places where I grew up,” and so on.

Now you go and read it again, and this time you discover characters and you discover clues along the line you should have picked up and so on. You read the book through entirely different eyes. In fact, the best books are books where you read them almost in layers. You read them a third time or a fourth time, and you pick up different layers depending on which time you’re reading it.

The question is did John, who wrote this book.… Did John write this as a kind of throw-away pamphlet or did he write it in layers such that he wanted you to see different things when you reread it? Now the first demonstration that he wanted you to see different things is in the next two verses, verses 4 and 5. This is what they say: “In him …” That is, in the Word. “… was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

If you’ve not read the rest of the book, you don’t really know much about Jesus, you don’t really know anything about Christianity particularly, all you’ve read so far are the first verses and then these two. What are you going to think this light is, this life is? Aren’t you going to think this light is the light at the beginning of creation? In fact, the Bible begins, “God said let there be light, and there was light.” It’s the beginning of creation. He created life itself. It’s talking about how in him was life and light because he was the Creator.

Then when you go on and read the book a little farther, you discover that light and life are used in a very different sort of way. By the time you get the third chapter, for instance, we read words like, “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

Well, now light has a moral overtone.

It’s not just creating electromagnetic waves or something like that. It has a moral overtone, a moral overtone that’s being rejected. “All those who do evil hate the light and will not come to the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”

A little farther on, Jesus comes along and actually says, “I am the light,” and he doesn’t mean he’s radiation. It means that he is actually disclosing God, and he’s disclosing what right and wrong are all about. So once you read the book right through, you discover that light is bound up with what is being disclosed of God and Jesus Christ, and life is not just the life that I live in this body. It’s actually eternal life. It’s life in the presence of God. It’s life to the full, in full harmony with God. It’s more than just this physical existence. It’s life even beyond death itself.

So now you go back and reread these verses. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness.” That is, now the darkness is not just the absence of light, but it shines in ignorance, or it shines in that which does not know God. It might even shine in moral decay, and the darkness hasn’t overcome it. The darkness hasn’t understood it.

Here we must then ask the question, “When these two verses were written was John thinking backward to physical light and life or was he thinking forward?” The answer, of course, is yes because he’s one of these writers who writes in layers, and you pick it up one time through then you pick it up at another time through. It’s a way of saying this same Word who is with God in creation is the Word who comes along and transforms us now, gives us eternal life now, discloses God to us now. It’s one whole package.

In the third place, this Word goes largely unrecognized in the world he created. We read a little farther down, “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. He came to the world that he made. The world didn’t recognize him.” We like to think of ourselves as in the captain’s seat, as it were, where we can make really penetrating judgments on all religious claims and moral claims that are all around us.

In some measure we are called upon to do so, to make some sort of analysis, some sort of evaluation of claims that are all around us, but we don’t always reckon with the fact that we are not neutral beings ourselves. We’re already bound up with our own biases and frameworks and so on. The Bible views evil, sin, in a peculiar way.

It’s not just a matter of breaking some rules. Rather, in the beginning was God, and he made human beings so that they were rightly related to him. The Bible uses the language of image bearers, God’s image bearers, reflecting God in some ways like the moon reflects the sun. God’s image bearers.

In that sense, you might wake up in the morning and your mind just naturally goes to him. You wake up in the morning, and he is at the center of your very being. He is utterly adorable. He is entrancing, intriguing. He is your source of life and light. He is your passion. Because other image bearers are rightly related to him, therefore, you’re rightly related to each other. But what happens when idolatry is introduced, when anarchy is introduced?

Each one of these image bearers now thinks, in effect, “I am at the center of the universe.” Oh, we don’t go around saying that. I mean, I doubt that there’s anybody here who has actually looked at himself or herself in the mirror some morning and said, “I’m at the center of the universe.” On the other hand, if I hold up a picture of your graduation class from university or high school or whatever and say, “This is your graduating class,” which face do you look out first?

