The Greatest Punchline

I’m going to go dark here for just a moment. This year, two women drove to Oklahoma from southwest Kansas and disappeared. It was later found out that they had been murdered.

They were involved in a dispute over child custody. The people who were involved in their murder were in a group that called themselves God’s misfits. And that’s an okay name.

And it’s okay to have… Obviously, we’re a group of people that have come together to worship God and learn about God. But somehow, in some way, their teaching and understanding took a bad turn. And this murder was part of what was happening to them spiritually.

There’s one word to describe what was going on, and that is darkness. Now, there’s one other piece to that story. Pam and I watched a series of videos that are put on by a guy that calls himself the Wise Guy.

And he calls it Travels with the Wise Guy. And he just loves to make videos of places he’s gone. And the guy just keeps going everywhere.

And mostly, he likes to go to little bitty towns and even ghost towns. And he spent several videos in the panhandle of Oklahoma. And he told a little bit of history of that area, which was known at one time as No Man’s Land.

It was sort of caught between Texas and what was becoming Kansas. And at that time, there was no official government in that area. And during that time, some people kind of took advantage of the fact that there was no law enforcement.

And they established themselves a saloon, and who knows what else was going on at that place. It was wild. It was really a place of sin and darkness.

It didn’t last very long. Things changed as far as government operations and law enforcement and so forth. It was called Beer City.

And it was very close to what went on in 2024. It’s like there was a hangover of those evil, dark intentions that kept on. I’m sorry that I know that’s a downer to talk about all that stuff.

And now, I want to preach. And I would like to start. Bob, do we have that first slide after the greatest punchline? By the way, I’ll come back and pull that in later.

But let’s go to the next slide. Oh, you don’t? Oh, okay. That’s all right.

I can read the scripture. Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry.

Okay, so we are in the book of John, the first chapter, and the first five verses. Would you stand and we will read this together? 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 was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. I don’t have that memorized.

I need to work on that. Thank you. Beginning.

John takes us back to the beginning. And if you were a Hebrew of that day, when he said, in the beginning, your mind would go straight back to Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, what? God created the heavens and the earth. And so John wants to tell us a little more about the beginning, and so he talks about the Word.

In the beginning was the Word. Now, that little word, which in Greek was logos, was in Hebrew, davar, and it had enormous power in the minds and spirits of the people of that day. Even heathens had the notion that the Word was very powerful.

The Word was called by some the rationale for the universe. Now, that word rationale is not one we throw around all the time. It has an idea.

I think of it as a business plan. You know, people are encouraged, if they’re going to start a business, to write a business plan. And it’s not just the details of what they’re going to do, but it’s sort of why they’re going to do it, what their vision for that business is.

And the logos was the business plan for the universe. And that Word had power. The Hebrews understood, as it says in Genesis 1 again and again, what does it say? And God said.

And when God said, it happened. His Word had power. Now, John is saying, let’s talk a little more about that Word.

He said, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And then he says something that if you were a Hebrew of that day, would just blow the top off your head. And the Word was God.

Whoa! Wait a minute. What? What? Every day many Hebrews would step outside and repeat what is called the Great Shema. It starts with the word here, which in Hebrew is Shema.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Now, the heathens down the road, they have lots of gods. They have all kinds of gods, but we have one God.

And now you’re telling me that the Word was God? Well, this actually would be the foundation of the Christian understanding of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, the Trinity is very, very hard to understand.

In fact, it’s impossible to understand. We believe God is one, just as the Hebrews have said. But we also believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Hank Hanegraaff often said this. He was the Bible answer man. I didn’t agree with a lot of the things that Hank Hanegraaff said, but I kind of like what he said about this.

He said, If you ask about God, what? God is one. If you ask about God, who? God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that doesn’t explain it.

That doesn’t, you know, help us that much. And yet, it does kind of help us to see that we’re looking at God from two different perspectives when we talk about the Trinity. I have often said, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

There’s a lot of negatives in that. So, there is this progression that there was the Word, He was with God, and He was God. And then it goes on to talk about creation.

Everything was created by Him. And actually, the Greek word is everything came into being through Him. And it says that what came into being was life.

There’s something about when God touches something, there’s life. There’s something about the creative power of God to bring life into things. And that’s what the Word was doing, was bringing life.

And then it goes on to say, and the life was the light of people. That life that God has was a beacon, was a source of knowledge and understanding. It was light.

And then, He kind of deals with the negative. And the darkness could not overcome it. Darkness.

Wait a minute. He created everything. Everything was good.

But John didn’t stop at Genesis 1 and 2. He went on to Genesis 3. Where we learn about a catastrophe that we call the fall. When Adam and Eve sinned. And that was a real bad situation.

It was so bad that Paul would later describe the whole creation groaning because of sin that permeates the human race. And so we see that darkness still around. And yet, we have this positive promise.

The darkness has not overcome the light. Okay. You notice that I had a little title to the sermon.

We didn’t put it up very long. You want to put that back up, Bob? Are you able to do that? Yeah. The greatest punchline.

I like comedians. That guy, I can’t ever say his name. Nate Bregazi or whatever that is.

He’s really funny. And comedians understand that there’s sort of two parts to a joke. You have the setup.

You have to kind of get the characters, the place, and so forth. You know when a man walks into a bar. You know a joke’s coming.

It’s a setup. So we have now the setup for what I call the greatest punchline. It’s not funny.

It wasn’t intended to be funny. It’s not a joke. But it hits you the way a punchline does.

You just, you know, you kind of got everything in your mind of how things are. And all of a sudden, bam! An amazing thing is said. Something is said that is so amazing that it just blows your mind.

