The Day Truth Came to Earth
Pastor Marty Monday, December 26, 2022 at 10:06PM John 14:5-6; Luke 2:39-40. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on December 25, 2022, Christmas Day.
We are going to start with a passage that is not a traditional Christmas passage. However, it will give us insight as we go back and talk about that day when Jesus took on human flesh.
The Christmas story focuses on Jesus coming into the world. However, let’s make the technical point that this is not the first time Jesus (the Word of God) came into the world. It is the first time that he came into the world as a human being, an incarnation (in human flesh). This unique human being was both God and man in a way that we can only speculate. He was fully God and yet fully human.
The second part of the focus is that He is the Savior of the world. This is a good thing because humanity has been looking for a savior to fix this mess for a long time. In fact, we have not fixed the mess still in this modern era.
It is also important for us to recognize that the Incarnation of Jesus was also a day of identification. Human beings were created like God in the sense that we could image Him in some ways. Yet, we were not God in any way. Jesus did not become “like” us. Rather, he became one of us in order to identify with our condition, experience, and need. From then on, no one could claim that God doesn’t understand what it is like to be a human.
Think about what this says to our foe, the devil. God did not identify with fallen angels. He identified with fallen humanity. Why would He identify with humans? For centuries now, we have been hammered with the reality that humans are just one species on a small planet, a speck within the universe. What is humanity that God would be mindful of us? It is interesting that even the ancients could understand the absolute smallness of mankind before the God of the universe. Yet, He chose to identify with us.
We are His creation, created for His purposes. We were made in such a way that the incarnation could happen. The uniqueness of humanity is not found in us, but in God’s creation of us for an amazing purpose, that the Word of God could become human and dwell among us! Men have striven to become gods throughout history, but here, God becomes a man. We are not fit to become gods in our mortality, but our mortality is somehow fit for God to become one of us. Hallelujah!
It is one thing for God to identify with us, but that only puts the ball in our court. Will you identify with Him? This is what needs to happen in our hearts, minds, and life. Think it through. He became one of us, and because of that, he has claims from within humanity as a human. You can identify with him and connect in a living relationship, a relationship that is symbolized by marriage. His future is your future because He has identified with you, and you have identified with Him.
I want to start with the John 14 passage. Jesus is speaking with his disciples about leaving. There he reveals something about himself that makes the Incarnation even more spectacular.
Let’s get into our passages.
Jesus is the Truth
Jesus makes several categorical statements here that involve his identity. He says that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. These three pictures are a response to the question from Thomas about not knowing where Jesus is going. Jesus makes it clear at the end of verse 6 that he is speaking about going to Father God in heaven.
How do we get to the Father? Jesus states that he himself is the Way. Not, I know the way; I read a book once about the way; I can show you the way. I am the Way! Jesus is not pointing out the way to the Father in the sense of pointing over there. Instead, he is pointing to himself. I am the way. It is about relationship with him. If you have Jesus, then you have the way to the Father. To be in relationship with Jesus is to be on the way to the Father, and you have nothing to fear.
The last picture speaks about life. Not, I have a life; I can show you how to have a life. I am the Life! The Father is the Lord of life. To dwell with Jesus is to have the life of the Father, eternal life. Jesus was not teaching them the secrets to having a good life. He was teaching them to come into a relationship with Life itself! To have Jesus is to have eternal life, and to have eternal life is to have the Father!
It is the middle picture we are going to focus on for the rest of our time today, Truth. Jesus does not say that he knows the truth, or that he climbed a mountain in Tibet and received the truth from a guru, who had received from a guru before him, ad infinitum (hmm, I wonder where such truth first came from). He says that he is the Truth! Yes, Jesus definitely taught Truth, but more than this, He is the Truth.
At Christmas, Truth came into the world, and this is a big deal! In fact, this shows us that God has designed humans with the ability to seek out Truth, and as a loving Father, He has been faithful to give us Truth all along.
Let’s talk about Truth versus truth (uppercase “T” versus lowercase “t”). We are a cynical age similar to the days of Jesus. We also say as Pilate, “What is truth?” On our lips, this question drips with much more cynicism and derision than it did from Pilate. Our philosophy of truth has advanced to an even greater degree of hopelessness about the subject. The “Enlightenment” of the 1600s AD have left us without hope of ever knowing absolute Truth. We are taught that the best we can do is obtain a perception of things around us that are almost guaranteed not to be the “absolute truth.” The only thing we can have is a personal perception of the world around us.
