Jesus Christ: Fully God and Fully Man
John 1:1-18
On 12 April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into space. Hurtling around the earth aboard Vostok 1, he completed one full orbit of the planet before safely returning home.
A few days later, Gagarin reportedly made a famous remark:
“I looked and looked, but I didn’t see God up there.”
That was the voice of militant Soviet atheism. Humanity had finally broken through the heavens — and, according to Gagarin, there was no God to be found.
But less than a year later, another astronaut made another journey into the skies.
In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth aboard Mercury 7. And when he returned, Glenn reportedly said this:
“The real miracle is not that man has gone into heaven, but that God has come to earth.”
That is the staggering claim at the heart of Christianity.
Not merely that humanity has reached upward toward God —
but that God has come down to us.
That’s what we’re going to be thinking about today as we continue our series on what is commonly called the Nicene Creed.
The word “creed” comes from the Latin word credo meaning: “I believe.”
That means the Creed is not merely a piece of cold religious theory or abstract speculation.
It is a declaration of faith.
A summary of what Christians have believed, treasured, proclaimed, sung, and even died for throughout the centuries.
Two weeks ago, Matt took us through the early lines of the Creed thinking about who God is.
Today we come to the next section of the Creed — the breathtaking claim that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.
Let me read the section:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man.”
Here’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to be in that section of the Creed and in John 1. And we’re going to see two crucial things we believe about Jesus Christ.
- Jesus Christ has brought God to us
First, that Jesus Christ has brought God to us.
Gagarin was wrong.
Life is not a game of cosmic hide and seek where God has hidden and hidden real well on the far side of Andromeda.
No God has come down – as John Glen said, He has made himself known.
People sometimes say:
“How can anyone know Christianity is true? There are so many religions.”
But notice the assumption underneath that.
The assumption is that God has remained silent.
Hidden.
Unknowable.
But what if God has spoken?
What if God has revealed himself?
But still there’s a problem because I can’t know everything about God. So how can we know Christianity is true?
I’ve been married to Anna for nearly 23 years.
I know her deeply.
I know what makes her laugh.
I know the look on her face when she’s worried.
But I do not know everything there is to know about her.
I couldn’t map every thought in her mind.
Yet that doesn’t mean I don’t truly know her.
We know many things truly without knowing them exhaustively.
Especially when someone chooses to reveal themselves to us.
And that brings us to John 1.
Now to understand John 1, we need to go back to the opening words of the Bible . Genesis chapter 1:
“In the beginning…”
Do you hear the echo?
John deliberately starts exactly where Genesis 1 starts.
And Genesis continues:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Now stop there for a moment. How did God create in Genesis 1?
Verse 3:
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
God creates by his Word.
He speaks—and worlds come into existence.
His speech is not merely sound waves vibrating through the air.
His Word creates reality itself.
Light and darkness.
Sky and sea.
Mountains and rivers.
Stars and galaxies.
Birds and whales.
Animals and humanity.
Everything came into existence through the Word of God.
Now come back to John 1 with Genesis ringing in your ears.
John writes:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Do you see what John is saying?
The Word is distinct from God the Father—“the Word was with God.”
Yet the Word is also fully divine—“the Word was God.”
This is what Matt introduced us to two weeks ago when he spoke about the Trinity.
One God.
Eternally existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Distinct persons.
Yet one divine being.
Now Matt also introduced to us a few figures who were around at the time the Nicene Creed was formulated.
Do you remember Arius?
He was the guy who got punched on the nose by Santa Claus – St Nick – at the first Council of Nicaea. Remember him.
Arius claimed that the Son of God was created.
That there was “a time when the Son was not.”
In other words, Jesus was the highest creature—but still a creature.
God-like perhaps.
Exalted perhaps.
But not eternal.
Not fully God.
And people still make the same argument today.
In fact, groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians point to John 1:1 and argue that because the definite article, the “the” is missing in the Greek text, the verse should read:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god” (New World Translation).
But that’s a big mistake. You see, it’s not uncommon for the definite article – the “the” - to be omitted in New Testament Greek, and the reason for doing so here is clear.
John has just been describing how the Word was with God (the Father) in the beginning—emphasizing their distinction and relationship.
But in the third part of the sentence he wants to show how the Word is divine but not identical with the Father and so he drops the definite article.
What he’s saying is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with [the] God the Father, and the Word was God.”
God the Son is distinct from God the Father and yet equally God.
Do you see?
And the next verses confirm it.
Verse 2. The Son of God was with God the Father in the beginning.
Verse 3: “Through him all things were made.” That is creator language, not creature language.
Everything that exists was made through him.
Which means Jesus himself cannot be part of the created order.
Contrary to Arius, there was never a time when the Son was not.
And that is exactly why the Nicene Creed says:
“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God… through him all things were made.” It’s the language of verse 1-5.
But then the Creed says something strange:
“begotten, not made.”
What do we make of that.
Well, look down to the end of verse 14:
“We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”
Now some old English translations, such as the King James version, translate that:
“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father”.
Only begotten.
Now the difficulty with that translation is that today we tend to confuse the word “beget” with “make” or “create” as if they’re the same.
