Christ, The Word Made Flesh - A

Jack Hibbs: Listen, I love saying this because it's so radical. That God draped Himself in human skin. You know, that's the greatest miracle of all, that God would leave heaven and clothe Himself with human frailty. That blows my mind every time.
David J: Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I'm David J, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God's Word, the Bible.
Jack Hibbs: Hey, my friends, come with me on our Bold Faith Hawaii cruise, June 12th to the 19th, 2027. Listen, we're going to set sail for seven unforgettable days with myself, Dr. Frank Turek, and special worship with Gia Lucid. It's going to be a breathtaking trip with destinations like Hilo, Kona, Maui, and the scenic cruise along Kauai's Napali Coast. You'll never forget it. This is more than a vacation. It's a time of rest, renewal, fellowship, and spiritual strength in the Word of God, all centered around the Bible. You can reserve your spot by going to jackhibbs.com.
David J: That's the Bold Faith Hawaii cruise with Pastor Jack Hibbs. As you explore the beauty of the islands of Hawaii, you will grow in your faith and knowledge of how the Word of God applies to your daily life. Once again, that's the Bold Faith Hawaii cruise, June 12th through the 19th, 2027. For more information, go to jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. On today's edition of Real Life Radio, Pastor Jack continues now in his series called The Life and Times of Jesus Christ and his message titled Christ, the Word Made Flesh. Now, this is a series about who Jesus really is, not the Jesus of popular opinion, but the Jesus of the Bible, God Himself, who stepped into our world. The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus Christ took on human flesh and walked among us as a man. So that brings up the question a lot of us have asked and wondered: Why did Jesus have to become a man? You see, the greatest miracle of all is that God would leave heaven and clothe Himself in human skin. He got tired, he got hungry, his feet got dirty, just like you and me. He came down to where we live so we'd know he understands exactly how we feel. So today, Pastor Jack teaches us that Jesus came to us to reveal the very nature of God. When we look at how Jesus loved, taught, and forgave, we're seeing the Father Himself stepping into human life in a real and personal way. Now, with his message called Christ, the Word Made Flesh, here's pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs.
Jack Hibbs: Let's dive into what is part three now of our study entitled Christ, the Word Made Flesh. We are doing a series on the life and times of Jesus Christ, and we come now to our third consideration, and that is Christ, the Word Made Flesh. This is what the Bible declares concerning Jesus. It says in John chapter 1, verse 1: "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, nothing was made that was made." Verse 14, same chapter, verse 14 says: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." I'd like you to mark that in your Bible there in verse 14, "full of grace and truth." That's what we're going to be looking at this morning in that we are considering today Christ, the Word Made Flesh. We have been going and we shall continue to go throughout this series to the theme verse of what we're studying, and that is Colossians chapter 2, verse 9, in all of our 16 weeks together. Colossians chapter 2, verse 9, really brings everything together. Look at it there with me. Colossians 2:9 says, "For in Christ all the fullness, the effulgence, the presence of the Godhead dwells in bodily form." And we're going to see exactly what that means by the time we come to the end of this series. It's so very, very important to us. But we want to take in a couple considerations today. In fact, more than a couple, we'll look at seven of them. So get your pen ready, as we're going to be taking notes on seven very important points regarding Christ and that He's been made available to us in the flesh. We want to ask the question like any good five-year-old: Why? Not a question to be an antagonist, not a question to unreasonably argue, but a question to ask because we want to know. Why did Jesus have to become a man? You ought to be able to answer that question of anyone who asks you why. If someone should ask you why should I believe in Jesus Christ, you should be able to give them an answer. Now, don't show me your hands. It's not important that you show me your hand, but how many of you are really Christians this morning? If you were really a Christian this morning that's been in the family of God longer than a month, you should be able to tell people why Jesus came and how He came. The reason why He came is because He has come to deliver a world from sin. How He came is by being draped in human flesh. And so we look this morning to the study, Christ, the Word Made Flesh, because it is so very, very central to the doctrine in which God is teaching us in the Bible. In our previous studies, we saw Christ in eternity, and that whole study was focused around the fact that Christ is preexistent, that Jesus never had a beginning. Don't you dare think for a moment that His life began in that Bethlehem manger. Oh no, the Bible says that He has always existed. In fact, the Bible says that all of the created universe, the physical realm and the spiritual realm that exist—angels and the like—have been created by Jesus Christ Himself. Colossians chapter 1 tells us this. Not only did Christ exist from all eternity, but we saw in our last study last week that Christ had a first coming. Yes, He was born in Bethlehem. Yes, He was laid in that manger that we looked at last week. But the real gist is that Christ came during that last final week of His life. His true coming, that is, the nation was held responsible to identify the coming of Messiah. The Old Testament prophets had forewarned them. Nehemiah had warned them, Jeremiah had warned them, Isaiah and Daniel had warned them of how to acknowledge and recognize the Messiah. And Jesus came on a prescribed day, a very specific day given in the prophet Daniel. And Jesus held that nation to know, listen, the day of His visitation, the arrival to Israel, to the city of Jerusalem, and as we focus our microscope even further, to the Temple Mount itself. That was the first coming of Christ, technically, in the theological sense, during that last week of His life. The second coming is very much like the first. The second coming, though it's futuristic, has to do with the nation Israel. It has to do with the city of Jerusalem. It has to do, as we focus in our microscope, on the Temple Mount specifically. During both of those occasions, it will have been said, when they're all culminated, that it was a public affair. Both believers and nonbelievers alike saw Jesus or will see Jesus in the second coming. The Bible says that when He comes in the second coming, every eye on the earth will see Him. And by the way, the people who don't know Him, the Bible says that they will mourn because of the wrath of the Lamb of God coming from heaven. Not to be mistaken between the second coming and the rapture of the church—something totally different. One is public, the other one is clandestine or secretive, quiet. One is every eye will see Him, one will be the believers are the only ones who see His appearing, not His coming. One is physically or bodily to the earth; the other one is just to our atmosphere, where He descends out of the stratosphere, comes into the atmosphere, receives the body of Christ in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. Very, very important. One is Gentile in context, the other is Jewish in context. The rapture of the church is altogether different. The first coming, the second coming, specifically dealing with the nation of Israel. We looked at that last time, and that in the coming of Christ and His first coming, we dealt with the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ. That is, God draped Himself in human skin. You know, that's the greatest miracle of all, that God would leave heaven and clothe Himself with human frailty. That blows my mind every time. Jesus came into the world as a baby. He was 100% man, the Bible teaches us, but 100% God. When Christ took on the form of a man, it was once and for all. We don't realize that. We don't often appreciate that Jesus, right now at this hour, shortly after the hour of 10:00 right now this morning, Jesus is the God-man seated in heaven. He will forever be the God-man. Before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, He was God, of course, but He did not wear human skin. And we'll see this morning how He valued you and I so much that He considered the drawback, the debt or detriment of taking upon a human body, and He weighed that out and He said, "I love them and I'm going to go die for them anyway." And it's a wonderful thing to realize that right now in heaven, there is Jesus Christ, the mediator between man and God, who the Bible says is praying for you and I. The Bible says He's praying for us. That seems kind of strange, doesn't it? But He's praying for us. He is praying. And who's He praying to? The Bible teaches us: the Father. Do you think Him and the Father have anything together? Little cahoots, a little bit, about a fellowship, about maybe a treaty? When Jesus prays for you or me, do you think the Father's going to say, "I'm not listening"? Oh no. We have our Jesus praying for us. And we're going to see how important that is as He is our High Priest, as we look at our study today. The first thing we're going to look at this morning, very important, consider it with me is this: we're going to look at our first point out of the seven: by His humanity, Jesus has revealed God to man or to mankind. By His humanity, Jesus had to come as a human or else we would never have been able to identify with God. Not only that, but He sends us the message that Jesus, coming in the likeness of human form, associates with us. He is telling us by His coming that He knows how we feel. He knows what we're going through. He knows what it's like to traffic around this globe. And so the first thing that we see this morning is that He has revealed God's nature to us. This is a wonderful thing. It's so important that you and I understand God's nature. And when I say nature, His very actions, His activity, God's way. You can be a brand new Christian and not understand all the Bible, or even much of the Bible. You may not be able to even memorize a verse yet. But it's so critically important that you read the Bible and understand God's nature. Example: You can know very little of the Bible, but yet if somebody comes up to you and says, "Oh, God told me that I should..." and they articulate some rude or stupid thing. You could quickly say, "There's something wrong with what you just said. That just doesn't ring true to me. I'm a Christian, and I just don't think God is that way." That is the Holy Spirit speaking to you regarding the nature of God. We would never have known the nature of God unless Jesus Christ would have come to earth. We would have looked to the Old Testament, and with that, we would have glimpses of God's personality and will and nature, but we would never have understood it much without Jesus coming. And the world today, by the way, is a little bit more acquainted—even the non-believing world who might know something intellectually about Jesus—they know something about the nature of God, though not what you know. Jesus Christ has revealed or unveiled to us the nature of God. John chapter 1, verse 18, says, "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten of the Father, the begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed Him" or declared Him to us. Now, listen to this. In John chapter 1, verse 18, the Bible uses there the word "begotten Son" and it capitalizes the word "Son." You can see that in your scripture: Son, S-O-N. Well, what's really fun about that verse is that the King James translators back in 1610 didn't know quite what to do with it because the word there is not "son" like you would say to your son. The word in the original Greek language is this—and those of you who have an NASB, a New American Standard Bible, you have it translated in the exact Greek as it appears in the Greek, and it's this. Listen. John 1:18: "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him." That's right. The translators put in capital S-O-N, telling us this: by capital S being the Son of God, that He is in fact God, deity. But the NASB Bible puts in "God" because the word is *Theos* that appears there in scripture. That's a powerful argument. If anybody comes to you and says, "Well, the Bible nowhere says that Jesus is God," well, it certainly does in a lot of places. But in John chapter 1, verse 18, the word Son, *Theos*, is God Himself, that God Himself has come, declaring or explaining the very nature of God.
