Sermon Notes

May 25, 2025

The Glory of God

John 1:1-18

The Andy Griffith Show is one of the most popular shows ever. It was a hit from day one and stayed in the top 7 for all 8 seasons. It is also one of only three television shows that ended its final season in the #1 spot with almost 16 million viewers per episode. The show has been consistently ranked among the top 10 television shows of all time and has won multiple awards. However, despite all these accolades, the show's namesake said that he had a major problem with the show. In an interview near the end of his life, Andy Griffith said that he was always worried about those who watched his show because he thought that the show oversimplified the problems of the average person. He said that in the Andy Griffith Show, it took 30 minutes for a problem in a character’s life to be recognized and then solved. These are unrealistic oversimplifications of problems that are the problem. He worried that this would cause people to struggle, suffer, and give up in their relationships because most real-world problems take longer than 30 minutes to fix. Now we might laugh at the idea that anyone would get upset because their problems can’t be solved like they were in Mayberry, but he brings up an interesting idea. Can oversimplification harm? Albert Einstein thought so. He is credited with speaking on the subject and stating that we need to do everything we can to make an idea simple enough to communicate, but we can never simplify the idea. Simplifying can help when you are trying to easily communicate something or even entertain people, but when it comes to complex ideas, there are times when you just can’t simplify too much without causing problems. We see the issues that oversimplification can cause with a psychiatrist named Walter Jackson Freeman. He thought that complex mental health issues could be solved with a simple solution rather than tried and true methods of consistent (and sometimes very long) therapy sessions. I’ll spare you the details of his horrific failures, but I will tell you that one of his most noted failures was with that of President Kennedy’s sister, Rosemary. Since we see that oversimplification can cause problems in many different fields like science, health, and relationships, we need to understand that this can happen in our understanding of God as well. Christians tend to oversimplify the complex as we try to describe the indescribable. One of the greatest examples of this is the word “Glory”.

The Glory of God is one of the deepest and most beautiful concepts in all of Scripture. The word “Glory” is used over 350 times in the English language and is more or less a stock term that we use to describe the greatness of God. The problem is that the word “Glory” is an oversimplification of the greatness of God and woefully inadequate to do so. There are at least 25 Hebrew words that we translate into that single English word. Each of those Hebrew words paints a beautiful mural describing in detail what constitutes the greatness of God. All of that is lost when we just use the word “Glory”. Yes, we might understand what they are trying to communicate on the surface, but we lose the detail and depth of what they are saying. It’s like going into an art museum and asking to see the paintbrush that was used on each masterpiece instead of going and looking at the paintings themselves. Sure, you can get an idea of what the brush did, but without examining each of the paintings themselves, you will never understand the depth and the beauty that the brush brings. Not only do we lose meaning in our understanding, but we also lose meaning in our purpose when we do not understand the depth of the “Glory of God”. In 1 Corinthians 10:31, we are told that “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” If everything we are to do is for the Glory of God, we need to understand what it is. So this morning, I want us to look at the word “Glory”, but not in its entirety, because we do not have enough time or perhaps not even in this lifetime to admire and understand the awesomeness of the Glory of God. Instead, I want us just to get a taste of what the Glory of God looks like in Scripture, I hope it will whet your appetite and spur you into a personal Bible study of the glory of God this summer, since it unofficially starts tomorrow. There are so many passages in Scripture that we could look at to help us start to understand the Glory of God. So I want to start where I started — with the first verse of Scripture I ever preached on and did so on the mission field — John 1:14.

John 1:14

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The Glory of The Word

John starts off his Gospel with a remarkable claim. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God because the Word was God. The word translated as “Word” in John’s Gospel is the Greek word “Logos”, and it is a fascinating word that is multifaceted as well. For centuries, the word “Logos” was the word that the Greeks used to describe the eternal essence that existed in eternity past that gives us the ability to do science, the ability to understand, and the ability to think logically, as we use these things to understand the universe. It was the central idea in Greek philosophy that the Logos exists even though we do not know anything about it. When John speaks of the Logos, he is speaking of the same thing. He is telling his reader that the idea of the Logos is found in God and that the one true God is not anything like the gods that they understood in their pantheon of gods. However, God was personal, eternal, active in creation, and the light in the darkness of our understanding. The One whom the Greeks couldn’t quite grasp was being shown by John as the God who reveals Himself in the Bible, the same God of the Israelites, and the God who stepped down out of time to live among them, where His glory would tangibly be on display.

The Glory of the Incarnation

The Greeks did not have a concept of a perfect God (maybe the idea of the Logos, but we aren’t sure). When you study Greek mythology, you will see that all their gods were just personifications of their own lives of sin and failures. If you wanted to gain favor with any of those gods, you had to do something to appeal to them and earn their favor. This type of understanding of serving a god isn't exclusive to just the ancient Greeks. Almost every other system of religion believes the same thing. What can I do that can cause the gods to grant me favor? These religious systems are much like a school. During your life, you study and are taught by teachers (priests). You work hard, and then when you die, you get to see if you passed the class or not. That is not what Christianity is at all. When John speaks of the Word becoming flesh and making His dwelling among us, he is throwing all those ideas out and is telling the reader that God came in flesh to fix the issue that we couldn’t fix ourselves. He came to fix our sin problem and have a personal and intimate relationship with us. This is an expression of a type of love that the Greeks were not and could not be familiar with in any way. It was a god whom they had been looking for outside of their religious system (who would explain the mysteries of the universe) and loved them enough to save them and make His home with them. The concept of the incarnation would show the Greeks the glory of God in a way that they had been looking for centuries.