You cannot comprehend it. And we have to skip a bunch of stuff, which is great stuff. But, you know, I only have so much time.

So in John 1, we come to the 14th verse. And as soon as I can get to John, here we go. And an amazing thing is said.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Now, I have to, it’s unfortunate because there’s a little terminology here that I have to explain, or this doesn’t make sense. The word flesh is used a number of different ways in the Bible.

Sometimes it just kind of means meat, you know. But one of the uses that it is put to is that it is a term for humanity, or collectively, or a group of humans, or a single human. There’s a verse in Isaiah that says all flesh is grass.

And it’s talking about the fact that, you know, human life is transient. It grows up and it gets dry and it dies off. And that’s sort of the story of the human life.

And flesh there is talking about human beings. And so here it says, and the Word, we’ve already talked about this Word. We’ve got the idea that this Word was with God, and then was God.

That everything came into being through Him. And He created life, and that life was the light of people. And the darkness could not overcome it.

We’ve got all that. But now it says, and the Word became flesh, became a human being, and dwelled among us. Whoa! You know, it just blows the top right off your head.

What is this about? Well, we don’t understand. It is so beyond us. All that stuff in the first five verses, that’s mind-blowing.

It’s hard to understand. But now the idea that God has joined the human race in the person of Jesus Christ is just beyond us. We just can’t get it.

I brought with me an old book. I taught in college for a while. I was in the department of Henderson State University, and one of the courses I taught was embryology.

Fascinating subject. I just loved teaching embryology, drawing all those pictures, and then we’d have the slides and the fetal pig, and then we had an actual fertilized egg, a chicken egg, that we’d pick off the—oh, you don’t want to hear all that. Wonderful stuff.

And the story of a human being. Okay, if you’re by a child, you might want to put your fingers in their ear. But it starts with ovulation, with an egg or ovum that moves from the ovary to the fallopian tube.

But before it gets there, it is encountered by a group of sperm. It’s like they’re attacking. And, you know, sperm, an egg is like this, and sperm is like this little bitty tadpole with a waving tail on it, and it hits, and then the membrane of the sperm fuses with the membrane of the ovum, and then the nucleus of the sperm enters in it and eventually will join up with the nucleus of the ovum.

In some cases, they kind of remain separate for a few cell generations before they actually come together. Well, that’s natural. That is something that just takes place all the time.

Sometimes we wish that—well, never mind. So now we’re saying that somehow God intervened in that process, and in the middle of that process, somewhere, I believe, right there at that fertilization step, God joined the human race. It’s not explicable.

We don’t understand it at all. We just have to accept it. Gabriel said to Mary, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the Holy Spirit we find again and again.

For example, the Spirit of God was on the face of the waters right at the beginning of the creation. The Holy Spirit is sort of like that member of the Trinity that sort of makes contact with the creation in order that things can happen. And somewhere in that process of the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary, that joining of the human race by the second person of the Trinity, by the Word, took place.

And the rest of the story is what we call the gospel, you know. This baby that we celebrate at Christmas time grew up among people in that verse where it says, and the Word became flesh, the Word became a human being, and dwelt among us. That word dwelt is a Greek word that is very closely related to tent.

The tabernacle where they were in the wilderness where they worshiped was that Greek word in the Greek version was used. So the tent was this Word coming to join us and pitch His tent among us. I was a Boy Scout for a few years when I was a kid, and we had several opportunities to go camping.

Of course, that’s one of the great fun things that you do when you’re a Scout. And we went to New Mexico to a valley. There was a valley and there was a creek running through.

There was mountains all around. And we pitched our tents. Did that do it? Oh, great.

Thank you. So as it would have it, I got lost at that camp. I got lost.

Went off up the mountain and couldn’t get back. And so all the guys or a bunch of the guys went looking for me. They were looking and looking and looking.

And I kept wandering and wandering, and I didn’t know they were looking for me. I kept wandering, and finally I got back to the camp. But they looked for me.

What else are you going to do? One of your fellow Scouts is lost, and you’ve got to go find him. And I can remember they started coming back in, and this one guy, he was quite the character. And he saw me, and he started cussing me.

I tell you, I disturbed his day when he had to go looking for me. But you see, that’s what you do when you tent among people. When they’re lost, you go looking for them.

Jesus said when you’re a shepherd and you’ve got a lost sheep, you go looking for it. He said, I’m looking for the whole nation of Israel that are the lost sheep. That’s what it meant for him to tent among us, to share our lives, to grow up in his father’s shop, learn how to be a carpenter, to go out among the people, to sometimes say, ah, foxes have holes, but I don’t have a place to lay my head.

And they slept by the side of the road. And he was with us, pitching his tent among us, until they came and got him. To pitch his tent among us, to join the human race, finally meant that he died our death.

It finally meant that he took upon himself our sins, and died for our sins. Hallelujah, the third day he came back. He rose from the dead.

You see, he didn’t just die our death, he rose our resurrection. That’s our resurrection he rose, and it will be ours someday. Most mind-blowing thing in the world, to think that that one who was with God, who was God, who created all things, who created the light, the light that cannot be overcome, has joined the human race.

John saw him sometime after, probably, he wrote this, in a vision that he describes in the book of Revelation, and he said, I saw a lamb that had been slain. The other John, John the Baptist, called Jesus the Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world. I tell you what, Christmas is wonderful, it’s got great songs, it’s got lots of fun, it’s got rejoicing, we’re going to sing a couple of those, if I’ll shut up, but at the same time,