John 1:1-18: Prologue

Video Teaching
Verse-by-Verse Outline
Full Transcript

Video Teaching

Verse-by-Verse Outline

Introduction

  1. Expository preaching
    1. The series will proceed through the Book of John via expository preaching (chapter by chapter and verse by verse) beginning with the first five chapters.
    2. An advantage of expository preaching is that forces us to engage with every verse, including the ones that are confusing or uncomfortable
    3. There are times that God wants to encourage us, but there are also times He wants to challenge us and encourage our growth.
  2. John is one of the four Gospels
    1. Matthew emphasizes fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies; 
    2. Mark emphasizes Jesus as servant who suffers;
    3. Luke emphasizes Jesus’s humanity; 
    4. John emphasizes Christ’s divinity
  3. John is often recommended for new Bible readers alongside Philippians, but just because it’s good for beginners doesn’t mean there’s not tremendous depth for everyone.
    1. “Consider, then, brethren, if perchance John is not one of those mountains concerning whom we sang a little while ago, I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence shall come my help. Therefore, my brethren, if you would understand, lift up your eyes to this mountain, that is, raise yourselves up to the evangelist, rise to his meaning.”  -Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on John, Tractate 1
  4. The depth of God reflected in John’s prologue helps address a common critique of Christianity: “It’s about a magical guy in the sky that grants wishes.”
  5. John’s opening, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” immediately displays the complexity and depth of the Christian understanding of God, which even language strains to fully express.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 

  1. John 1:1 parallels Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning…”).  John is retelling the story, but answering a question that haunted mankind from the beginning: who is “us?”
    1. Genesis 1:26: “Let us make mankind…” 
    2. Many answers that people have proposed (God is talking to angels (not creators) or humanity (not existent) or the Earth (an object, not a being)) are deeply inadequate.
    3. John reveals “the Word” (Jesus pre-incarnate) as with God and as God—revealing the foundation of the Trinity.
  2. “The Word” refers to Jesus before His incarnation.
    1. In the original Greek that John was writing in, “The Word” is “Logos.”  That word carried important and distinct meanings for both Jewish and Greek audiences:
    2. For a Jewish reader: “Logos” meant “the word,” resonating with the Old Testament’s emphasis on knowing and keeping God’s word.
    3. For a Greek audience: “Logos” meant the “plan,” “blueprint,” or “wisdom” behind the universe—what philosophers sought to understand.
    4. By using “Logos,” John tells both groups that the thing they loved and were looking for had come to find them: Jesus.

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 

  1. By using that term, “logos,” John affirmed that Jesus was both the creative word of God (the spoken word in Genesis) and the blueprint of creation.

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

  1. “The darkness has not overcome it” can also be translated “the darkness has not understood it.” Both are good translations.
  2. The world’s darkness (frustration, cruelty) persists because people haven’t understood Jesus. But that darkness can’t overcome the light and hope that is Jesus.

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

  1. The John in verse 6 is John the Baptist, not the Gospel’s author. Throughout the book of John, the author doesn’t refer to himself by name.  Instead, he calls himself, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
  2. John the Baptist’s role was to witness to the light (Jesus), serving as a herald announcing the King’s arrival.
  3. A herald prepares people to receive the king properly. The fact that Jesus’s herald was a crazy guy on society’s fringe shows how little the world understood God or was ready to receive Him.

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 

  1. Imagine a parent visiting their child, only for the child not to recognize them at all.  That’s what it was like for God coming to us.

12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

  1. Some might object that we’re all “children of God” because God made us.  
    1. God doesn’t just want to be our father in the smallest sense!  He wants to be our father in the fullest sense!  He wants to be the one we count on in every situation
    2. A good father isn’t just the person who helps us to exist, but the one who nurtures us, protects us, and cares for us.
    3. God invites us to be in a personal relationship with him so we can be His child in the fullest sense.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) 

  1. In Hebrew culture, older writers received greater respect.  By conceding to Jesus’s age, John the Baptist is showing that Jesus is the ultimate authority that he doesn’t can’t give any credibility to.  He already has ultimate credibility.

16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

  1. In Exodus 33:20, God says, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
    1. This is because He is utterly holy and beyond comprehension.  Our sinful, mortal minds couldn’t handle it
    2. Even though it’s incomprehensible, God made Himself knowable by coming down to our level as Jesus to restore our broken relationship with Him.

This prologue is highly abstract!  Not everyone is comfortable with abstract thought.

If you’re not, here’s the core takeaway: seek a relationship with God.  In spite of your smallness and his vastness, he wants to know you.  Pray to him.

