Wednesday: The Word Become Flesh
WEEK 1
WEDNESDAY
THE WORD BECOME FLESH
John 1:1-4
We have looked at the mastery of the Master. He has been the starting point and stimulus of everything that is working for the redemption of the human race. For since he is the “true light that shines on all people . . . coming into the world” (John 1:9), so he is the life of all that leads toward Life. People have been and are often unconscious of the source of that light and life within, urging them to better individual and collective living, but the source has been Jesus, for “through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people” (John 1:4).
That leads us to inquire what lay behind the mastery of those who laid masterful hands on life around them and changed it profoundly. Did it just happen? Was it a historical departure from the ordinary, an aberration—what is called in biology a “sport,” a kind of life that lives and dies within itself and will not be repeated? Or was this the working out of something that has divine purpose and plan behind it and is capable of being duplicated wherever conditions are met? What lay behind this amazing burst of spiritual mastery?
The answer is in the opening verses of the Acts. There Luke lays down the seven things upon which the Christian gospel rests. They are the pillars sunk deep in the purposes of God and going down to the very bedrock of the foundations of the universe.
The first pillar is Jesus: the Word become flesh of “everything Jesus did and taught from the beginning” (Acts 1:1). Our starting point is Jesus. But someone objects and says, “The gospel begins with God.” No, for until Jesus came, there were views about God and there was news about God, but no good news. Apart from Jesus we know little about God, and what little we know is not good news. The conception of the character of God apart from Jesus is questionable. In Jesus our question marks about God turn into exclamation points. In the face of Jesus we know what God is like and what we must be like if we are to be good. If God is other than Jesus, God is not good; if like Jesus, God is good. That is an astounding thing to say; yet when I say it, I hear the ages give a resounding Amen. And it reverberates through all things.
O Lord, I see you in a Face. And that Face is the express image of your Face. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am beginning not with an idea but with a Fact, so fact must come out of it.