If you’ll turn with me your Bibles, please, to Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
From there, we turn to the Gospel of John, chapter 1, where we hear the same story told from a slightly different perspective. 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. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Father of creation, we thank you because we are here to thank you, for you have created all that is, all that was, and all that ever shall be. Help us to be grateful for existing and mindful of your purposes and your love that comes from and is displayed by your grace of creation. Help us to hear you speak and find comfort in your words. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So we’re next going to study our way through the Gospel of John. Therefore, it is fitting that we start in the beginning.
Anybody who has spent any time reading Scripture knows that the Gospel of John is very different from the three other synoptic gospels. But it is John’s differentness and uniqueness which makes it so important and interesting for us to study more deeply. The synoptic gospels teach us a great deal about who Jesus is and what Jesus did during his time on the Earth. They give us many different facts and details and other bits of information. They point out his many works of prophetic fulfillment. They lead us to conclude firmly that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who was foretold long ago, and that he is the Incarnate Son of God, God the Son.
However, beyond a simple understanding of why Jesus came to bring his people salvation and to forgive sin, the first three gospels are lacking something. Where is the Gospel of John? John gives us many facts and details which are noticeably absent from the synoptics, such as the wedding at Cana, which is at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, or recording Jesus making three separate Passover visits to Jerusalem during his ministry, as opposed to only the one trip mentioned in the others. John also describes more different, special, and unique appearances of Jesus following his resurrection than the other three.
So ultimately, John’s greater emphasis is on explaining why Jesus came and explaining what Jesus’s life and work means for us, both as individuals and as his people, the church. Where the synoptics are more historical by nature, John is more theological. Where the synoptics are convincing in regards to who Jesus is and why we owe him our full allegiance, John teaches us more about the ‘so what’ of what Jesus should mean to us—what Jesus means for us, as well as why and how we should respond to Jesus.
Now concerning the background of John, his gospel, and its relationship to the synoptics, church history universally credits the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee and brother of James the Elder, with writing this Gospel. According to Eusebius and his ecclesiastical history, written early in the 4th Century, John’s gospel was the last of the four to be written. Eusebius writes, ‘They say that John, who had employed all his time in proclaiming the gospel orally, finally proceeded to write for the following reasons: the three gospels having come into the hands of all, and his own: two, they say that he accepted them and bore witness to their truthfulness, but that there was lacking in them an account of the deeds done by Christ at the beginning of his ministry.’ John accordingly, in his gospel, records the deeds of Christ which were performed before the Baptist was cast into prison, but the other three evangelists mentioned the events which happened after that time.
One who understands this can no longer think that the gospels are at variance with one another inasmuch as the Gospel according to John contains the first acts of Christ while the others give an account of the latter part of his life. The genealogy of our Savior, according to the flesh, John quite naturally omitted because it had already been given by Matthew and Luke. Instead, he begins with the doctrine of his divinity, which had been reserved for him by the Divine Spirit.
That’s when John began his gospel. He did not begin with Jesus’s birth like Matthew, or the pre-announcement of John the Baptist in Jesus’s conception as with Luke, nor did he begin at the start of Jesus’s ministry as in Mark. John began his gospel in the beginning, back before time itself began. This is the reason why John’s gospel is so very different from the synoptics. The synoptics tell the story of a man who is also God, while John tells the story of the only God who also became man.
Ultimately, the synoptics focused themselves more upon Jesus as God the Son—the man and his human nature—and the good works he did in the world, while John’s gospel focuses itself more upon Jesus as God the Son and the supernatural works which he did from his incarnate divine nature.
The synoptic gospel story would have been more easily accepted and found reasonably familiar to the first-century mindset because pagan myth is filled with countless examples of men who became gods—Greek heroes like Hercules and Asclepius, who achieved apotheosis. The Egyptian pharaohs were worshiped and obeyed as the living incarnations of Horus, and Roman emperors claimed divine honors for themselves, being deified by their successors and worshiped as gods across the Roman Empire.