Full Transcript

This morning, we are embarking on a new series. We’re going to go through the book of John. And the methodology we’re going to be using: we’re just going to start at the beginning and go chapter by chapter, verse by verse for a little while. We’ll do about five chapters and see where we’re at. This is a style of preaching, by the way, that I enjoy. I think it’s helpful for us. It’s easy to jump around the Bible and miss certain parts. When we skip around, there’s a tendency to go to what’s exciting or what’s encouraging or what’s delightful. That can be good sometimes. Sometimes I preach like that. There’s nothing wrong with it. But when you go chapter by chapter, verse by verse, you end up looking at those verses that you don’t often look at otherwise. The verses that are convicting! The verses that are confusing! And that’s good! Sometimes God wants to challenge us. Sometimes he wants to convict us. When we go chapter by chapter, verse by verse, I believe we have that opportunity to see the full range of what God is saying to us in the Scriptures. 

Now before we get too far into John,here are  just a few notes. First off, the Gospel of John is indeed a Gospel. There are four Gospels in scripture: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They all tell about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but each of those four Gospels presents things just a little bit differently. The Gospel of Matthew focuses on how Jesus was someone that fulfilled all of the prophecies in the Old Testament. The Gospel of Mark focuses on how Jesus came to serve us and suffered on our behalf.  The Gospel of Luke focuses on Jesus’s humanity, and the Gospel of John focuses on Christ’s divinity. So expect to see a lot about how Jesus was God and who exactly God is. You’ll see that in all of the Gospels to some degree, they all have a little bit of everything, but it is the most prominent theme in the Gospel of John. 

I know I mentioned a few weeks ago that John is one of the books of the Bible that I recommend for people who are just starting out reading their Bibles. The two books I usually send people to are the Epistle to the Philippians and the Gospel of John, but I don’t want you thinking that we’re starting here because we’re starting with the easiest stuff and if you’ve been reading your Bible for a million years, there’s nothing you can get out of this.  John did not write just a little primer on the basics for people who didn’t really understand that no one else could benefit from. No, to the contrary, the Gospel that John wrote has so much depth to it. It’s something that if you are coming to it for the first time, you will get something. And if you’re coming to it for the thousandth time, you will still get something. 

I couldn’t put it any better than the great Augustine of Hippo once put it. Augustine of Hippo, you’ll hear me talk about him from time to time. He is one of the greatest Christian thinkers in all of history. He was a bishop in the fourth century, and the man was… he was a poet, he was a philosopher, he was a theologian, he was a pastor… he was a genius and his influence cannot be overstated.  You hear all of those different things he did, and you might be thinking, oh man, this guy was kind of a big shot. He probably didn’t know what life was like for real everyday people. To the contrary, that’s what made him famous. Augustine of Hippo was famous because he understood people. He understood real life. He understood the struggles that we face every day, and he knew how to speak to those things in a way that anyone could benefit from.  When he preached through the Gospel of John, he started out saying that one of the psalms we sing reads, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from?” That’s Psalm 124. The apostle John may just be one of those mountains that Scripture hopes we look towards.  Here is a mountain of the faith that rose above every earthly peak. He rose above the sky. He rose above the highest stars and every choir of angels. Because unless he rose above everything that was created, he wouldn’t have arrived at the one who created everything. I could not put it any better. Here we have someone who was aware of spiritual realities. We can only hope someday to scratch the surface of there is so much here in John. 

As we get ready to look at these first few verses, I have to admit to you, I am humbled to approach verses like these. They are so beautiful and they’re not just beautiful.  They are incredibly important for people in this modern world. One of the most common objections to Christianity that I hear and see around in the world is, “Oh yeah, You guys just believe in a magical guy in the sky that grants you wishes. That’s all Christianity is. It’s just a guy in the sky that grants wishes.” Some people say that they’re making that argument specifically knowing that it’s untrue. It’s overly simplified. The argument is made out of mean-spiritedness. People are just trying to make it look silly so it’s all the easier to defeat. I don’t think that’s true. When I come across that argument, I think more often than not, it’s not born out of mean-spiritedness so much as ignorance. I think a lot of people genuinely think that the Christian vision of God is so shallow, so easy, so simplistic. That it is nothing more than a guy in the sky that grants wishes. That is objectively untrue. 

Here in the Gospel of John, you can see right from the very beginning how complex our vision of God really is:

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made. ; without him, nothing was made that has been made.

