...in the beginning...

Dear friends, today we embark on an ambitious project together, today we are going to study and meditate on — think deeply about — John’s Gospel.   We are doing this not so that we gain head knowledge, but we are doing this to open our hearts up to the Loving presence of God in our lives.   We are doing this to kneel in the presence of God as ask Him to change our lives through John’s Gospel.   And to get us started I am going to ask you to consider one of the most important statements in the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  John 1:1.    What does John mean by The Word?  

Let’s take a look. 

“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”  John 1:1-14.

Soon after Jesus died, rose from the dead, and then ascended into heaven the Christian Church was confronted with a basic problem.  In the beginning all members of the church were Jews.   By human decent Jesus was a Jew, so Christianity began among the Jews, spoke in the Jewish languages and used Jewish categories of thought.  But within 30 years of Jesus’ ascension Christianity had travelled all over Asia Minor and Greece and had arrived in Rome.   By the year 60 there were 100,000 Greek Christians for every Jew who was Christian.  The Greeks had never heard of the Messiah.   Jewish ideas were completely strange to the Greeks.  The Jewish expectation of  the coming of the Messiah was an idea quite alien to the Greeks.  So when John wrote his Gospel in the year 100 AD — 70 years after Jesus’ ascension into heaven — John’s challenge was how to present Christianity to the Greek world.   A Greek who was interested in Christianity could not possibly be routed through Jewish ideas of the Messiah and through Jewish ways of thinking.  So the problem was: How could Christianity be presented to Greeks in understandable ways?

In the year 100 AD an old man known as the Beloved Apostle named John was living in the Greek city of Ephesus where he had been dealing with Greeks for decades and speaking Greek.   He realized that in both Greek and Jewish thought there existed the common concept of the Word which could meet the two (2) worlds of Greek and Jewish.   The Word was something that belonged to both races and could be commonly understood.   To the Jew, a word was far more than a mere sound — no, it had an independent existence and actually did things.  The Hebrew language was alive — almost like a unit of energy charged with power.  And so for that reason the Hebrew language has a very small vocabulary — fewer than 10,000 words.   The Greek language has 200,000! 

The Old Testament is full of stories about the power of words.   Isaac was supposed to give his 1st-born son, Esau, the blessing of all his inheritance, but Isaac was tricked into giving his blessing to Jacob.  But the words had already gone out of his mouth and had begun to act — so nothing could stop it.   Isaac couldn’t pull back his blessing.   

The creation stories in Genesis speak of the Word of God having creative power.   Psalm 33:6 says: By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made.  Psalm 107:20 says: God sends out His command to the earth — His Word runs swiftly.    Everywhere in the Old Testament there is this idea of the powerful and creative Word of God. 

And for a 100 years or more — before the coming of Jesus — Hebrew was a forgotten language, and while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew — the Jews no longer knew their language.  The scholars knew it — but not the ordinary people.  The common Jew spoke a development of Hebrew called Aramaic.   Jesus spoke Aramaic! Do you remember on the Cross Jesus cried out:  My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?   Eloi, Eloi, Lama, Sabachthani — that’s Aramaic.

Now the Old Testament Scriptures were written in Hebrew but translated into Aramaic. In the Synagogues they were read in the original Hebrew but translated into Aramaic — and these translations were called the Targums.   The Targums were used as translations.   And when the translators — the authors of the Targums — produced their translations they were afraid of attributing human thoughts and feelings and actions to God.   So the Targums substituted The Word Of God for The Name Of God.  In Exodus 19:17 we read: Moses brought the people out of the camp To Meet God.   The Targums thought that was too human a way to speak of God so they wrote: Moses brought the people out of the camp To Meet The Word Of God.  A scholar named Jonathan wrote a Targum, and in the Jonathan Targum, the phrase The Word Of God appears 320 times!    The Word Of God became one of the most common forms of Jewish expression.

Now when John wrote his Gospel in Greek in 100 AD he used the Greek term for Word — which is Logos — but Logos does not only mean Word — Logos also means Reason.  For John, and for all of the Greeks, these two (2) meanings were always closely intertwined.   So when John used Logos, he meant both the Word Of God and the Reason Of God.    And when Logos was attributed to God the Greeks understood in the word Logos that everything was changing from day to day and from moment to moment.   The classic illustration of Logos is that it is impossible to step twice into the same river.   You step into a river — you step out — you step in again — but you do not step into the same river, for the water has flowed on and it is a different river.   Logos — The Word — suggests that everything is in a constantly changing state of flux — so who among us can understand the Logos — the Word — the Reason of God?    Who can understand the mind of God? 

Jews and Greeks also held that the Logos — the Word — the Reason of God — was the oldest thing in the world — the instrument of God’s creation of the world — the thought of God stamped into every single aspect of His creation.  The human mind was also stamped with the Logos.

So John comes to the Greeks and said: The Logos — the Power that made the world — the Power that keeps order in the world — the Power by which we all Think and Reason and Know — the Power by which we all come into contact with God — that Power of Jesus — is the Logos come down to earth. The Word Became Flesh — John wrote — and both the Jews and Greeks could wrap their minds around that concept of the Logos — the mind of God.   And so John came to the world to tell them that men and women need no longer guess or grope — all they had to do was to look at Jesus and see God — see the Mind of God — see the Word of God.  

Now listen to this again, and ask yourself if this doesn’t make more sense than ever before:

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

2 He was in the beginning with God.  3 All things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being.  What has come into being 4 in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people.   5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John — the Baptizer. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 Now John the Baptizer himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 The Word, the Logos, was in the world, and the world came into being through the Word;  yet the world did not know the Word.  11 He — the Word — the Logos — came to what was His own, and His own people did not accept Him — the Word — the Logos. 12 But to all who received the Word — the Logos — who believed in his name, the Word — the Logos — gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood — not of the will of the flesh — not of the will of men and women — but of God — the Word — the Logos.

14 And the Word became flesh an”d lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son — the Word — the Logos.

So for our prayer and meditation time today ask yourself: Who is Go?  Who is God for you?   Who is God in and of Himself?   Who is God for others?   Then tell God how you feel about what you have learned today about Him!

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner!