Questions about the Babe in the Manger (John 1)

In this part of the sermon: Martin introduces Hugh Martin's concept of the Gospels as 'galleries of the King,' noting God's deliberate withholding of Christ's physical appearance. He highlights that only…

Martin quotes Hugh Martin's description of the four Gospels as 'galleries of the King,' likening them to picture galleries offering verbal portraits of Christ, setting the stage for understanding John's unique contribution.

The following sermon was delivered on Sunday morning, December 18, 2005, at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey. In what I regard as one of the most profoundly instructive books I have ever read, entitled The Abiding Presence, a book written by a Scottish preacher and theologian by the name of Hugh Martin, who lived and preached and wrote in the 19th century. In this book, Mr. Martin calls the four gospel records, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the galleries of the King, and he likens them to four different picture galleries into which we may walk. And there have these verbal portr...

0:03 - 1:14 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin introduces Hugh Martin's concept of the Gospels as 'galleries of the King,' noting God's deliberate withholding of Christ's physical appearance. He highlights that only…

Martin highlights the 'amazing providence' that God left no accurate physical representation of Jesus, contrasting it with resemblances of figures who lived before Him, to emphasize that God's chosen revelation is verbal, not visual.

An amazing providence. We have reason to believe that we have reasonably accurate resemblances of well-known figures who lived before our Lord appeared on earth, but God so ordered all the affairs of providence that we have absolutely no representation of the physical appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have absolutely not one bona fide, accurate, physical representation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We don't know if he was 5'7 or 6'4.

1:14 - 1:48 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin poses the question of Christ's pre-existence, contrasting it with ordinary human experience. He expounds John 1:1-2, emphasizing the Word's eternal, continuous existence…

Martin uses the common experience of a birth certificate and the absurdity of asking if a newborn existed before birth to highlight how unique and profound the question of Christ's pre-existence is.

Question number one. It is this. Did the babe in Bethlehem's manger exist before his birth in Bethlehem? Now you all remember the account in Luke 2, where Mary and Joseph had died because of the decree to register for a forth coming taxation, because they had left their hometown in Nazareth. They Lived horizontal, pair of his birth in Bethlehem. Now, if this question were asked of you or of me, it would be a no-brainer question. While we understand that biologically and theologically

5:10 - 6:14 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin poses the question of Christ's pre-existence, contrasting it with ordinary human experience. He expounds John 1:1-2, emphasizing the Word's eternal, continuous existence…

He explains that John's opening words 'In the beginning' echo the Septuagint's translation of Genesis 1:1, providing a linguistic and theological bridge for his audience to understand the eternal nature of the Word.

All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that has been made. In Him was the Word, and in Him was life, and the life was the light of men. Now, John begins his gospel with these two little words, en-ache, that is, in the beginning. And in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament Scriptures, when you would pick it up as a Greek to read it, and that was the working Bible of the world into which our Lord Jesus came, into which the apostles went with their preaching, you know what?

8:17 - 8:56 Read in full sermon

Driving home: To put it as simple as I know how, John is informing us, that there never was a time when the Word was not. Capital W. There never was a time when the Word was not.

Martin challenges listeners to stretch their minds to conceive of 'never-ending existence' and 'existence that has no beginning' to grasp the eternal nature of the Word, emphasizing 'there never was a time when the Word was not'.

Take your mind and use all of its powers to think back, back, back, and back, and back, and back, and back, as far as you can, to the vanishing sea. To the vanishing point, or to the point where you feel your brain is going to break under its attempts to think of never-ending existence. Existence that has no beginning. And at that point, the Word was.

12:16 - 12:46 Read in full sermon

Driving home: People cannot have a God who makes His entrance in a manger and makes His exodus by a cross.

He contrasts Thomas's confession 'My Lord and my God' with a profane exclamation like 'Oh my God' on 'Antiques Roadshow,' to underscore the genuine theological weight of Thomas's declaration of Christ's deity.

Be not faithless but believing. Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. This wasn't an exclamation like the people on Antiques Roadshow brought in what they thought was a piece of junk that they got for 50 cents in a yard sale and find out it's worth 50,000 and so many of them profanely say, Oh my God, oh my God. This is what the Russellites, the Jehovah's Witness, do with this passage.

20:11 - 20:39 Read in full sermon

Driving home: And the Word, the one described in the opening five verses, in the beginning with God, in the beginning towards God, God Himself, this Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Martin uses the example of angels appearing as men to Abraham (Genesis 18) to distinguish between temporary angelic appearances and Christ's permanent Incarnation as true humanity.

Sin, though it is a part of our experience, and we know of none around us without it, we must never think sin is normal. It is a wretched, twisted, perverse intrusion of abnormality into humanity. And when the Scripture tells us the Word became flesh, it is telling us that this eternal Word actually took to Himself all the components of a real, sure enough, flesh and blood, thinking, feeling, willing, rational soul and body. Unlike angels, who are described in Hebrews 1.14 as ministering spirits, to whom God gives human faculties and even human appearance for specific tasks, the Word did not t...

