Names of Jesus | Advent DevotionalSample

Saturday, December 14
John 18 | Immanuel
Author: David Bibee

When Moses asked God for his name to report to the Israelites, which God had sent him, the Lord called himself, “I AM who I AM” (Ex. 3:14). It’s a strange name—I am. When asked for his name, God declares himself to be Self-Existent. God is the one who is the Living One, or, perhaps, as the Nicene Creed says, “The Lord, the Giver of Life.” God is, while all of us weren’t—all of us once did not exist. God is. We happen to be.

In John’s gospel, the phrase “I am” features heavily in Jesus’ public ministry and in his private teachings to the disciples (which will be covered throughout this devotional). Jesus takes the name “I am” for himself, identifying himself as Israel’s God in the flesh. John presents us with details of Jesus’s life that cast the whole story in a different light. John shows us that the crucifixion of Jesus is, as theologian James Jordan has said, “The funniest event in all of history.” The attempt to kill Jesus was the height of foolish arrogance. When the powers of the world took hold of Jesus to kill him, they were laying hands upon God Almighty. Jesus is Immanuel, “God with us.” Like toddlers lashing out in tantrums, the attempt to kill Jesus—the Great I Am—was like worms rising up to strike a blow against their Maker. Psalm 2:4 tells us the Father’s perspective on the attempt to defeat Jesus, “He who sits in the heavens laughs, the LORD holds them in derision.”

In John 18 and the beginning of Christ’s trial and humiliation, we witness a unique display of his power. When the soldiers came to arrest him, they asked if he was Jesus of Nazareth. As Jesus speaks, “I AM he,” John tells us that the soldiers “drew back and fell to the ground.” Jesus is the Logos (John 1), the Word of God, through whom all the universe was created. When he speaks, God speaks—with “a voice [like] the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder” and with a tongue like a sword that divides and cuts to the core (Rev. 14:2, Psalm 18:13; Rev. 1:16, Heb. 4:2, etc.). His voice knocked them to the ground, yet he might have said more—withering their bodies like the fig tree (Matt. 21:19) or calling “twelve legions of angels” with a word (Matt. 26:53). Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus is always shown to have all the power, even as he is marching toward his death.

Jesus was born to testify to the truth and to wage war as the Lord’s Champion, striking the greatest blow by dying himself according to the purpose and plan of the Father. And therein lies the great comedy—the world’s best effort in defeating Jesus was nothing other than the cunning plan of God to defeat the powers of hell once and for all. If Jesus had not voluntarily gone into their hands, they could not have seized him any more than they could have bottled a hurricane. As Jesus would say to Pilate before his sentencing, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11).

This Advent, we should take great comfort in the fact that Jesus is truly man—he did take on human nature—a nature just like ours. But he united human nature to divinity. In Christ, the “I am” has become a man to save fallen and sinful men. God does not shrink away from the evils of the world but has become Immanuel in Jesus Christ, facing the world’s evils head-on. In Christ, God came to experience the reality of human suffering and, by his blood, has made a way for us to be freed.

He did all this so that you would be free.