We’ll go through it piece by piece, but recognize that this is not simple. To the contrary, this is incredibly complex. It’s almost as though John recognizes the limitation of language. He’s trying to describe something the likes of which language itself cannot fully describe, And so he’s getting close, and he’s doing his best to try to tie it down. This is incredibly complex, though. I wish more people knew the full depths of our vision of our God. This is not a simple God. This is a God the likes of which words cannot fully describe. 

Let’s dive in. Verse one: 

In the beginning was the Word. 

And we have to stop already. That alone has so much you could unpack with it. “In the beginning was the Word.” I hope that sounded a little familiar to you.  Familiar because it sounds a whole lot like the beginning of another book of Scripture!  Which book is that? It’s Genesis. Genesis 1 :1 ” In, the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “In the beginning…” These two books start the exact same way, and this is not something that John was ignorant of. Any first century Jew knew the book of Genesis very well, especially the opening line. John is deliberately referencing the book of Genesis to talk about what happened there, but he’s not trying to change it. He’s not trying to fundamentally alter what’s presented in Genesis in an unfaithful way. To the contrary, He is answering one of the biggest questions that people had pondered in the book of Genesis for years. 

Look at Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” Who is “us”? Why is God speaking in plural? There were all kinds of answers that people came up with. Some said that God was using a plural because maybe he was talking to the angels. Maybe the angels were made on day one; these are, after all, beings of spiritual light. Maybe, they were made on day one and now God just wants to include them in his creative action. He’s saying it out of courtesy.  While that’s clever enough, it doesn’t fully make sense, does it? Because nowhere in Scripture does it say ever that the angels helped God make things. To the contrary, it repeatedly and consistently talks about how God is the sole creator of everything. That doesn’t make sense. 

Others thought that maybe God was speaking to humanity itself.  God gave us free will. We have the ability to make decisions that create the person that we will become. Maybe God was including us by saying, “let us make humanity.” Again, exceedingly clever, but it doesn’t really work that well because God hasn’t made humans yet. Why is he talking to someone who doesn’t exist? That’s not a very helpful practice. If you want to talk to someone, you should wait until they exist first and then have a word with them. 

Still, others believed maybe God was speaking to the earth. Genesis two talks a little about the specifics on how God made humanity, and it talks about how from the dust of the earth and God’s divine breath, humans were created. So we know earth is there. We know humans were made partially from the earth. Maybe God is speaking to the earth when he says, “Let us make humanity.” But, you know, that doesn’t work either. Think about a time when you made something. I remember a time that I made a birdhouse. I really had to struggle for this analogy because I am not good with my hands. I do not make things often. It was like eighth grade, but nonetheless, I remember it well. I made a birdhouse, and before I made that birdhouse, do you think I sat down with the wood and said, “All right, wood. Here we go. We’re going to make this birdhouse together.” No. I didn’t talk to the wood. Wood is an object. It can’t hear me. It is just wood. It’s not going to get up and help me either. “We” were not making the birdhouse; I was making it out of the wood. Trust me, I wish the wood would have helped! Maybe the birdhouse would have turned out better. It wasn’t great. But the wood didn’t do a thing during creation! It just sat there and I had to work with it. That’s the same with dirt. God would not have sat down with dirt and said, “All right, dirt, here we go. ” That doesn’t really work. It’s dirt!  It’s raw material!  It’s not part of the creative act. 

You can still hear some of these interpretations in non Christian circles today. But really, John is revealing who the “us” was. He is revealing it here in John after all these years. He says, “Here it is: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 

Now who is the Word? You can answer. I know you know. It’s Jesus! You can tell that from context. We’re starting a book about the life of Jesus, and sure enough it begins with talking about this Word that existed before the world did and then enters into the world to save humanity. From context clues, it’s Jesus. We’ll talk about why John calls Jesus “the Word” here in a minute, but for now, it’s good enough just to say the Word is Jesus before he was incarnated as a person. 

So we know that Jesus is this Word. He is this thing, and this is the one who was part of the “us” in the beginning. This is the us! In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is one of the most explicitly trinitarian verses in the entire Bible. Clearly we see thatJesus is God, and yet there is more to God than just Jesus alone. There are three persons that are all God; three that are one.

Now, the Holy Spirit is not in this particular verse. We know about his involvement from Christian doctrine and other verses, but in this particular verse it specifically talks about the second person of the Trinity, Jesus. Now, I find a lot of people think the Trinity is incredibly hard to understand. If it’s baffling to you, don’t feel too bad. We aren’t going to go into a deep dive of the Trinity today. This is just a reference that we see here but, you know, there’s not a lot of beings that we know that are three persons that are one being. That’s not a common thing. All of the beings we meet are only one person, right? The only exception to that rule is God, who is three persons that are one being. Naturally, that’s going to be confusing. We have no frame of reference for it around us. We have nothing that we can compare it to. So don’t feel too bad. That’s just part of how massive God is; how totally different from anything we can regularly see and understand. God is so different that even when language makes him explicitly apparent to us, it’s still challenging to wrap our minds around Him. 

