Word of Salvation – Vol.53 No.47 – December 2008

 

Skin, Not Sin

 

A Christmas Sermon by Rev John De Hoog on John 1:14

Scripture Readings: Matthew 1:18-2:12; John 1:1-18

 

Beloved people of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here is one of the most famous sentences uttered in the twentieth century: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong said these words on 21 July 1969 as he took his first step on the surface of the moon. It was the Apollo 11 mission. Richard Nixon was President of America at the time, and as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood on the surface of the moon, he spoke with them.

“For every American, this has to be the proudest day of their lives, and I am sure that people all over the world, not just Americans, will acclaim you for this. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world… For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one. One in their pride and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.” It was a moment of great optimism, of hope in what mankind could achieve. Subsequent events did not exactly live up to the promise.

Compare mankind’s visit to the moon with the coming of the Son of God to the earth about 2000 years earlier. There are some similarities. Each can be described as a mission. Each was a sensational journey to a place very different from home. But they are also very different. The Apollo astronauts never identified with the moon, never became part of it. Indeed, if they had attempted to do so, they would have been dead in a minute. Instead they took with them all the necessities of the earth — earth’s oxygen, equipment, clothing and food.

When Jesus came from heaven to earth, he left heaven behind and brought nothing but himself. His was no superficial touchdown. He became a human being like us. He emptied himself and humbled himself to serve. He took our nature, lived our life, endured our temptations, experienced our sorrows, felt our hurts, bore our sins and died our death. He never stayed aloof from the people he might have been expected to avoid. He touched the untouchables; he made friends with the unwanted. He could not have become more like us, he could not have identified with us more fully than he did. It was the total identification of love.

And the amazing thing is that it is the Word, the eternal Son of God, who had made this deep identification with us. Look at the contrast John draws in verses 1 and 14. These are the only two verses in the Prologue to John’s gospel that mention “the Word”  specifically. But look at the contrast between these verses.

Verse 1 Verse 14

The Word was The Word became

The Word with God The Word among us

The Word was God The Word became flesh

Verse 1 speaks about the eternal being of the Word — always existing, always with God, always himself God.

But verse 14 speaks about what that Word became in time . The Word became flesh! God did not just touch down on the earth, coming as an unidentified flying object. Instead, God the Son became a man. Here is the message of Christmas — that baby born in the stable at Bethlehem was God the Son.

John uses a very strong expression for what God has done. John doesn’t say, “The Word took a body”  or “The Word assumed a human nature” . No, he says, “The Word became flesh” . John wants his readers to be absolutely sure of his meaning — that the Son of God was fully a man, fully a flesh-and-blood human being.

In his first letter, John expresses the same thing: “This is how you can recognise the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus Christ is not from God”  (1 John 4:2-3).

Here then is the heart of Christianity. The Word became flesh. God the Son fully became a human being for our salvation. He didn’t wear a space suit and keep himself totally insulated from the world — he became one of us. John goes on. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The words “made his dwelling among us” literally mean “pitched his tent among us” or “tabernacled among us”. God the Son tabernacled among us. By using this word, John is intentionally pointing us back to how God related to his people in the Old Testament.

In Exodus 25, Israel is commanded to build a tabernacle so that God can dwell among his people. The tabernacle becomes the site of God’s localised presence on earth. How do the people wandering through the wilderness know that God is with them, dwelling in the tabernacle? They know because God’s glory fills the tabernacle as a sign of his presence. When Moses had finished constructing the temple, God’s glory filled the tabernacle so that Moses could not enter it. The people can look at that tabernacle and understand that God is with them in a special way.

The tabernacle was a movable tent, suitable for the Israelites because they were a moving people. But when they eventually settled in the Promised Land, when they stopped moving, something more than a movable tent was required. God commanded that Solomon build a temple to replace the tabernacle. And once again, when Solomon had finished building that temple, God filled the temple with his glory, as a sign of his presence with his people.

God graciously shows his people his presence; he shows that he is with them, and dwelling amongst them. He shows this by revealing his glory, by filling the tabernacle and then the temple with his glory.

Now what does John say? “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only…”  It is the glory of God, the same glory that filled the tabernacle and the temple. Do you see what John is saying? In days gone by God dwelt with his people in the tabernacle, and in the temple. The tabernacle and the temple were the sites of God’s localised presence on the earth. Now the flesh of Jesus Christ is the new site of God’s presence on earth. In Jesus Christ, God is present with mankind on earth.

The flesh of Jesus Christ is the new site of God’s presence with his people. Jesus Christ, the man walking around Israel in his day, is God himself, come to tabernacle with mankind . He is the replacement of the tabernacle and the temple. Here is the great point. All the ways of God tabernacling with his people in the past had been transitory and incomplete. But all these ways are fulfilled perfectly in the Word who became flesh. He is Emmanuel — God with us.

You might be tempted to think that this visit of God to earth was also only temporary. After all, John describes it as “pitching a tent among us” . And a tent is impermanent — you pitch it for your summer holidays, and then you take it down again to go home. But Jesus did not make a temporary visit, a brief touchdown, like the Apollo astronauts on the moon. He came to stay permanently.

In Jesus Christ, God has begun a new way of dwelling with his people. God is with us now. Of course, Jesus is not here physically — his physical human body is in heaven now. But he is with us. He remains present with us by his Spirit. Remember what he said. “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt 28:20). “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you” (Heb 13:5). “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn 14:23). Jesus is present with us — he lives with us now by his Spirit.