David J: You're listening to Real Life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. To learn more about this ministry or to catch up on some previous episodes, go to jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. And now, let's get back to today's message. Once again, here's Pastor Jack.
Jack Hibbs: In Matthew chapter 1, verse 23, the Bible says to us, "Behold, the virgin will be with child, and she shall bear a Son, *Theos*. And they shall call His name Immanuel," which is a name attributed to God only. Immanuel. Notice the spelling: I-M-M-A-N-U-E-L. In Hebrew, you read right to left. That's God who is among us. You read it E-L, God. That's His name, El, E-L, God. Immanuel. God among us, or God with us. It's a title of Jesus Christ, both out of the Old and New Testament alike. John chapter 14, verses 6 through 8: "Jesus said to us, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. And no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.'" Philip said to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it will be sufficient for us." And Jesus said to Philip, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you say you do not know?" He says, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." Now, what does Jesus mean by that? If you looked at Jesus—and wouldn't it have been great to look at Him? Haven't you and I been guilty of this? Haven't we once or many times said, "If I could just see Jesus," or "I would have done anything to live back then"? It's just a common thing. It's natural. What would we have experienced? Well, what if we would have touched Him? What did He feel like? Did He feel like a normal human? Oh yeah. He was such a normal human that many people didn't recognize Him. He had a certain body aroma as every individual has. He had certain looks. He had certain personality-type things. Maybe He had a kind of an awkward or funny giggle at times. Maybe when He laughed, it was loud. We don't know. But He was so human. We begin to portray Jesus in our mind that He's somehow a superhuman. No, He was the God-man. He was 100% God and He was 100% man. But listen, He was totally God and totally man. And we're focusing on the fact this morning of His manhood or His humanity. Jesus did not walk six inches above the ground. Jesus's feet got dirty. Jesus got sweaty. He got tired. Jesus often was hungry. Jesus said, "I don't own a home. I live just out in the open. I have no place to put my stuff—my head even at night. I use a rock to sleep on." He would wake up like you and I wake up, and maybe there's a little crick in his neck or his elbow had been bruised when he bumped into the stall or to a cart or whatever. We have so either caused him to be so far from our touch in that we've exalted him—and that's good. But we have failed often to bring him down to associate with him. And that's the reason why God came in Jesus Christ: to reveal God's nature to us. And so when Philip said, "Show us the Father," what Jesus was saying is, the Father is not 5'11" or 6' or 6'2". That's not what He's saying. It doesn't mean that the Father has long hair or a beard. What He is saying is, "Have I not been so long with you, and you still ask Me to show you the Father? He who has seen Me has seen the Father. Philip, the things I say, the Father says. The things I do, it's what the Father does. The decisions I come to, Philip, the way I handle a situation. Example: John chapter 8. You've heard this before: the woman caught in the very act of adultery. They dragged this woman to Jesus, and they say, "Moses says to kill her, but what do you say?" And I love what it says there in John. It says, "Jesus stooped down and began to write in the dirt." They're surrounding Jesus. There's this woman caught in the very act of fornication and sexual intercourse. They grab her from her mate and drag her down the street to Jesus. She's probably wrapped in a sheet at best. And they stand there, they're all dressed in robes. What an intimidating moment. Can you imagine? They're all standing there in their religious pride-puffed faces, saying, "Moses says she should die. What do you say?" And this, the Bible says, they were trying to trick him, to catch him in his words, which leads us to believe it was a plot. They set this up. They probably hired the man to entice this woman so that they could catch her. And so Jesus, just quietly—and this is how the Father is—Jesus stooped down and began to write in the dust. And it says that from the oldest down to the youngest of the scribes and Pharisees, they went away. The oldest guy peeled off first. You know why, don't you? The longer you live, the more sins you rack up in your life. Jesus looks at this one guy and says, "Fred," and He writes his sins in the dust. Can you imagine? And it says that they, being convicted, turned away, the oldest first, then to the youngest. And the youngest—that's interesting. People who are steeped in religion and religiosity without having a personal relationship with