But that’s not what the word “beget” means in either old English or Greek - the language of the Creed and John’s Gospel.
Let me try to illustrate this. Think of a carpenter.
A carpenter makes a chair. The chair has a different nature to the carpenter.
But the carpenter begets a child. The child is of the same nature.
That’s what the Creed and John 1:14 is saying.
The Son is of the same nature as the Father. “Of one Being with the Father” as the Creed puts it.
Not in the sense that the Son was physically born at a certain point in time. He is eternal.
But in the sense that they are both fully God.
Now let me be clear what that means.
The persons of the Trinity are not like Captain America, Thor and Iron Man who when they assemble become the Avengers.
God is not three parts combining into one greater whole.
The Father is fully God.
The Son is fully God.
The Spirit is fully God.
One God.
Three persons.
Which means, back to verse 14 – if you want to see the glory of God, just look at the Son.
And get this – the Word, God the Son, became flesh two thousand years ago.
The eternal Son took on flesh.
Weakness.
Mortality.
Humanity.
Not by ceasing to be God.
And not merely pretending to be human – that was the mistake of the Docetists back in the first and second centuries
He became fully man while remaining fully God.
And look again at verse 14: he “made his dwelling among us”.
Literally: he “tabernacled” among us.
He pitched his tent among us.
When I was growing up, we couldn’t afford fancy holidays or hotels, so we used to stay at campsites.
And if you’ve ever camped, you know what it’s like.
You hear everything.
Babies crying.
People arguing.
Zips opening at 2am.
You queue together for the showers.
You wash dishes side by side.
You are right in the middle of ordinary human life whether you like it or not.
That is what God the Son chose to do.
He moved into the neighbourhood.
He stepped into the mess and closeness and pain of human existence.
Coming as Jesus of Nazareth.
The carpenter’s son.
Fully God.
Fully man.
Which means if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
Verse 18:
“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father [the word used there means in the bosom of the Father], has made him known.”
Jesus Christ has brought God to us.
Last week, I was speaking with someone who has been occasionally coming along to City Church over the past few months. He’s not a Christian, and growing up he had some deeply painful experiences of church. He’d seen hypocrisy. Cover-ups. People saying one thing and living another. And it had made it incredibly difficult for him to believe what Christians claim to believe.
Maybe you can relate to that.
Maybe your experience of church—or Christians—or even your own family—has made belief in the God of the Bible feel difficult, perhaps even impossible.
If that’s you, can I say: I hear you. And I’m sorry. Because the church has often failed to reflect the God it proclaims.
But can I also say what I said to that young man:
If you want to know what the God of the Bible is like, ultimately you must look at Jesus.
That’s fair with any worldview.
If you want to examine Islam, look at Muhammad.
Marxism, look at Karl Marx.
And of course Jesus is not merely the founder of Christianity.
He is God come to us.
And when you read the Gospel accounts, you encounter someone utterly extraordinary.
You see breathtaking authority wrapped in astonishing tenderness.
You see holiness without harshness.
Strength without cruelty.
Truth without manipulation.
Power without abuse.
Look at the people Jesus moved towards.
The leper nobody would touch.
The prostitute everybody condemned.
The tax collector everyone hated.
Again and again, Jesus moves towards the unwanted, the ashamed and the broken.
Look at the Samaritan woman at the well—socially rejected, morally compromised, carrying years of shame—and yet Jesus speaks to her with extraordinary gentleness and dignity.
Look at him restoring Peter after Peter publicly denied even knowing him.
And then look at the cross.
Watch him bleeding.
Mocked.
Spat upon.
Abandoned.
And hear him pray for the very people hammering nails through his hands:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”
Who speaks like that?
Who loves like that?
God does.
Jesus Christ has brought God to us.
And that means God is not distant from human suffering.
In the person of Jesus He knows what it is to be hungry.
Exhausted.
Lonely.
Rejected.
Misunderstood.
Tempted.
Betrayed.
Publicly shamed.
Falsely accused.
Tortured.
Killed.
Christianity says that when we suffer, we are not speaking into a cold universe.
We are speaking to a Saviour who still bears scars.
Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie endured unimaginable suffering in the Holocaust, imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp during the Second World War.
Years later, Corrie wrote these words in The Hiding Place:
“There is no suffering that Jesus cannot understand.”
So firstly, Jesus Christ has brought God to us.
- Jesus Christ has brought us to God
Secondly, and more briefly: Jesus Christ has brought us to God.
Because the problem is not simply that we do not know God.
The problem is that we have run from him.
Back to Genesis again.
Humanity was created for life with God. To know him. Delight in him. Walk with him.
Genesis gives us this extraordinary picture of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Humanity enjoying unhindered fellowship with their creator.
Why did God make humanity at all?
Not because he was lonely.
Not because he needed servants.
Not because he lacked anything.
God created out of the overflow of his own love and joy.
Father loving Son.
Son loving Spirit.
Spirit loving Father.
And humanity was invited into that life.
But Genesis 3 tells us something catastrophic happened.
The first man and woman ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And we can make that sound trivial.
