“‘Ere sin was born, or Satan fell’”;
ere there was a creation that could fall,
‘the same was in the beginning with God.’”
CHARLES SPURGEON
The first sermon in our Advent series will dive straight into one of the grandest passages in all of Scripture – the first chapter of the Gospel of John.
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through Him,
and without Him was not any thing made that was made.”
JOHN 1:1-3
In Christ the Eternal Son, A. W. Tozer struggles with the impossible task of conveying the magnificence of the eternal Christ as John portrays it.
“Think of where the Apostle John leads us, taking us up and into the Godhead where no Milton could go and certainly no secular Shakespeare could ever go. John introduces us to spheres and circles of deity so high and lofty and noble that if we follow him, we will certainly die in the attempt. All we can hope to do is to toddle along on our short legs and gaze heavenward, like a goose whose wings have been clipped but whose heart is in the sky. Those wings will just not take her there.
“This is what we will attempt to do: we will walk along the broad seashore of God and pick up a shell here and a shell there, holding each up to the light to admire its beauty. While we may ultimately have a small store of shells to take with us, they can but remind us of the truth and the fact that there stretches the vastness of the seashore around the great lips of the oceans – and that still buried there is far more than we can ever hope to find or see!”
The Nicene Creed (AD 325) does its best to express the wonder of our eternal Lord in the following words:
“We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
begotten of the Father, the only-begotten –
that is, of the essence of the Father –
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father.”
Be praying for Erik Thoennes as he trembles before this awesome task: to help us gaze into the mystery of our eternal Son and pick up a few glorious seashells along the way.
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