The day will come when he will return physically on the clouds of heaven as the glorious king and judge — on the last day. And then we will be with him physically and spiritually forever. Revelation 21:3, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them, they will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

Here is the full message of Christmas Day. God in the flesh, Immanuel, God with us. Not just for a little while, for the period that Jesus lived on the earth, but now and forever. Jesus came on Christmas Day, and he has remained with us ever since by his Spirit. One day, we will again see his physical presence — we will see him face to face. Christmas Day was not a temporary touchdown on foreign soil with no real connection made, like the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. It was the beginning of a new way of God’s permanent dwelling with his people.

[Pause]

There is a very strong implication here for the way we live in this world. Jesus says to us in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me into the world, so am I sending you.” As the Father has sent me, so I send you! How did the Father send Jesus? To touch down temporarily, collect a few samples and take off again, back to the safety of heaven? No, he sent him to become one of us, to identify with us as deeply as he possibly could, to suffer with us and for us, to know us. He did all this without falling into our sins. He identified with us without losing his own identity. And our mission is to be modelled on that. To identify with the world, without losing our own identity as God’s people. To reach out without selling out. As the Father has sent me, so I send you into the world.

This has very strong implications for the way we do mission. There are some dramatic examples of Christians trying to live out this principle in the history of missions. In 1822, Major Frederick Tucker launched the Salvation Army in India. General Booth’s last words to him were, “Get into their skins, Tucker.” He did. Tucker was deeply concerned for the untouchables in India. So he and his fellow missionaries decided they should live their lives. They donned saffron robes, adopted Indian names, walked barefoot, cleaned their teeth with charcoal and ate their curry and drank their water cross-legged on the floor. All for the sake of identifying with the people they were seeking to reach. They got into their skins.

Paul did the same. 1 Corinthians 9:19-22, “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” Paul always sought to get into the skins of those he was trying to reach.

Here is the principle if we want to follow Christ’s example — identify with the world without compromising yourself; identify with people without losing your own identity as a Christian. Reach out without selling out. If you like, get into their skins, without getting into their sins. That’s exactly what Jesus did. He got into our skin, quite literally — he became flesh — without getting into our sin. He was tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin.

[Pause]

Now in practical terms , how can we do this work?

Here I want to get alongside you and learn with you. It’s a critical question that I have much to learn about. Perhaps I could just point out two errors that I/we often make here. One is to mistake skin for sin. The other is to love skin for sin.

The first is to mistake skin for sin — or in different words, to confuse worldliness and culture. It is to presume that a skateboard riding tattooed teenage son of a single mother must be worldly, beyond the reach of the gospel and certainly no future partner for my daughter, and that a clean cut high income church goer who wears a suit to work would be a great catch for both the church and my daughter. It is to imagine that certain skins, certain outward appearances, are necessarily good or evil.

Jesus exploded that myth when he sent the rich young ruler away empty-handed. Jesus exploded that myth when he told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector. Jesus exploded that myth when he consorted with tax collectors and sinners rather than the high and mighty. But we make that mistake all the time, don’t we? We are so quick to judge people by their appearance, their habits, their backgrounds, their interests, the way they use their time, the kinds of people they associate with, what they spend their money on. We would probably have been shocked by the way Jesus conducted his social life.

The trouble is: that just about kills our mission. It means that there is only a very narrow band of people that we can reach out to; it means that we are comfortable only with people who are very much like us, and it means that we rarely go outside of our very narrowly defined comfort zones. Please remember that I am describing myself as much as anyone; it’s an area of real weakness for me.

Our first error is to mistake skin for sin, and that means we have no one left to talk to. But our second error is to love skin for sin — or in other words, to love what the world loves for its sinfulness . I guess a very obvious area is literally loving skin for sin — to indulge in pornography — naked skin — knowing it is sinful. But that’s just an obvious example. There are so many ways in which we simply adopt the values of the world and become like the world and love it for its sin ; we love it because it is sinful . We love it because we love to indulge our own sinful natures rather than giving up our own desires for the sake of Christ. It means that we have nothing left to say to the world, because we are just like the world.

Here are two errors that kill mission. Mistaking skin for sin kills our mission because we have hardly anyone left to talk to — everyone else is just too sinful. Loving skin for sin kills our mission because we have hardly anything left to say — we are just too sinful and are no different from the world. And we do both these things at the same time, so we have no one left to talk to and nothing left to say .

[Pause]

Maybe I’m being too negative; but these are the things I struggle with, and surely all of us struggle with them to some extent. But Jesus offers us great hope, because he got into our skin perfectly without getting into our sin at all . And so he can speak to everyone, and he has everything to say.

And here is our calling — often described as “being in the world without being of the world” . It means to venture into the world and to go to dangerous places and talk to dangerous people, knowing that Jesus calls us to do that, knowing that Jesus rules all that, without falling for the dangers ourselves. Paul expresses it this way in Galatians 6:1, “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.” Or, as Jude expresses it, “Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; show mercy, mixed with fear — hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.”

[Pause]

When you think about Christmas, don’t think about it in the narrow sentimental way of sickly, sugary Christmas cards: the baby in the manger, snow, peace on earth, good will to all. Rather, see the gospel in all its depth and power. God the Son, the eternal Word of God, became a man, so that God would dwell with us in a new way. He continues to dwell with us today, by his Spirit. And see how this message demands a radical new lifestyle — a life of identification with the world for the sake of the gospel, identification without compromise, as Jesus himself did so perfectly.

Amen.