Like children sneaking sweets from a cupboard.
But it was cosmic rebellion.
It was humanity saying:
“We will decide good and evil for ourselves.”
“We will rule our own lives.”
Humanity tried to climb onto God’s throne.
And if we’re honest, every one of us has done the same thing.
Some of us have done it loudly like Yuri Gagarin, writing God out of the pages of human history.
Others of us have done it more quietly, writing him out of our daily lives.
We fill our schedules.
Build careers.
Raise families.
Chase pleasure.
Accumulate possessions.
All while living as though God does not exist.
But that has consequences.
Genesis 3. Adam and Eve were immediately banished from the presence of God. And death – eternal separation for the good presence of God came into the world.
That is why the words of the Nicene Creed matter so much:
“For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven…
and was made man.”
We need saving. By trying to be god of our lives, we have cut ourselves off from the source of all goodness, joy and life.
By seeking our own honour, we have covered ourselves in shame.
By claiming power for ourselves we have banished ourselves from God’s presence and flung ourselves towards hell and judgment.
And that is why Jesus came.
John says, verse 14 the eternal Son came “full of grace and truth.”
We’ve seen the truth.
Jesus reveals God to us.
But he is also full of grace.
Grace means gift.
Undeserved favour.
Love for the undeserving.
And to bring us that grace, the Jesus had to be both fully God and fully man as the Creed puts it.
Why?
Well, He had to be fully man for two reasons.
Firstly, so that he could represent us.
When King Charles went to the United States earlier this month, he went representing the UK and the Commonwealth. When Harry Kane scores the winning goal on 19 July, the whole of England will win the World Cup. As our captain, he represents us. Do you see the point?
When Adam rebelled in Genesis 3, humanity fell with him.
His shame became our shame.
His guilt became our guilt.
His exile became our exile.
Which means humanity needed a new representative.
A second Adam.
And that is what Jesus came to be.
Think about the contrast.
Adam stood in a garden surrounded by abundance, beauty and provision.
He faced one temptation.
And he fell.
Jesus stood in a wilderness hungry, exhausted and alone.
And where Adam failed once, Jesus obeyed again and again and again.
The Son of God became human to live the life we should have lived.
Perfect obedience.
Perfect trust.
Perfect righteousness.
But Jesus had to become human for another reason too.
Not just to represent us.
But to substitute for us.
The people of Israel had a day called Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement. You can read about it in Leviticus 16.
Once a year the high priest would place his hands on two goats, symbolically transferring the sins of the people onto them.
One goat—the scapegoat—was driven out into the wilderness, carrying away the sins of the people.
The other was sacrificed. Taking the punishment for the people’s sin.
But of course it was always intended to be symbolic.
A goat could never be an adequate substitute for human beings.
So the Son of God took on flesh.
Real humanity.
Sinless humanity.
And on that Friday outside Jerusalem, Jesus became the true scapegoat.
Led outside the city carrying our shame away.
And he became the true sacrifice.
Bearing judgment in our place.
Listen to how the writer of Hebrews puts it:
“For this reason he [God the Son] had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might … make atonement for the sins of the people.”
Only a human representative could obey for humanity.
Only a human substitute could die for humanity.
But Jesus also had to be fully God.
Why?
Because as Jonah put it “salvation comes from the Lord” (Jonah 2:9).
Humanity cannot climb its way back to God.
No amount of morality.
Religion.
Good works.
Can remove our guilt or defeat death.
As Anselm of Canterbury so famously put it:
“The debt was so great that while man alone owed it, only God could pay it.”
That is the wonder of the incarnation.
The one who owed nothing paid everything.
Fully man to represent us.
Fully God to save us.
And this is why Arius was ultimately so wrong.
Arius taught that Jesus was the perfect creature.
The model human.
Someone showing us how to rise upward toward God.
But the Gospel says the exact opposite.
Christianity is not about humanity climbing up to God.
It is about God coming down to us.
Not about us making ourselves good enough for God. But about God coming down into the depths of our guilt and shame to lift us out.
God has come to us in grace and truth. Have you received him?
If so, let me remind you of three really important things.
Firstly, we never grow out of grace.
We never pay God back. Jesus is the gift who keeps giving. We need his grace, forgiveness and life just as much today as we did yesterday and as we will forever. The Christian life is a journey of going deeper and deeper into his grace.
Secondly, remember that the greatest gift of the Gospel is that you get God.
Look, it’s not wrong to want a nice house, a relaxing holiday, a 2i, good health, a great job. Those things are great gifts.
But don’t mistake the gifts for the giver himself.
In Jesus you get God himself.
The Father welcoming you.
The Son uniting himself to you.
The Spirit dwelling within you.
Forever.
And finally, remember that the incarnation means that the way up is down.
How was God’s glory revealed according to John 1:14?
By God the Son coming down, down, down all the way to the cross.
In Jesus the way up is down, the way to glory is service, the way to honour is shame, the way to joy is sorrow.
City Church, in Jesus, the God-Man:
God has been brought to us and we have been brought to God.
Let’s us show that good news here in Manchester, the northwest and beyond.
Let’s pray
