In the final section of the prologue, John sums up what he has already stated concerning the eternal existence and deity of Jesus, the Word. John also definitively states the doctrine of the incarnation of God into human flesh and locates the glory of God in the Person of the incarnate Christ. Along the way John begins to apply the image of light to concrete Old Testament references.

The mystery of the Word’s eternal being is now brought into human history. God, in the Person of Jesus, has come to be and act within the creation as a man of flesh and blood. This is the doctrine of the incarnation. “The Word became flesh.”

John’s use of the earthy term “flesh” rather than “man” is due, at least in part, to his desire to banish any Gnostic errors which sought to undermine the actual embodiment of God. Jesus was truly God in flesh and blood. The use of “flesh” is also a corrective to the Greek philosophical notions of the Logos as something well outside the material realm. As one writer puts it: “Flesh is the most vulnerable, the most corruptible, the most easily destructible part of the human body – in a word the most impermanent.” And yet, in the Person of Jesus, the Word never ceases to be the eternal God. Jesus is the God-man.

And in the Person of Jesus, God came to dwell with us. He began to banish the distance that our sin had made. Like a new and better tabernacle, Jesus became the way in which God dwelt among us as one of us. And even in his fleshly, humble estate, the glory of God was fully present in the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.