The God Who Pitched His Tent Text: John 1:14-18
Introduction: The Scandal of Specificity
We have arrived at the very center of the universe. The first thirteen verses of John's gospel are a majestic, soaring overture, introducing the eternal Word, the Logos, who was with God and was God. But here in verse fourteen, the symphony crashes down into a single, explosive, earth-shattering note. The abstract becomes concrete. The infinite is contained in an infant. The eternal Word, through whom all galaxies were spoken into existence, learned to coo and cry and speak with a human tongue.
This is the central scandal of the Christian faith, and it is the point at which all other worldviews trip and fall. Modern man, like the ancient Gnostic, is comfortable with a distant, spiritual, abstract "god." He can tolerate a "higher power" or a "cosmic consciousness." But a God with a body? A God with a hometown and a mother and spit and sawdust on His hands? This is an offense. It is too particular. It is too gritty. It is too gloriously messy. Our age wants a god who is a tame, philosophical principle. The Bible gives us a God who became a man, a God who pitched His tent in our dusty, rebellious neighborhood.
John is not writing a myth or a poem here. He is making a historical claim that splits all of history into two ages. He is an eyewitness, and he is testifying to what he and the other apostles saw with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, and touched with their own hands. This is not a feeling or a religious sentiment. This is an invasion. The Word became flesh. God moved in. And if this is true, then nothing can ever be the same again. If it is not true, then we are, as Paul says, of all men most to be pitied.
The Text
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John bore witness about Him and cried out, saying, "This was He of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has been ahead of me, for He existed before me.' "
For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.
For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.
(John 1:14-18 LSB)
The Incarnation: God in Our Neighborhood (v. 14)
The first part of our text is the hinge upon which all of reality turns.
"And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)
"The Word became flesh." This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. The eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, took on a human nature without in any way diminishing His divine nature. He did not simply wear a human body like a costume. He became what He was not, without ceasing to be what He always was. He is fully God and fully man, two natures in one person forever. This is the great mystery of our faith, the hypostatic union. It demolishes the Gnostic heresy that matter is evil. God made matter, called it good, and then dignified it forever by taking it upon Himself.
"And dwelt among us." The Greek word here is eskenosen, which literally means He "pitched His tent" or "tabernacled" among us. This is a direct and unmistakable reference to the Old Testament Tabernacle, the tent where the glorious presence of God dwelt with Israel in the wilderness. That tabernacle was a shadow, a placeholder. Now, John says, the reality has come. The glory of God is no longer housed in a structure of acacia wood and badger skins, but in the human flesh of Jesus Christ. God has moved into the neighborhood.
And because He was here, He could be seen. "We beheld His glory." This is the testimony of an eyewitness. This is not secondhand information. John is saying, "We saw it. We were there." But what kind of glory did they see? It was not the terrifying, unapproachable glory of Mount Sinai that made the people tremble. It was a "glory as of the only begotten from the Father." The word "only begotten" is monogenes, meaning unique, one-of-a-kind. He is not just a son of God in the way angels or believers are; He is the Son, sharing the very nature of the Father. And His glory was "full of grace and truth." This was a winsome glory, an approachable glory. It was glory you could touch, glory that healed the sick and ate with sinners.
The Forerunner and the Fullness (v. 15-16)
John immediately grounds this high theology in the historical testimony of John the Baptist.
"John bore witness about Him and cried out, saying, 'This was He of whom I said, "He who comes after me has been ahead of me, for He existed before me." ' " (John 1:15 LSB)
The forerunner's job is to point. John the Baptist was the greatest of the prophets, but his entire ministry was a giant arrow pointing away from himself and toward Christ. He presents us with a riddle that can only be solved by the pre-existence of Jesus. In terms of time, Jesus came after John; He was born six months later, and His public ministry began later. But in terms of rank and reality, Jesus was ahead of him, because He was before him. Before Abraham was, I AM. John the Baptist, the last and greatest of the Old Covenant prophets, understood that the one whose sandals he was unworthy to untie was, in fact, the eternal God.
"For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace." (John 1:16 LSB)
Because the Word became flesh, He is the reservoir of all of God's blessings. "Of His fullness," His pleroma, "we have all received." All that God is, dwells in Christ in bodily form (Col. 2:9). And from this infinite supply, we, the undeserving, have received everything. This is not a stingy, reluctant trickle. It is "grace upon grace." Imagine standing on the seashore as waves of grace crash over you, one after another, endlessly. This can also be rendered "grace in place of grace." The grace of the Old Covenant, the law, the sacrifices, the types and shadows, was a true grace from God. But now it has been replaced by a greater grace, the reality to which all the old shadows pointed: grace and truth in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Law and the Lord (v. 17)
John now draws a sharp, clear distinction between the two covenants.
"For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17 LSB)
This is not a contrast between something bad and something good. The Law is holy and righteous and good (Rom. 7:12). It was a gift from God, delivered through His servant Moses. The Law is a perfect mirror; it shows us God's righteous standard, and it shows us our own sinful faces with perfect clarity. What the Law cannot do is provide the power to obey it or the forgiveness for disobeying it. It diagnoses the disease, but it cannot provide the cure.
But "grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." Notice the difference in verbs. The Law was "given." It was an external code delivered by a mediator. But grace and truth "came" or "came into being" through Jesus. He does not merely deliver a message about grace and truth; He embodies it. He is the grace of God that forgives our failure to keep the law. He is the truth to which the law, as a shadow, pointed. Moses brought the blueprint; Jesus is the building. Moses brought the commandments from the mountain; Jesus is the God of the mountain who gives us a new heart to obey them.
The Final Exegesis (v. 18)
The prologue concludes with one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture.
"No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him." (John 1:18 LSB)
This is the fundamental problem of humanity. God is infinite, holy, and invisible. We are finite, sinful, and blind. "No one has seen God at any time." Not Moses, who only saw His back. Not Isaiah, who saw His enthroned glory but cried out, "I am undone!" In His unveiled essence, God is unapproachable. An encounter with sheer divinity would annihilate a sinful man.
So how can this chasm be bridged? The answer is the "only begotten God." The best and earliest manuscripts read "monogenes Theos," only begotten God, a thunderous declaration of Christ's full deity. This unique God-man, who is "in the bosom of the Father," a phrase denoting the most intimate, eternal fellowship and love, has solved our problem. He has made the invisible God visible.
How? "He has explained Him." The Greek word is exegesato, from which we get our word "exegesis." To exegete a text is to draw the meaning out of it. Jesus has exegeted the Father. He is the living explanation of God. Do you want to know what God is like? Do you want to know His character, His heart, His disposition toward you? Look at Jesus. He is the perfect tense of the verb "to be God." He is the image of the invisible God, the exact imprint of His nature. He has translated the ineffable God into a language we can understand: the language of human life, sacrificial love, and resurrection power.
Conclusion: Read the Explanation
The central claim of Christianity is not that we found our way to God, but that He found His way to us. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. The unseeable has been seen. The unknowable has been explained.
This means we are without excuse. We can no longer plead ignorance. We cannot say that God is a distant, unknowable force. He has provided a perfect exegesis of Himself, and His name is Jesus. To reject Jesus is not to reject a religious teacher; it is to reject the only coherent explanation of God that has ever been given.
It also means we are without despair. From His fullness, we have received grace upon grace. The God who is explained in Jesus is not a God of wrathful distance, but a God of gracious nearness. He is the God who became one of us in order to die for us, so that we might become one with Him. The whole story of the Bible, the whole story of the world, is right here. The Word became flesh so that we, who are but flesh, might, through faith in Him, become children of God.