Or, if you have one of these once-in-a-decade fights.… You know, some argument where you really lose it, just international-class bad temper. You say all kinds of wretched things. It’s one of those really intense ones that lasts about 20 minutes. You go away and you’re absolutely steaming.

You think of all the things you could have said and all the things you should have said and all the things you would have said if you had thought of them fast enough. You replay the whole thing over in your mind. Who wins? I’ve lost lots and lots of arguments in my time; I’ve never lost a rerun.

The reason, of course, if because I’m at the center of the universe. I mean, I’m supposed to win, aren’t I? Besides, I’m cute. It’s just the way we think of ourselves, isn’t it? People are supposed to relate to us as if we’re at the center of the universe, but that’s the beginning of greed, fences, war, rape, envy.

Imagine a world in which we are all so rightly related to a perfectly good God that we actually not only loved him but truly sought the other’s good and loved one another. If the Bible’s depiction of the human situation is that we are as enslaved as all of that, then when Christ comes into the world, when the light appears, it’s not too surprising that we don’t recognize him.

In fact, when that kind of goodness does show up, we might find reasons for dismissing it, charging it with being “too puritanical,” “a bit extreme,” or maybe “fundamentalist.” Whatever. It’s got to be dismissed. It will be annoying and might get crucified.

So that’s the way this text presents what happens when Jesus does appear in the world, when the Word actually appears in the world. It’s not a pretty picture. A true light that does give light to everyone is coming into the world. “He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world didn’t recognize him. He came to that which was his own …” His own people, his own Jewish heritage. “… but his own did not receive him.”

Of course, there are some spectacular exceptions. To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Those who did receive him didn’t receive him because they were intrinsically better. It’s not that the Bible presents some people over here as really, really, really, really nasty and other people over here as really, really, really, really good, and the good ones accept the light. That’s not what the text says.

Rather, it pictures all of us as in this state of rebellion, and those who actually do receive him do so not because they’re intrinsically better, but because they believe in him. They trust him. Now that’s a theme that’s going to get unpacked right through this whole book. From night to night we’ll flesh that out to see what it looks like. It means, however, that they’re not trusting themselves and saying, “Oh, I’m good enough, God. I’ll accept you.” Rather, they are trusting him and they receive him.

There is something even bigger going on. These people become the children of God. They are born again, to use language that shows up two chapters later. They are children born not of natural descent, just natural birth, nor of human decision. That is, there’s something supernatural in it. It’s coming from God’s decision. Nor are they born of a husband’s will at a time in culture when most sexual acts were begun by the husband’s interest, not from any of those causes that are part of natural coitus and procreation. Nope, nope. They’re born of God.

That is, the Bible presents Christianity as involving, quite frankly, a supernatural element in which people change their origin. There’s something spectacularly new, just plain flat-out supernatural that takes place in their life. In other words, Christianity never is looking around for saying, “I’m looking for volunteers. Who will come with me? Just make a decision and follow me.”

Oh, there is some decision all right, don’t misunderstand me, but it’s looking for people who actually are changed inside. That’s what we’re going to spend time on tomorrow night. I told you this was the prologue. This prologue introduces you to themes that get unpacked and unpacked and unpacked in the book, and what the Bible means by new birth is one of those things. It’s hinted at here.

If there is a division in humanity, it’s not because some are good and some are bad. No, we all fall into this idolatry class, but some come to trust this Jesus. They come to believe in him, and they experience new birth. A transformation from God himself that changes their hearts, their orientations, their priorities, their values. That’s what biblical Christianity looks like.

Fourth, the Word becomes a human being. This is the verse that I quoted earlier, verse 14: “The Word became flesh and became a human being …” The Word that was with God and was God now becomes something that the Word was not. He becomes a human being. One with God from before the beginning of the world now actually becomes a human being. The eternal steps into time. He becomes a human being, “… and he made his dwelling among us.”