It wasn’t just the Greeks that would have been challenged with the first few words of this verse. They would have caused the Jews to sit up and take notice as well. The idea of “making His dwelling among us” was a very familiar idea to the Jewish people because it portrays the idea of the tabernacle. The tabernacle was the place where God would meet Moses in the wilderness as He directed the children of Israel to the promised land. It was the Holy Place where the Shekinah Glory of God dwelt and dealt with mankind. In Jesus’ day, it would have been understood that the presence of God was still tabernacling with His people in the Holy of Holies at the temple in Jerusalem. When John says that God is no longer tabernacling with His people in the temple, but in flesh and blood. This would have been an earth-shattering statement because the Glory of God was no longer reserved for just the chief priest once a year. It would be seen by anyone who would come to Jesus.

The Glory of the Son

Paul then tells us that we have seen His glory, and in a sense, everyone has a type of glory. We are all made in the image of God, so we have His fingerprints all over our lives. Everyone has a type of glory. When we are speaking of the Logos or Jesus, we see that His glory is the glory of the one and only Son. This is a very different type of glory than we have, and it can be confusing. When we see that Jesus is called the son of God, it does not mean that Jesus is the son of the Father like we would understand in a biological family, no matter what others might believe. To understand what John means by this phrase, we must look to the Greek. We will see that when he says that Jesus is the son of God. He means that Jesus has the same nature as God, or as He says in John 1:1, “The Word was God”. This idea can be easily seen if we look through all the Gospels. In Matthew 26, we see Jesus on trial before the religious leaders, and they ask Him if He is the “Son of God”. Jesus replied, “Yes”. The religious leaders knew exactly what Jesus was saying. He was saying He was God, and they responded with cries of blasphemy and wanted Him executed following Mosaic Law. Pilate asked the same thing of Jesus, and the Jews again responded to His answer the same way. They knew Jesus was claiming to be God, and there was no question about it. The writer of Hebrews expresses this perfectly when he states in Hebrews 1:3 that “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being”. Therefore, this declaration is telling us that the glory that we see in the life of Jesus, is the same glory of God that was revealed to the children of Israel in the Old Testament: His kingly glory, His beaming glory, the glory of His character that revealed who He truly was, the glory that showed us He is worthy of all of our praises and the glory of His power. The examples are too numerous to mention here, but they were all on display in the life of Jesus. While John could have taken the rest of his book to list all the examples of this, he chose to focus on two.

The Glory of the fullness of His Grace

There might be a tendency to focus on the glory of God’s grace here. Don’t get me wrong — the grace of God is glorious. Grace is what God gives us that we do not deserve. Our mind usually goes to the greatest of the graces that Jesus extends to us, and that is an offer of Salvation. The Bible tells us that there is nothing that we can do to compensate for our sins and the consequences of those sins. Because of God’s great love, He has offered us a gift of forgiveness that only comes by faith in Jesus Christ. When we accept it by making Jesus the Lord of our lives, we experience Salvation by His amazing grace. However, the glory that John is speaking of here is more than just Salvation. He describes it a little more in detail in verse 16 when he says that we have received grace after grace from Jesus. What he is saying is that when we enter a relationship with Jesus that He offers through His incarnation, His Death, Burial, and Resurrection. The grace we experience at Salvation is not the only grace we experience with Jesus. The grace of God is heaped upon us, day after day, minute after minute, and hour after hour. It’s like going to an “all you can eat” taco joint when you are hungry. There is going to be no surprise that they keep bringing you tacos to feed that hunger. With Jesus, when you need it, Jesus is going to keep blessing you with grace after grace after grace after grace. This is all given with love and compassion that you have never, and will never, experienced without a relationship with Him.

The Glory of the Fullness of Truth

The last thing that Paul mentions in this verse is the fullness of truth. This was also spoken in verse 17. Both are telling us what Paul says in Romans 3:20 when he states, “For no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. The law simply shows us how sinful we are”. The law was not the truth that could save us, but pointed us to the truth that we are sinners. Now Jesus was here to bring us into a relationship with Him and to forgive our sins by His amazing grace once we put our faith in Him. This abstract concept of the law had now tangibly come into our lives. It came from God, who stepped down out of time to bring Salvation to a people who did not deserve it but were still offered it because of His inconceivable love. He is the standard of truth by which all truth is defined.

We don’t even have enough time this morning to plumb the depths of the Glory of God revealed in these two sentences. Imagine what would become of our understanding of the Glory of God if we took time each day to learn more and more about God’s Glory? We need to remember we don’t just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake, we must always respond as God reveals more and more about Himself to us through His Word. The study of the Glory of God is no different. What do we do with this knowledge — this brief glimpse into the Glory of God? We do what we are always supposed to do when we learn more about God. 2 Corinthians 3:18 tells us that we are to reflect it into a lost and dying world. “So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.” That’s always our call. We are to learn more of our Savior and become more and more like Him every day so that we can tell this world of our hope for all eternity.

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Sermon Notes

The Glory of God

John 1:1-18

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