Recently, our pastor asked me and 2 other church members to preach a series of 6 sermons on Jesus. Perhaps you think this would be a pretty easy undertaking. After all, he’s the central focus of our Christian faith. Even the name Christian has his title of Christ at the very core of it. We are Christ followers. Without Jesus and his death on the cross, there would be no salvation, and we would still be without hope, facing a lost eternity. Yet the trouble is that there’s just so much to say about him. Since I had to go first, I pondered where to start, and I came to the conclusion that we should start at the very beginning.
The mistake I feel some people make is that when they want to consider Jesus, they only look in the new testament. Yet I once heard a preacher say that if we look hard enough, we will find him on every page of our Bibles, and the more I read, the more I discover that to be true.
when we consider Jesus, we’re looking at one person out of a trinity of 3. I know the trinity is really hard to understand, and even more difficult to explain, but as believers it’s just something we have to accept. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one. They always have been, and they always will be. Jesus didn’t become separate from the Father and the Holy Spirit when he came down to earth as a baby born in a manger at Bethlehem. The Bible says he “became flesh.” (John 1: 14) Yet being God Almighty, Jesus could have become anything he wanted to be. However, he chose to become human, so he could identify with us in every way and suffer on our behalf.
Let’s consider the first 5 verses of John’s gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
We can learn so much just from those few verses, although I have to confess I used to get confused by John 1 when I was a child, because it talks about “The Word”. I always understood “The Word” to be the Bible itself, but I was made to understand that in this case, it’s another name for Jesus. Once I’d comprehended that, it all made much more sense.
The first thing we learnt in these opening verses of John is that Jesus was “in the beginning.” When I think about the “Beginning”, my mind automatically turns to Genesis 1, where we discover that Jesus was present and active in the events of creation. He wasn’t part of the creation, because Jesus isn’t a created being. Even Satan was created, but Jesus has always existed because he is God.
There is a similarity between Genesis 1 – the first verse in the Bible – and John 1. They both start with the words “in the beginning.” I am by no means a Greek scholar, but I’ve been told that when it says “in the beginning God created” in Genesis 1, the term for God is plural. In other words, it’s acknowledging right at the start that God is not a single entity. So God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were right here working together at creation. As we have already read in John 1 verse 3: “Through him (Jesus) all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.”
If you seek more proof that Jesus is present in Genesis 1, let’s go a little further to where God created Adam, and see what he said in verse 26. “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Notice the words “Let us make man.”
I can understand why people get confused, because the following verse says: “So God created man in his own image.” And when you read that, it’s easy to think of God as just being one. It was very difficult for the Bible translators to get across some of these deeper ideas about God being more than 1 person, because there really isn’t the language to express it in English. The main point is that Jesus is present and active right from page 1 in our Bibles.
If you go looking for Jesus in the Old Testament, you’ll be amazed where you find him.
Interestingly, we discover that his birth in the manger definitely wasn’t the first time Jesus came down and physically appeared on the earth. He appeared to many people at various times in the old testament scriptures.
One such example can be found in Genesis 18. This is right in the middle of the story of Abraham and Sarah, who were longing for a baby. They’d been given a promise that they would have numerous descendants, but they were both getting very old, and it seemed like it was never going to happen. Then suddenly, they have some visitors turn up at their tent. But at least one of these visitors is no ordinary man. Genesis 18 opens with the words: “The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day.” The writer of Genesis makes no effort to hide the identity of one of Abraham’s special visitors.
Abraham rushes off to prepare a special meal, and when the food is ready, the men ask where his wife is. He says she’s in the tent. Then, in verse 10: a promise is given that by this time next year, Sarah will have a son. Not surprisingly given her age, Sarah laughs. I think I might too if I was 90 and I’d overheard such a prediction. Sarah is hidden away in the tent, and she probably only laughed quietly to herself, but since one of their visitors is Jesus and nothing can be hidden from him, it says in verse 13: “Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’”
AS the chapter progresses, the Lord makes his identity even more obvious when he starts talking to Abraham about the destruction of Sodom. (Genesis 18: 17-21.) This is why Abraham starts pleading for the people of Sodom – because he recognises who he’s talking to. This is just one of Jesus’ many physical appearances in the Old Testament scriptures.
Another example can be found in Genesis chapter 32, verses 22-32. This is the account of where Jacob wrestled with “a man” all night. I find it interesting that Jacob asks for a blessing from this person. The “man” also gives Jacob a new name. Finally, when Jacob asks his name, he’s not willing to reveal it. Most scholars believe this is yet another of those wonderful preincarnate appearances of our Saviour.
However, as we shall consider next week, alongside these preincarnate appearances of the Lord, the old testament also contains amazingly accurate prophecies and pointers toward why it would be necessary for God himself to become flesh and blood, and pay the ultimate sacrifice for all mankind.