But I promised you that we’d talk about why John used the language ” the Word.” Why did he call Jesus pre-incarnation “the Word”? And obviously, John was not writing in English. He would have written in Greek. And in Greek, the word for “word” that’s used here is logos. And logos can mean different things to different audiences. For people in the first few centuries reading the Gospel of John, if you were Jewish, it would have been immediately clear what John was talking about when he started writing about this logos. What was the logos? It was the Word!  And any Jewish person reading through their Old Testament can see how often they talk about God’s word. Love God’s word! Keep God’s word! Have God’s word in your heart! It is a constant theme. That’s the way you can have God with you and please Him is to know His word and hold it closely. So as they read about this logos, they would’ve thought, “Okay yeah I get it. God’s word is what he’s talking about”

But there was another audience that was also reading that in the first few centuries, and they were Greek. The Greeks thought about logos a little differently. Logos can also be translated into something like, and it’s hard to put into English, something like plan, blueprint, or wisdom. Something like that. Greek philosophers were always writing about the logos. They thought that if they could just understand the wisdom behind this world, the blueprint that was made to create it, the plan behind everything, if they could just pin it down, then they’d be able to really act in this world. You just had to know the logos, the blueprint, the plan. So if a Greek was reading this, that’s what would have popped into their head. They would have made a different association than the Hebrew readers, but one that was also connected with something beloved, something that some of their greatest men had spent years trying to fully understand.

John is speaking to two different groups and telling them both with just one word, that thing that you love? The thing you have written whole books about? You have been seeking it all this time, but you don’t have to seek it anymore. It came here and is seeking you. 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.” 

Hopefully you can hear the duality in how he’s speaking. It works brilliantly for the Greek readers and for the Jewish readers. “Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.” If you’re thinking about logos as some kind of blueprint, boom! That perfectly encapsulates it! Through him all things were made! Yeah, that’s the logos alright! The same one we know about! Great, this guy knows what he’s talking about!  And if you were Jewish, “through him all things were made.” All things were made through the word? Well, that’s right! In the beginning of Genesis, how does God make things? Words. And so here, here we don’t just have a word. This is the Word! The creative Word is here. 

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

Now, I don’t know which Bible you might be looking at this morning, but there’s a popular difference in how that one word is translated. Some translations use the word “the darkness has not overcome the light.” Other translations say that “the darkness has not understood” the light. Which is a better translation? Frankly, they’re both good, and I think they both bring something different to the table. I mean, just think about it. Think about the darkness in this world. I want you to think about the things you endured this week: the frustrations, the stressors, the cruelty—the bad stuff! Think of all that darkness. Think about how much of it would not exist if people acted like Jesus. This world has not understood Jesus. If even just one percent of this world truly understood Jesus, there would not be nearly as much darkness as there is. The world has not understood Jesus, and yet think of all that darkness again: all the frustrations, all of the cruelty. And look at where you are now. Here you are in church on Sunday morning.

Why? Because you know.  You know that all of that darkness out there in the world cannot extinguish the light that is Jesus. Jesus is the hope beyond all hopes, the joy beyond all joys. All the darkness in the world cannot stand against his light. That’s what got you here this morning. You know the light that is Jesus. 

Verse six: 

There was a man sent from God whose name Was John. 

The apostle John is not talking about himself here; he’s talking about John the Baptist. When John talks about himself in the Gospel of John, he calls himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” We’ll talk about that later, but for now, just know this is John the Baptist. 

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. 

John the Baptist, I think, is kind of an odd figure in many of our imaginations. When we come to the Gospels, we’re not really there for John the Baptist. We’re there for Jesus. And he’s there kind of at the beginning doing his thing. What’s he doing? Why is he significant? A helpful way to think about John the Baptist is to remember that Jesus was the King, the King of all creation, and any king anywhere doesn’t just walk into a place. A king does not just wander into a random town. That’s not how it works. A king has someone who lets you know that they are coming. Why? So you can act appropriately. You don’t want to be standing around slouching with your hands in your pockets, and then the king walks in! You want to be prepared to receive the King well!