But John’s story is different and would not have been as easily accepted or considered reasonable by any non-believer. Although pagan deities were known to take on human form or shape, they did not become mortal; they never chose to become human unless that was a status inflicted upon them as a divine punishment. Yet, as we will soon see in this gospel, the Divine person became flesh and dwelt among us, against all ordinary religious convention or mythological expectation.
Therefore, as we read through John’s gospel, we will find the trajectory of our perspective often moving downhill, from God to man, from the divine to the mortal, from the supernatural to the natural. This is very important for us to remember from the outset because while we are united in Christ and we are thus sharers and partakers in his divine nature and blessings, we are never understood to become divine ourselves.
We are redeemed, we are justified, we are sanctified, we are glorified, and although the status and character of our relationship with God the Father is fundamentally changed by our union into Christ, we all still remain human. We have no hope, no expectation of, and we should have no desire for achieving our own apotheosis because that would be idolatry, plain and simple. That is the prideful sin of Satan, who, from the most ancient antiquity, has been seeking to supplant and replace the Lord of Glory upon the throne of heaven.
But now John the Apostle begins with the beginning because, having been raised a devout Jew, a monotheist—which he remains as a Christian—he needed to address a serious concern: the Trinity, the godhead which consists of three persons. It still remains one God. This issue was of great concern and a problem to both Jews and Gentiles. It is important to Jews because Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “The Lord is one,” and they needed to reconcile the affirmation of Jesus Christ’s deity with their understanding and uncompromising assertion that there is only one God, the Lord.
Furthermore, it was also necessary for them to reconcile the equality between God the Son and God the Father. These Jews were not given to understand how the one God could also be three persons. It was important for the Gentiles, who were used to and accepting of the idea of having a multiplicity of gods interacting and working together for a common purpose, because they needed to reconcile and understand how multiple divine and distinct persons could also share one single, same divine nature while still possessing this diversity of personage.
See, the Gentiles were not given to understand how three persons could all be only one God.
So John begins where Moses began. He restates Genesis 1, a passage familiar to Jews, but he reframes it by using terms and expressions that were more familiar to Gentiles. He restated the story to showcase the multi-personality: in the beginning was the Word.
Now, the Greek term for Word is ‘Logos,’ and it’s an expression which can carry several different meanings and uses, notably order, word, knowledge, reason, or rationality. However, the manner of John’s use echoes or is reminiscent of the use by ancient philosophers as he redeems the term and redefines it for our Christian use. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used the term to describe the principle or the source of order and knowledge. The Stoic philosophers, a school of thinkers derived from Plato that remained influential even into the 2nd Century AD, used the term ‘logos spermaticus’ to describe the generative principle of the universe.
The Jewish philosopher Philo developed the idea that God created the world with the Logos as an intermediate being, and he also distinguished between a ‘logos pictus’ as the uttered word and a ‘logos endos’ as the word remaining within—as an intrinsic meaning or unspoken truth. One consistent unifying factor between the Greeks and the Jews here was their false understanding that the logos was a thing and not a person. They considered it a principle or a force which could be directed by another power or being to influence and impact the created world.
Another shared point of commonality was their understanding that this logos was not itself divine.
So first, John here begins by asserting the antiquity, the ancientness of the Logos as existing in the beginning. Then he writes, ‘And the Word was with God.’ The Greek term for God is ‘Theos,’ and the term is used universally for any and every god. But when it was used by a first-century Jew, they only meant the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They only ever meant the God of Israel.
So next here, John asserts an equality of antiquity between the Logos and the Theos, with both being present and together in the beginning. Now, Philo, although he was a Hellenistic Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt, and lived contemporary with Jesus and the apostles, it’s uncertain and unknown how popular his philosophical ideas were in Judea, in the temple realm of Sadducees and Pharisees. His writings, however, were more well-known and accepted by other Hellenized Greek-speaking Jews across the Roman Empire, so it’s not unreasonable to presume that the Apostle John could have at some time become at least passingly familiar with Philo’s thought here and then appropriated his terminology for the Holy Spirit’s purpose when writing his gospel account.