Let me just say that there is a thread of truth in this. Much of our understanding of the world around us is merely perceptions, and perceptions have a reality of their own even if they don’t match the reality around us. This relative and situational truth is not to be capitalized because it is in contrast to the absolute Truth (with a capital “T”) that modern philosophy says is impossible for us to know.
Now, I wonder just who in the universe has a vested interest in human beings believing that they cannot have a relationship with absolute Truth? Where do you think such doctrines of demons come from? Of course, you may protest that we don’t have doctrine of demons in our modern enlightened society. O, to the contrary, my friend! The devil does not show up one day with a pitchfork, wearing a red Halloween costume, and saying, “I have a teaching for you!” No, he works upon men’s weak hearts and minds to draw them into accepting lies that are contrary to the Truth of God. Brilliant but lost people write books and give lectures promoting the doctrine of demons despite their best intentions.
How do you build a society upon relative, perceptive truth? In Truth, you can’t. Our society is falling apart because of our exchanging God’s Truth for man’s relative truth. We are responding to the dissolution by amassing more and more power for really smart people to tell us all how to live and how to fix the world. It will not work because those “really smart people” refuse to believe that there is an absolute reality, Truth.
The Bible presents this absolute reality, this Truth. It has concrete reality. It is transcendent to us. We cannot change reality by not perceiving it, or even refusing to accept it once we suspect it is real. Humans were created to be able to know absolute Truth, and have a relationship with it. Jesus is the lynchpin to this whole thing. We were made to know Him, and therefore we can know absolute Truth.
Yes, we do not know everything absolutely. We don’t have to. Think about a light switch. I don’t have to know all the cutting-edge physics behind how and why it works. I only need to know that it works. I can flip the switch and have power. If it doesn’t work one day, I don’t quit believing in electricity, or those who designed the circuit. I just know that something has gone wrong and will call an electrician.
Similarly, we do not need to know everything about the universe in order to live life. We just need to know some absolute Truths, the ones that matter most. God has been faithful to give us this. Humans were designed to live by faith upon those Truths that God has given us.
-Truth as a baby-
So, what does Truth coming as a baby say to us? To a world that was cynical (is) in regards to Truth, God gives the gift of Jesus, the Truth incarnate. Why would he come as a baby? Why would he even go through nine months of gestation? Birth into a stable, a manger, a small village, a small country, a dangerous time? All of these questions are meant to provoke us to think about the day that Truth came into the world. How could the title “Truth” begiven to such a baby who was so small and vulnerable? Yet, we even have bureaucrats today declaring, “I am science!”
I believe that God is showing us that Truth can be found. It may not look like we expected, and it may not be all that we wanted, but there it is, Truth in a manger. Even shepherds are able to find Truth in this wonderful world that God has made. You do not need to be a genius to find Truth because God wants you to find it; He made you to find it!
Truth as a baby also tells us that God is absolutely the humblest being in the universe. He doesn’t drop in as a fully developed man in his prime speaking our language proficiently. Instead, He truly identifies with what it means to be a human, what it means to be the average human within human existence (something that Americans know nothing about). God knows what you are going through. He really does, that is the Truth.
This also tells us that there is something about Truth that cannot be sped up, or skipped. We can’t just download to our minds quickly and be experts overnight. This is because God is Truth and to know Truth is to have a relationship with Him. You may have just been saved. Well praise God. You have just come into a new relationship with Truth. Be faithful to the end of your life, and you will grow in your understanding of Truth.
It also tells us that our lives on this planet are Truly important and worth living because God Himself lived as one of us. In fact, I would say that it is impossible for an American to be happy in this world. Praise God that all things are possible with Him!
-Truth as a man-
Luke 2:39-40 describes Jesus growing up. He grew up into a young man just like any of us do. Yet, he did so without sinning like we did. What does Truth becoming a grown man say to us?
It tells us that no station in life, or hindrances, should keep us from being what God called us to be. Jesus carried the social stigma of being conceived outside of marriage. He was an “illegitimate” child. He grew up with adults and other kids continually making him aware that there was something wrong with him.
Notice how modern society wants to blame this on God. “If we didn’t have these rules, then no one would ever carry a stigma in society.” It’s God’s fault. Yet, the same God who said that sex outside of marriage is sinful, also chose to be born in a way that put him under such suspicion. Yes, Jesus was not born of fornication. He knew it and Father God knew it. However, the perception of society was that there was no way this young girl was made pregnant by the Holy Spirit of God. That was their truth. Jesus knows what it is like to be born into a state where the world around you continually lets you know that you fall short in their judgment. There is a whole discussion on this in John 8 where the Pharisees accuse Jesus of being a bastard. The problem wasn’t God. It was them. That is why God sent Truth in human form.