Now other books of the Bible talk about how this came to pass, and it talks about his mother, Mary, and so on. This book doesn’t explore any of that. Clearly, there’s something of accommodation going on here, huge accommodation. In fact, Christian thinkers have wrestled with this one across 2,000 years trying to think through the best ways to talk about how the eternal Son who was one with God and inhabits eternity, who has all power and all knowledge, actually becomes, genuinely, a human being.

I could take you through some of those debates and those discussions, but let the vision of it, the sweep of it, sink in. If this is true, it changes absolutely everything. If it’s not true, Jesus is an international-class charlatan, because he doesn’t go around presenting himself just as a nice chap or telling you to love your neighbor and turn your cheek and that sort of thing. He presents himself, and the Bible certainly presents him, as the visitation of the eternal God. “He becomes flesh and makes his dwelling with us.”

Then something further is said of him, and this is a theme that is then picked up through the rest of the book, “We have seen his glory …” John is writing as one of the first-century eyewitnesses. “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

John likes to play with themes, and glory is one of the themes that he plays with. For example, in the next chapter, Jesus performs a rather remarkable miracle. Once he’s grown up and he’s actually undertaking his ministry, he turns water into wine. That sounds like a good miracle to me. At the end of it, John comments, “And so the disciples saw his glory.”

Now this does not mean that Jesus went around with a sort of halo over his head like art paintings from the Middle Ages. Nor does it mean that his face sort of shone, some sort of internal radiation to point out, “I’m really God!” He was a first-century Jew. His glory wasn’t manifested that way.

Who he really was, what his glory was, was manifested in chapter 2 in the performance of a spectacular miracle. Although that sort of theme gets played on in several chapters, eventually you come to chapter 12 in this book, and there the theme develops in an utterly stunning way, because Jesus knows that he’s going to the cross.

He knows that he’s come not simply to reveal God with certain teachings or something like that, he’s actually going to get beaten up, condemned to die, and crucified. When a certain signal comes he openly says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” This is one of his ways of referring to himself, “the Son of Man.” “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies it produces many seeds.”

Jesus actually sees the manifestation of his glory, if you please, not only in miracles or special teachings or the like but in his torturous death, his resurrection, and then his return to the glory that he had with the Father before the world began. In other words, Jesus is claiming, “If you want to see who I really, really am, if you want to see what God is truly, truly like, you don’t just look for the spectacular.”

This God’s very being, what he’s really like, his glory, is most spectacularly displayed in a wretched instrument of torture, because in the teaching of the New Testament when Jesus dies, he dies not simply as an accident of history, a footnote to the cruelties of one third-rate Roman governor on the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the first century.

He dies, rather, by God’s own plan to bear our death, our sin, our guilt, and that displays who God really is. The God who made us, instead of just judging us as he could, actually in the person of his Son, of this Word made flesh, displays what kind of God he is by taking our death himself. That’s where Jesus is glorified. John writes, as he looks forward to the storyline that’s going to unpack in the rest of his book, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory.”

Oh, yes! He’s remembering the miracle in Cana where the water is turned into wine. He’s remembering that damned cross, too, because that’s what God is like. That’s why he adds at the end, “full of grace and truth.” Those were much-loved words in the 39 books that came before Jesus. They’re used a lot in what’s called the Old Testament, the first 39 books (“God is full of grace and truth.”), but he sees that this grace and truth is particularly tied to Jesus. Grace. God’s free-flowing favor to the undeserving.

We’ll sing later, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Do you know who wrote that? The author was John Newton. He was a slave trader. He estimated that he had transported 20,000 slaves across the Atlantic. He later said, after his life was transformed by Christ, that he could still hear them screaming in his dreams every night.

When he became a Christian and abandoned all of that life, he eventually became pastor of a small village. Amongst the hymns he wrote was “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” because this Jesus is full of grace and truth, displaying who this God truly is.

