In the past few chapters in this book we have seen Christ as the wonderful One in the four Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles. Now we must come to the last part of the New Testament, the book of Revelation. When we come to the Word, many times we simply cannot see the things that are there. This is why we need the revelation of the Holy Spirit. If we simply read the black and white letters and understand with our mentality, we never see the clear revelation in the Bible.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). By this verse we are clear that in the beginning Christ was God. We all must declare, proclaim, and announce to the universe that our Christ was God in the beginning! It is sad that today there are some so-called Christians who do not believe that Christ is God. But we do! Why do we believe? Simply because the Bible tells us so. The Bible tells us that Christ is God.
However, we must realize that this is in the beginning. When we have such a phrase, “In the beginning,” we realize that surely something will follow. The whole Bible opens with the same phrase: “In the beginning God...” (Gen. 1:1). In the beginning there was only God. God was God and there was nothing else. But John 1:14 tells us something more: “And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Now we have a problem. John 1:14 tells us that the Word which was God became flesh. Is the term “flesh” in the Bible positive or negative? If you say that it is negative, how could God become anything that is negative? However, the Word tells us clearly that God became flesh. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. In order to understand this, we must come back to the pure Word. God did not create flesh. God created a man. Originally, man was man; he was not flesh. The Bible does not say that man became flesh until Genesis 6. By this we see that flesh in the Bible is not a positive term, but a negative one. By incarnation, God became flesh. By the time God was incarnated, man was no longer pure; he had become fallen. Fallen man in the Bible is called flesh. Man became flesh, and no flesh can be justified by the works of the law (Gal. 2:16). Flesh in the Bible is a negative term, denoting fallen, corrupted man.
How then could Christ as God become flesh? In this matter, we must be very careful. The Bible tells us that Christ became flesh, but only in the likeness of the flesh of sin. Romans 8:3 says, “For what is impossible to the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Recovery Version). When Christ became flesh, He did not take on the corruption of the flesh, but only its likeness.
There is a type of this in the Old Testament. In Numbers 21, God told Moses to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole to save those who were bitten by the fiery serpents. Then in John 3:14 we are told that this brass serpent was a type of the Lord Jesus. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that every one who believes in Him may have eternal life” (Recovery Version). Jesus was lifted up on the cross just as the serpent was lifted up on the pole by Moses. This means that when Jesus was on the cross for those six hours, in the eyes of God He was made a serpent. But He was a serpent only in form. Within Him there was no corruption.