26:11 - 27:34 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin shifts focus to John 1:14, explaining that 'the Word became flesh' means the eternal, divine Word took on real, complete, ordinary human existence—a true body and soul. He…

He uses the modern understanding of inter-uterine development, including images of a fetus, umbilical cord, and a mother's physical experiences (stretch marks, quickening), to vividly illustrate the reality of Christ's true human conception and development in Mary's womb.

As our existence as human beings begins in our conception, He is so identified with us that in the mystery, and I cannot draw near to it without feeling such pressure upon my mind that I say, no Lord, I can't think upon it, yet I must. You will conceive in your womb. When were you conceived? When the little wiggly-tailed sperm invaded an egg, and that fertilized egg began to multiply in cells.

32:06 - 32:43 Read in full sermon

Driving home: What was in Mary's womb the Creator of all millions of galaxies. Now in Mary's womb nourished by an umbilical cord.

Martin quotes from the Nicene Creed and Athanasius's arguments against the Arians to demonstrate how early church fathers meticulously articulated the doctrine of Christ's two natures in one person, emphasizing its critical importance to the Gospel.

He had always He was as much the Word in Mary's womb as He was when untold millions of angels bowed and worshipped Him before He ever chose to come to Mary's womb and take our humanity into union with Himself. It is the Word that became flesh. And it is this wonderful mystery of the Logos, the Creator, assuming our nature, that our forefathers felt was so critical to the Gospel that they spent months hammering out what the Scriptures taught. They came up with such marvelous confessional statements and creedal statements such as the Nicene Creed and I quote, speaking of Christ, who for us men i...

35:44 - 37:13 Read in full sermon

Driving home: The only Redeemer of God's elect is our Lord Jesus Christ who being the eternal Son of God became man and so was and continues to be both God and man in one person and two natures forever.

He mentions A.W. Tozer's love for reading old creeds to highlight the spiritual value and theological depth of these confessional statements about Christ's person.

a term that confuses some. Man of the substance of the Father of His mother, born in the world, perfect God and perfect man, a reasonable soul and a human flesh subsisting, equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching His manhood, who though He be God and man yet He is not two but one Christ, one, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God, born all together, not by confusion of substance but by unity of person. For as the reasonable soul in flesh is one man, so God in man is one Christ. A.W. Tozer used to say nothing t...

37:13 - 38:09 Read in full sermon

Driving home: There is no biblical rationale for the manger apart from the cross. It is only the cross that exegetes the manger.

Martin explains the Jewish sacrificial system, where worshippers transferred guilt to lambs, to illustrate how the concept of 'Lamb of God' would have been deeply embedded in the minds of John's audience, pointing to Christ as the ultimate sacrifice.

The whole Jewish religious worship system centered around the offering of lambs and of other animals, but supremely lambs. Lambs to whom the worshipper would symbolically transfer the guilt of his sin by laying his hands upon the head of the Lamb, confessing over it his sin, and then the priest would slit the throat of the Lamb and take its blood and do the appropriate actions. Lamb of God embedded in the minds of these Jews was the concept of bloody sacrifice as the bridge between sinful man and a holy God. Embedded.

42:04 - 42:47 Read in full sermon

Driving home: There is no biblical rationale for the manger apart from the cross. It is only the cross that exegetes the manger.

He uses the metaphor of 'one mountain of accumulated guilt and wrath deservingness' to describe human sin, emphasizing the vastness of what Christ, as the Lamb of God, bears away.

So when John pointed to Him and said, Behold, look at, consider, let your gaze be filled with this one who is the Lamb of God who bears away the sin of the world. It conveyed but one thing, that Jesus was God's final fulfillment of that towards which every bleeding, bleeding Lamb pointed throughout all the centuries of their experience from the time God gave them the sacrificial system. It was pointing to the blessed reality that in Jesus God would bear away, look at the text, it doesn't say the Lamb of God who bears away the sins, plural, but the sin. It views human sin as one mountain of acc...

42:47 - 43:56 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Not only is it true God so loved, but the eternal Word so loved that he does all of this that he might become the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.

Martin references John's vision in Revelation 5 of 'a Lamb in the midst of the throne as it had been slain' to illustrate Christ's eternal identity as the God-man, forever bearing the marks of His redemptive work.

and the Lamb forever. The Word became flesh. The old writers used to say there's a man in the glory who carried with him up to heaven all of the memories of what it was like to be a man on earth in a body like unto ours, susceptible to weakness and weariness and hunger, a soul like ours, susceptible to grief and joy and pity and disappointment and excitement, all of these emotions described as you walk through the galleries of the King. And there in heaven, what did John see in that vision in Revelation chapter 5? He said, I saw a Lamb in the midst of the throne as it had been slain. The Lamb ...

49:41 - 50:44 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Not only is it true God so loved, but the eternal Word so loved that he does all of this that he might become the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.

He quotes Luther's line 'by this our love is won' to express the profound impact of Christ's self-sacrifice and Incarnation on the believer's heart.

That forever and forever we'll be able to look upon the marks by which our redemption was secured? No wonder Luther wrote, by this our love is won. He takes what he didn't need. What did he stand to gain?

50:44 - 51:01 Read in full sermon