Truth as a man also tells us that God is not afraid to tell us the Truth. The little baby didn’t stay a baby. It grew up and began speaking Truth. Too many “Christians” in the US have only embraced a baby Savior that only says, “Goo-goo gaga.” This is a pretty, innocent, vulnerable baby that cannot threaten us by giving us Truth. We have no problem giving lip-service to Truth, as long as we don’t have to face it in actuality.
If you think your life is dull, then read the Bible and start speaking the Truth of God to our society (even to other Christians). You will find out really quick that the problem has never been that God is holding out on us, but more on that in a bit.
Truth as a man tells us that God wants to walk with us through life. We are not alone. He is Truly with us. Even before the incarnation, this was True.
It also tells us that we can have hope in the future. Do you really think that Jesus would do this if there was no hope? We can hope in the future because we are not at the mercy of the “brights” of our age, just as Israel was not at the mercy of the “brights” of their age, whether Israeli or Roman.
Truth lived among us, and His impact upon this planet is still rippling across this world like the aftershocks of a great earthquake. In schools today, they will teach that time is divided between C.E. and B.C.E. Of course, this is a rejection of the previous A.D. and B.C. Yet, notice that it still divides upon Jesus Christ. They cannot escape the reality, the Truth, of who He really is.
-Truth being executed-
It seems fitting in a tragic way that the crucifixion of Jesus symbolically shows us our problem. We nailed Truth to a cross, and put it to death! God had been giving us Truth all along the way. Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden and He told them the Truth. Still, they believed a lie and went down a path of discovering what evil is. Praise God that He has gone down that path with us and did not abandon us! He also gave us Truth in the heavens and the world around us, but we believed a lie and worshiped the creation instead of the Creator. Down through the ages, God was faithful to speak Truth to us through holy men, but we believed a lie and didn’t like what we were hearing from them. Most of them were killed.
The execution of Truth tells us that our problem has never been that God has made it too hard to see the Truth. The Truth is stated in John 3:19. “this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Men love darkness rather than The Light. Men love shortcuts rather than The Way. Men love the shadowlands of lies rather than The Truth.
Praise God that we do not have to live that way. Yes, you will have to live through this mess, but you don’t have to live like it. It is only when we see our own penchant towards rejecting Truth, and chose to embrace the Truth instead of ourselves, that we can find the eternal life of Jesus. God help us to be a people who are repenting of embracing lies and half-truths. In Jesus, we can Truly find our way out of the mess.
It is fitting perhaps that we celebrate the Incarnation during the darkest period of the year, but our need of the Light, of Truth, is year-round.
-Truth being resurrected-
This world tried to kill The Truth! This is down in our hearts as humans. We will kill the Truth and bury it, or put it under a tarp in the basement so long as it never gets out. This is America; this is our world; this is me without Jesus! Without Jesus, we are all struggling to live our lie.
What does Truth being resurrected say to us? Can I just state the obvious? It tells us that humanity will never be able to kill the Truth. The Truth is that you can’t hide the Truth. You can’t get away from the Truth. Everything that you deal with and run into in this world was built on the foundation of Truth, even if it is rejecting the Truth. To a person bent on getting away from Truth, this world, this universe, is a horror show filled with the rebukes of Truth everywhere. We can manipulate much of God’s creation, but Truth is the framework upon which all of the creation operates. Truth is the operating system of the creation, and we will never be able to create our own reality. No matter how good our false path, false truth, and false life are in the moment, they are always headed over the cliff of Truth, and down the river of no return.
It is unavoidable, and it is not because God hates us. He loves us too much to leave us trapped in deception and lies, and then lost forever. No young person after a car wreck calls their dad and says, “Daddy, the perception in my mind has been wrecked! Can you come and get me!” So today, the Father of creation is waiting for you to cry out to Him in response to the reality you were trying to avoid.
The resurrection of Truth tells us that God will have His way in the end. Those who embrace Truth will dwell eternally in the goodness of God. Humanity will dwell in perfect Truth one day, and in fact, He has made it possible for each of us to taste of that Day in the now.
Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus, The Truth? Truth may have physically left this planet twenty centuries ago, but He did not leave us without Truth. He gave the Truth to His followers, and also had them write the Truth down. He gave the Spirit of Truth so that they and we could be guided into all Truth that we need. Yes, Truth can dwell in your heart today by the Spirit of Christ.