Page 36 - BACK TO BETHLEHEM

‘Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did
not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.’” And
there He gave the secret to Peter, “You didn’t give it; My Father
gave it to you.” Paul prayed for Christians in Ephesians
1:17&18, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of
glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in
the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may
be enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of His
calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the
saints.” When we read the Bible we must ask the Lord to open
our eyes.
I would like to set this truth of revelation before your
heart by looking at Jesus as the Word of God. We know He is
the Living Word and we know this is the written word. We
study the written word to see the Living Word. Let me spend a
few minutes talking about the word. After we do that I want to
take you to Peter’s testimony just before he died. Peter looked
back over his thirty years of life and he said, “I remember this.”
Let me begin with Jesus as the word.

What is God communicating when He says, “The
word?” The prologue, the beginning, the introduction of John
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.” It
begins with verse 1 and ends in verse 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.”

Words are for communication. John 1:1 says that He is
the Word and John 1:18 says that God has explained Him. I
want to start very simply with what is a word? It’s a sound that
has a meaning and you can’t understand it apart from its
context. I can think a word in my mind but you won’t know
what I’m thinking. You might say, “I can tell by the look on
your face; you are surprised or you are angry or you are
discouraged or you are sad or you are happy or you are hungry.”
But unless I speak a word, you don’t know what I’m thinking.
Sometimes one word is not enough. Sometimes you need a
sentence. Sometimes you need a paragraph.