A debate was being held at a conference in Britain on comparative religion. These wise and scholarly were debating the differences between religions. And then the question came up, what makes Christianity unique? Incarnation? No, other religions had some version of Incarnation. Resurrection? No other religions had some version of resurrection.
At this point, C.S. Lewis wandered into the room, a little early for his presentation. He asked, “What’s all this arguing about?” They told him they were trying to find the difference between Christianity and other religion. Lewis looked at them and said, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” The room fell silent. Lewis continued that Christianity uniquely claims God’s love comes free of charge, no strings attached. No other religion makes that claim.
We see this in an exchange between Jesus and Philip.
Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.”
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.” (John 14:8–10)
Why the Incarnation? So that we could behold the glory of God. God became man, so that we could finally see God with our eyes and know what He is like.
Have you ever heard someone say, or perhaps you have said, “Why can’t God just make it easy and appear? Why can’t God make Himself visible and then we would all know.” The message of John says, He did. And people still didn’t believe.
What would we see? Before we answer that, there is a brief interlude here in verse 15:
John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’”
He returns us to John the Baptist, whom he mentioned in verses 6-8, and will take up again in verse 19. John testified to the supremacy, the firstness of Jesus. In Hebrew culture, the one born later or younger was always considered to be inferior to the elder. John says, even though Jesus came after me in terms of ministry, He is higher than me in rank, because He actually was before Me in time, He pre-existed me. He is superior to me. John did not seek glory, because he acknowledged that it belonged to Jesus.
And notice, Jesus never speaks like John the Baptist. He never says, I exist to serve this other person. Jesus receives glory, receives honour, while always speaking of His relationship with the Father. This shows Jesus has the glory, the glory of the only begotten Son, who declares, expounds, the glory of God.
Grace is Offered To Man: The Meaning of the Incarnation
and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.
For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
But what did this glory look like? When we think of glory, we often think of some kind of bright and blinding light. We imagine Moses beholding the glory, and he needs to be shielded. When he is in the presence of the glory, his own face takes on a shining quality that would steadily fade the longer he was away from that glory. So we tend to think of glory as a kind of physical manifestation of light.
That isn’t entirely wrong. For example, Peter, James, and John witnessed the Transfiguration, where for a few moments, they saw the Lord Jesus unveiling His glory in physical form, and His face shone like the sun. Luke tells us that those three disciples “saw His glory and the two men who stood with Him.” (Luke 9:32)
Peter also recalls that moment:
“For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.” (2 Peter 1:17–18)
But I don’t think that is at the heart of what John means when he says, “we beheld His glory”. Yes, John was a witness of the Transfiguration, but I don’t believe that moment of physical, optical demonstration of glory is not what John means.
How do we know? Well, when John speaks of this glory, how does he describe it? And what word does he keep repeating?
the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.
For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Grace and truth. God’s good, kind, undeserved and faithful love for us. The real glory of God shown for us in the Incarnation was not the blinding glory of infinite power or the fiery glory of perfect judgement, but the beauty, the glory of God’s gracious character.
“The awful majesty of the Godhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of human nature to protect mankind.” – A. W. Tozer
That God was stooping down, to become one of us, to be among us, to join our family, teach us as one of us, and then to die in our place. Truth is God revealing reality to us, showing us what truly is. Shining the light on our darkness, bringing clarity and understanding.
So when Jesus came, in all His words and works, we could behold the glory of God’s grace, and the glory of God’s truth. Grace and truth. In Hebrew, these are the two words chesed and emet. And when Moses asked God to show Him His glory, we read that:
And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,” (Exodus 34:6)
Abounding in chesed and emet. Abounding in grace and truth, merciful and gracious. It seems that the beauty of God is seen most clearly through the lens of grace. Grace is the prism that lets us see the spectrum of God’s beauty.
Think of it: of all God’s attributes, His power, omnipresence, eternality, infinitude, holiness, justice, which of them could you ever know or see, unless God kindly stooped down, to favour us, speak to us, use words we understand? The whole Incarnation is God taking on weakness, limits, finitude, coming to our level to communicate Himself to us. It’s all grace.
It really is amazing. Think of all the human-made myths of God who became men. Most often, they are very angry, destructive, vengeful, impatient with men. They demand instant worship, they enslave men, they are often lustful or greedy or vindictive. But think of it. When God becomes man in Jesus, what is outstanding about Him? His appearance is gracious – nothing extraordinary. His circumstances are gracious – born in a stable, raised in a backwater town, to a poor family. His approach is gracious: the first things He does is He relieves people of diseases, and deformity, and demons. He could be scolding them for the sin that brought such curses into the world. His tone is gracious. He patiently teaches, using everyday parables to explain very high truths. His purpose is gracious: He comes not to be served, but to serve and give His life a ransom for many.
And it is not partial, but full of grace and truth.
For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; (Colossians 2:9)
So to have listened to Jesus, to have watched Him, talked with Him, seen Him, was to see the beauty, the glory of the gracious God in fullness, as full as a human frame could express it.
John says, we have all received from this fullness, we have drank from this fountain of grace, and grace. And the for linking it to the next verse in verse 17 likely explains what John means by grace for grace. It’s likely this: Moses gave us the law, which gave us an partial form of grace and truth. There was grace and truth, but it was still a shadow. But then in place of that grace comes the fullest expression of grace and truth: Messiah, God in the flesh.
What does it mean to receive this fullness of grace? It is verse 12: as many as received Him, to them He gave the authority to become children of God. You receive His Word as truth, and then you receive Him as God’s grace-gift to the world, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. And that’s why it is such a serious thing to reject the Lord Jesus. Because if you head and eyes are clear, you must see how irresistible He is: who can refuse such a gracious personality. It is one thing to reject someone who is harsh and cruel to you. But to reject one who was full of grace and truth, who revealed the very heart of God, and who was indeed God among us, is a serious rejection indeed.
God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. – C. S. Lewis.
Have you believed that this moment took place, that the message of God was spoken to us in His Son (Heb 1:1). Above all, have you believed and received the meaning: God’s gift of forgiveness and eternal life?