Last, the Word discloses God to us. Now a little earlier on, in verses I skipped over, we’re introduced to a chap called John, who was sort of a forerunner of Jesus. He came along first as a kind of prophet and pointed out who Jesus was. He wasn’t the light himself, but he pointed him out. He recurs here now. “John testified concerning Jesus. He cried out, saying, ‘This is he of whom I said he who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”

To make sense of that you have to remember in the first-century Jewish world at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the children were always less honorable than their parents. If you go to some Asian countries today, elderly people are highly honored, of course, because they are elderly people. The older you are then the more you deserve a certain kind of honor. It’s not a youth culture. That means that the son and the grandson and the great-grandson, and so on are always going to be a little farther down the pecking order.

Since, in earthly years, Jesus was certainly was younger than John, at least six months, maybe a little more, there’s a sense in which John came after Jesus, though he was related to him in some way, maybe a cousin. Yet, he came after John. Therefore, Jesus was supposed to be viewed as somewhat inferior, but John the Baptist says, “He has outclassed me. He has outstripped me. He has surpassed me even though he’s come after me because he really was before me.”

Well, I guess so. I mean, if his rootage goes back to eternity past, if he was one with God in the beginning then he outstrips all of us. Do you see? That’s his argument here. And then these remarkable words: “Out of his fullness …” That is, the fullness of all that Jesus is. “… we have all received …” Not just grace on top of grace, grace piled on grace, but grace instead of a grace. “… grace replacing a grace already given.”

For all of the Old Testament revelation, the things that we’re given in the Law, taught by Moses, great hero of the faith a millennium and a half earlier.… All of these things were there, but now grace and truth, par excellence, come in Jesus and his cross. No one has ever seen God. You don’t look at him, you don’t gaze at him, but the one and only Son, who is himself God (that’s what we read in the first verse: “He was with God and he was God, who is himself God”) has made him known.

Do you hear what that’s saying? Do you want to see what God is like? Look at Jesus. I know it’s an accommodated vision. The Father is eternal. He is spiritual. He is immaterial. You can’t gaze on him. The Bible says that even the angels of heaven cover their faces before him he’s so transcendentally glorious, but the closest we’re going to get in this life to seeing what God is like is to look at Jesus.

Do you want to know what God is like? Do you want to know what his character is like? Do you want to know what his holiness is like? Do you want to know what his truth is like? Do you want to know what his morals are like? Do you want to know what his love is like? Do you want to know what this God is like? Study Jesus.

Let me tell you about my friend, Mohammed. I met Mohammed when I was an undergraduate, which was quite a long time ago. It was at McGill, and I was reading chemistry. He was there from Pakistan. He was doing a PhD in Islamic studies because McGill then, as now, had a really excellent Islamic school. He was twice my age; he was old enough to be my father.

He lived down the hall from me, and eventually I got to know him a bit. He became a friend. He had an uproarious laugh, this big white-toothed smile. He was just a great chap, and after awhile it dawned on me that he was trying to win me to Islam. I thought, “Well fair dues, I’ll try and win him to Jesus.” I wasn’t really quick about this. I was trying to sort things out.

I remember one night we were walking down University Avenue to Pine Avenue to pick up the bus together. We were going somewhere. He said, “Don, you study mathematics, yes?” “Yes.” “If you have one cup and then you add another cup, how many cups do you have?” Well, I was studying mathematics, so I said, “Two.”

“If you have two cups and you add another cup, how many cups do you have?” I said, “Three.” I could tell where this was going. He said, “If you have three cups and you take away one cup, how many cups do you have?” I said, “Two.” “So you believe that the Father is God, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe that this Word, this Son, is also God?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe that the Holy Spirit is God, yes?” I said, “Yes.”

“So if you have one God plus another God plus another God, how many Gods do you have?”