Jesus, and they're young about it, they get puffed up. Can you imagine that last guy standing there? "He's not going to get anything on me." And Jesus writes there in the dirt his name and his pride, and his lustful thoughts, and his anger, his temper. And it says the man went away. And then Jesus says, "Woman, where are your accusers?" And she says, "Lord, I guess I don't have any." And He says, "You're right. Neither do I condemn you. Go now and live no longer in this sinful practice." That's the Father. That's exactly—Jesus spoke exactly what the Father would speak to us today if that situation was present. Would to God that we as Christians would exercise such grace and truth, huh? Seems like churches in these days either are so liberal and so lenient and so vacant from the Word of God that they go one way, or they get so legalistic and bound up that they're vacant from the Word of God in another way and stone the very people that come to them. Jesus is: "Neither do I condemn you." The very nature of God. When Jesus walked and spoke and taught, the very essence of God was being shown to the world. That's why He said, "I am the Son of God." And we looked at this before. It's a position in that culture, as you know, that's equal to, not less than. A very important thing that we need to consider also—revealing God's nature is this: that Jesus Christ has come and revealed God to man by revealing God's doctrine, by revealing to us the doctrine of God. That is the word "doctrine" for teaching, the teachings of God. The Bible says in Matthew chapter 5 that Jesus there sat down and taught the people, and they were all astonished because He taught them as one having authority. In other words, when He taught, He spoke knowing what He was talking about. And they said, "Man, He teaches." He teaches and He taught. The word in the Greek to be a teacher or teaching them is a word to impart knowledge, information, instruction. And when it says that He taught them, it's the word in the Greek *didasko*. It means that He gave them the information and then acted it out with them. Many of you are involved in the construction world and field, and you have journeymen and you have apprentices. And the journeyman imparts to the apprentice. This is exactly the teaching style that Jesus was involved in. He would speak to them as a journeyman, but as that journeyman is, he would turn to the apprentice—that's us and the disciples—and he would begin now to teach us hands-on what we were taught by verbiage. Are you with me? It's a great way to learn. It's the only way to learn. One of the great setbacks is going to a Bible college or to a seminary, getting all kinds of head knowledge without any practical experience or to go through a practicum. They miss it. And then all of a sudden they have their degree and they're launched out into the world and they don't know how to even do a church. They don't know how to conduct prayer meetings or a service. But they've got all the head knowledge about the theological tweedledees to the tweedledums. But they can't do practical ministry, which is where God is. He's in the practical ministry. And Jesus has revealed to us God's doctrine. When Jesus opened His mouth, He spoke what the Father gave Him. He did what the Father wanted Him to do. That ought to encourage you.
David J: Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs here on Real Life Radio and his message called Christ, the Word Made Flesh. Thanks for spending some time with us today. You know, this message is part of Pastor Jack's series called The Life and Times of Jesus Christ. It's a series about the real Jesus of the Bible, God in the flesh, and why knowing Him more deeply changes everything. And we'll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio. America's founding wasn't just political; it was biblical. In the American story, the beginnings, Tim and David Barton uncover the scripture-anchored principles that shaped this nation from day one. It's the history they don't teach anymore and the history every American needs. Give a gift to Real Life and receive the book, plus a free kid's guide for America's 250th birthday. And check out our Faith and Freedom collection, bold apparel to wear in celebration of America. Visit jackhibbs.com or call 877-777-2346. Hey, thank you again so much for listening. And if you'd like to hear or see more of what we do here, you can always go to jackhibbs.com for all the latest on what's going on with this ministry. And please, if you're ever in the Southern California area, come see us at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills. We'd love to see you there in person. It has been so good to be with you today, and I pray you find yourself in the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. See you on the next episode. This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com, that's jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word. We'll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.