John is not only writing to Greek readers, however; he is also writing to Jewish readers, and he has also written in a way that's meaningful for us as well. When he chose this term logos, he chose a word which was meaningful not only to the Greeks because of their philosophy, but to Jews as well because they had a high understanding of the power of the word of God, since, after all, that's the way God created things. When God created the heavens and the earth, God spoke and it came into being. So in using that concept, he has attracted the attention of the Greeks on the one hand, for whom it was a philosophical idea, and the Jews on the other, for whom it was a religious idea.

This week we are looking at verse fourteen of John 1, which speaks of this powerful idea of the Word becoming flesh. There are a lot of places in the New Testament that talk about the incarnation indirectly. Any passage that talks about who Jesus Christ actually is, identifying the divine Son of God with Jesus of Nazareth, is about the incarnation. But of all those texts, there is none in all the Bible that states the literal meaning of the incarnation more clearly than in our text.

What if we just lived on and on? What if we found eternal life and lived forever in exactly the form in which we find ourselves now, growing increasingly hard, increasingly bitter, increasingly arrogant, and increasingly selfish? That would be no salvation at all. That would be a living hell. We need a God who is not only able to save us physically, but spiritually, and to make from the slime of our spiritual lives—which we ourselves have made—the purity of spiritual jewels who by his grace are fit to stand before him.