Well, I was studying chemistry and mathematics. I didn’t know much Bible. I didn’t know what to say except, I said, “Listen, if we’re going to use mathematical analogies, let me choose the branch of mathematics. If you have infinity plus infinity plus infinity, how many infinities do you have?” For those of you who are mathematically challenged, infinity.

That was the level of our discussion. He burst out into laughter. He was a friend. It was good fun. Then it dawned on me two or three months later (I told you, I was really quite slow) he didn’t have a Bible, just as I didn’t have a Qur’an. So he needed to explain to me something of how the Qur’an worked, and I needed to explain to him something of how the Bible worked.

I went and got him a Bible, and he thanked me for it. He said, “Where do I begin?” I explained the Old Testament, 39 books, and the New Testament, 27 books. “Start here with Jesus …” “Well, where should I begin to read?” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know much about Islam. I said, “Well, why don’t you start with the gospel of John?” So he began to read, and he read the way an older generation of Asian folk read, you know?

Today in the West, by and large, we read to get through stuff as fast as we possibly can, but he read in a sort of meditative way where you read and you think about it, and you go back and reread it. Maybe you memorize a line or two. “Boy, that’s deep, I’m not sure I understand. Let me read on a bit.” Then you go back and read it again. He read that sort of way. Do you see? You could see that the gears were going around and so on.

Then at Christmas, the dorms were shut down. I said, “Why don’t you come to my parents’ place, and you can stay with me over Christmas.” So that’s what we did. My father ended up in the hospital, so my dear friend was largely left alone while we were shuttling back and forth to the hospital. Heart problems, whatever.

Toward the end of the Christmas holidays, Dad was going to make it, I could see that, and I said to Mom, “We’ve only got one car. Could I borrow the car and take Mohammed around and show him some of the sights across the river in Ottawa, the nation’s capital?” “Well, yeah, why not? Why don’t you do that?”

So I took him here and there. In those days, there was much less security. I brought him to the Parliament building, and the Parliament building is sort of a pseudo-gothic structure, really quite attractive. There’s the rotunda at the back, and the Senate, which is like your upper house here, not like the American Senate. It’s a parliamentary system, as here in Australia. There is also the lower house and the rogues’ gallery of our prime ministers, from Sir John A. Macdonald and so on.

Then the guide took this group of about 30 people to the central foyer where you first come in. There, there are these huge pillars, and at the top of each pillar there is a little fresco and a figure in it. The guide carefully explained, “There is Socrates, for government must be based on wisdom. There is Aristotle, for government must be based on knowledge. There is Moses, for government must be based on law.”

He went all the way around. “Any questions?” My friend, Mohammed, piped up. “Where is Jesus Christ?!” The guide did what guides do under those circumstances. He said, “I, uh, beg your pardon?” So Mohammed did what foreigners do under those circumstances. That is, he assumed that he was misunderstood because of his accent. So he said it more slowly and more loudly, “Where is Jesus Christ?”

Now there were three groups of 30 in the foyer of the Canadian Parliament listening to a Pakistani Muslim ask where Jesus was. I was looking for a crack in the ground to fall into. I didn’t know where this was going at all. The guide finally said, “Well, why should Jesus be here?” Mohammed looked shocked. He said, “I read in the Christian Bible, in the gospel of John, that the Law was given by Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Where is Jesus Christ?” I thought, “Preach it, brother!”

Now there were three groups of 30 in the foyer of the Canadian Parliament listening to a Pakistani Muslim ask where Jesus was. I was looking for a crack in the ground to fall into. I didn’t know where this was going at all. The guide finally said, “Well, why should Jesus be here?” Mohammed looked shocked. He said, “I read in the Christian Bible, in the gospel of John, that the Law was given by Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Where is Jesus Christ?!” I thought, “Preach it, brother!”

Because, you see, he was Muslim. He understood about a sovereign god. He understood about law. He understood about the justice of God. He didn’t need those things explained to him, but he was already to begin being captured by someone who is depicted as full of grace and truth and who manifests the glory of God finally in a cross where he bears the sin and guilt of others.