So who was the one telling everyone that the King was coming? John the Baptist. And, you’d think that a king as illustrious as Jesus himself, would have a herald that is the most earthly impressive person in the world. Someone who is well-educated, landed elite, wealthy, influential. That’s the kind of herald you’d expect and yet, The Herald of Jesus is someone on the fringe.  He’s this crazy guy who’s really out there! That is who Jesus’ herald is. Why? I think it just shows us how little the world understood God and how little they were ready to receive Him. The best herald available was someone who everyone thought was crazy! This way-out-there guy? That’s the best herald for Jesus. But in spite of someone telling everyone, “The King is coming,” nobody prepared for the King. 

Scripture continues on in that same vein:

The true light that gives light to everyone, verse nine, was coming into the world. He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not receive him, recognize him. He came to that, which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Think about that for a second. Think about the emotional impact of that. Many of you have children. Imagine going to your child’s house to visit them, and you knock on the door, and they answer it and they say, “What do you want?” And you say, “I’m here to visit you.” They say, “Who are you?” They genuinely don’t know! Nothing in their eyes recognizes you.  After all of the years that you spent raising them and loving them, they don’t even know who you are. That’s what it was like for God. God came here, he saw us, the children that he had spent time and effort and love. He came to see us and we didn’t even recognize him. 

To all who did receive him, those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.  Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, nor of a husband’s will, but born of God. 

Some of you may well be thinking, well we’re all children of God aren’t we? God made everything and everyone. So in that sense we are all God’s children. Right? That’s true. Yes in the minimal sense, we are all always children of God, but God doesn’t just want to be a father in the least sense of the word. He does not just want to be the one who is responsible for our biological existence. He wants to be a father in the greatest sense of that word! He wants to be someone who has a relationship with us, who knows us, who loves us, who supports us, who teaches us. He wants to be there cheering for us when things are good, and he wants to be there listening to us when things are bad. That’s what God wants. That’s what he meant when he said now you can really be children. Not just children in the lowest sense, but children in the perfect sense. And He will be our father in the fullest sense of the word. 

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testified concerning him. He cried out saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said he who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”

It was common that the writers and thinkers who were the oldest were treated with the most respect. That’s the social convention he’s referring to. He said, I am not even fit to give this guy credibility. He is the most credible there is. He’s the oldest there is! He was around before all of this. He should be the most revered!

Verse sixteen, 

Out of His fullness, we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father and has made him known. 

No one has ever seen God. “No one can look upon the face of God and live,” is how the book of Exodus chapter 33 verse 20 puts it because God is so holy. He’s so different, He’s so massive, He’s so totally beyond our comprehension, that to look at the face of God, you just can’t even handle it. You would just cease to exist because God is so far beyond us. And yet in spite of that, here, after all this time, we see that because God was so beyond us, He made Himself knowable to us. In all of His greatness, he came down to a place where we could engage with him to start the relationship again. 

That gets us through the first eighteen verses of the book of John. I love these verses, I really do, but I understand they’re not everybody’s cup of tea. Some of you may be out there thinking, “Okay, I don’t know. That was a little out there. It’s a little here and there. I wish we just had a nice simple parable. I like it when there are stories! Those are easy to follow. This is… I don’t know. It’s weird.” If that’s you, that’s okay. These first few verses especially require you to be a pretty abstract thinker to wrap your mind around all of them. That’s a skill that some are comfortable with and some are not. Some have a knack for it and some don’t, but it’s a skill like any other. The more you think in abstract ways the better you’ll get at it. So you will learn more as you go. But if abstract thinking isn’t your forte, these may have been challenging verses for you. If that’s the case, let’s just recap it real quick. Let’s look at the big takeaways. God, the God, that is so far beyond our understanding that we can’t even fully comprehend Him, that God loved us so much, that He came to us. He made Himself knowable to us. When we broke the relationship with that God, He sought to restore it, because a God that big wants to be in a personal relationship with us. He notices us. He cares about us. He didn’t just make us and then stop worrying about us. 

So I have to ask, how’s your relationship with God? Have you been nurturing it lately? And if you don’t have a relationship with God, there is no better time to start than today. There is no better time than now to go to God in prayer and just ask Him to begin that relationship. He would be delighted. But I’m sure many of you have had a longstanding relationship with God. How’s it going? When’s the last time you talked to God? When’s the last time you spent time with Him? That’s what God wants. A relationship isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s not something you just say, “Yep, I met him once.” That’s not good enough. No, A strong relationship requires constant effort from both parties, and God is always putting in the effort. God is always there. He always wants to be the one that we run to when things are good, when things are bad and when things are in-between. How’s your relationship with God? Spend some time on it this week because the God that is beyond human comprehension, the God that is so holy that we can’t even look on His face, has made himself knowable to us, and He is waiting to talk to you. Amen.