Now I don’t know you. You may have been wrestling with these things for quite some time. If they are really new to you and you haven’t heard what the Bible says put together this way, then there are other meetings this week and there are courses that can follow on that will tell you more about the Bible, but if you’ve been thinking about these things for some time and you are already yourself beginning to be captured by this Jesus, then after this meeting is over there will be people at the front who you would be more than welcome to come and talk to. Meanwhile, let me just close in prayer.

Father, many of us in this room have already been captured by who Jesus is, certainly through no merit of our own, but we thank you, Lord God, that you have disclosed yourself in the Word who is one with God and who is God and who became flesh and went to the cross on our behalf. Lord God, if there are some here who are seeing him for the first time, help them even now to pray. I do not understand all who Jesus is, but I see him full of grace and truth, and in my heart I am sorry for my sin, and I do believe. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Male: You have been posting some questions through so we’ll seek to try and respond to those now. Here we go. “How could a perfect God become flesh yet still remain perfect?”

Don Carson: That’s a very good question. What it presupposes, of course, is that if you’re human it is an intrinsic part of being human to be imperfect, but the Bible insists that initially human beings were made good and one day will be perfect.

In other words, the Bible projects Jesus’ humanness as perfectly human but not succumbing in any sense to sin, and one day the Christian hope is that you and I, transformed finally by Christ at the end, beyond death, will have resurrection existence ourselves that is human, genuinely human, but perfectly good and without any sort of decay or sin at all.

There is mystery in the fact that God is infinite and now he assumes human form. This Jesus has two natures, but we do insist, nevertheless, that the human nature is not a sinful nature. The Bible keeps saying, “He was without sin.” Tempted in all points, as we are, yet without sin.

Male: Excellent, excellent. Second question. “Did your friend Mohammed become a Christian?”

Don: That’s a complicated story, actually. By the end of that academic year, he had decided that he would return to Pakistan. He abandoned his PhD in Islamic studies. He was drawn more and more to Christ, but he hadn’t made a decision, and he wanted to go back to Pakistan. I wrote to him many times over the next little while. No letters ever came back. I can guess what happened, but I really don’t know. I don’t know what happened.

Male: Thanks for that, Don. “How does John know about God’s history and the Word?”

Don: That’s a very good question as well. A lot of what he says he is actually drawing on from the older part of the Bible, what I’ve called the Old Testament, the initial 39 books. In fact, if I had time to show you, I could show you how a lot of the themes he’s dealing with, for example that word pair, grace and truth, and the theme on glory are actually snipped right out of an account in the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus, chapters 32–34.

So a lot of it is actually coming out from his reflection on mediation on what God has already disclosed of himself, but part of it also comes out of the fact of his knowing Jesus. He was one of Jesus’ 12 closest followers, and so he heard Jesus instruct him on all of these matters, was with him, stood at the cross when Jesus died, had no expectation that Jesus would rise from the dead but then became a witness of the empty tomb and then of the resurrected Christ himself.

He was one of the first eyewitnesses, and so a lot of what he received he received from Jesus himself. It wasn’t passed on through three centuries or six centuries of oral tradition or something like that. Then on top of that, if God himself is a talking God, he is an eloquent God who is quite able to inspire people to put down words, think things through, and say things that disclose God to us, then we hold that God himself helped John to put these things down in this sort of way.

Male: I think we have time for one more question. “Did Jesus stop being God?”

Don: No, and after he became a human being and died and rose again he didn’t stop being human either. That is the part that just about blows our minds. I’m going to come back to that one in several different ways during the week, where on Wednesday night we talk about Jesus’ sonship. What does that mean? Does God have a son? What does that look like?

Then on the last night, one of the 12 disciples after Jesus’ resurrection actually bows before him and says, “My Lord and my God” to him. We need to think about what that looks like, too. So we will be coming back to that one a little more later in the week.