Talking about the Logos, furthermore, there was also during this time a conflation or confusion between the concepts of the Greek Logos and the Jewish Sophia, or wisdom, within Second Temple Jewish philosophy. The personification of Sophia of wisdom was first introduced to us in Proverbs 8, where Solomon wrote of her: ‘The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago, I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the Earth, when there were no depths; I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water; before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; before he had made the Earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.’ When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep; when he made firm the skies above; when he established the fountains of the deep; when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command; when he marked out the foundations of the Earth—then I was beside him like a master Workman; I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.
So one could suggest that Lady Wisdom here not only participated in the Lord’s work of creation, but was also present with the Lord in the beginning. But Solomon does not attribute either divinity or a non-created eternal nature to her; instead, he suggests that she was his first creation, the first of his acts of old. So her participation, this idea, may be best understood as being the wisdom that is inherent within all of God’s work and not as a distinct person.
Still, even more details are given about and more works are attributed to this Sophia in the extra-biblical apocryphal text, the Wisdom of Solomon, but we’re not dealing with that—we’re sticking with Scripture. However, when considering Philo’s thought and the teachings of Greek philosophy concerning the Logos, John has not yet written anything that should be offensive to either perspective.
But then John changes everything as he writes, ‘And the Word was God.’ The Logos was the Theos, and he was in the beginning with God. The Logos was in the beginning with the Theos. See, this would be blasphemy to Jews, suggesting that a creature or creation—like Sophia, if that’s who it was—was also God. This would have begun to suggest to the Gentiles that there might be a contradiction here because something cannot be both one thing and another at the same time and in the same relationship.
This would have been blasphemy to Jews because they would consider it a denial of their monotheistic confession, ‘The Lord is one,’ by suggesting that there was another divine presence or person with the Lord at the time of creation. This would have been concerning to Gentiles because, within all the many different pagan mythologies, there was almost never an absolute beginning. Instead, they would tell tales about many beginnings, and few, if any, would look back to a singular historical moment when the clock started ticking. But most still describe a time of ending; their default religious assumptions required the pre-existence of non-created eternal matter that was worked upon by some force or intelligence and then used to make everything. Even their gods, described in Greco-Roman and ancient Near East mythology, were themselves created and never eternal.
The chiefest of gods within most every pagan religion was themselves always a creature and not the ultimate initial Creator.
See, this is where the Christian faith begins to describe what seems a strange synthesis but which is actually the revelation of the true reality upon which all myth is based. This is why the Christian faith seems so strangely similar at times when compared to other world religions because so many other religions have myths or stories that echo the biblical account. Remember, all truth is God’s truth. All the people in all places in all times have been witnesses to God’s truth in part, but now in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has been revealed to mankind.
Jesus is the true type, with all others either being partial prefigurements that point to him as being the greater or their echoes and poor copies—counterfeits offered to lead some astray from the truth by sowing doubt through similarities and differences.
Then finally, John makes the greatest and most outrageous claim against both the Jewish and Gentile religious perspectives. This claim is what cements our understanding of the Logos’s divinity and his shared non-created divine essence: all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.
The Logos could not have been himself made if everything that was and is ever made was made through and by him. This act of making is not like making a cake or building a bookshelf; those are things which creatures construct. We cannot actually make them. Now, this sense of making is better understood as becoming—being brought into existence from prior nonexistence. A cake or a shelf can become because they were before, as their constituent based materials of milk, flour, and sugar or wood and screws. It’s only through the power and will of the Divine Logos that everything became where before there was nothing.
So the Logos is not a creature; he cannot be a creature because he was never created. He never became, and so the Logos is not Sophia. John’s claim affirms the Logos’s active participation in the Lord’s total work of creation as being the generative means of creation and as a generative will directing the whole activity of creation.
Then John asserts that both the Theos and the Logos work together in the beginning to create everything that is, was, and ever shall be. This act of intentional and willful creation imposes a sense of purpose and meaning to that which is being created. The act of creation adds both explicit and implicit value to the creation; nothing is made by God just because. And so, through John’s retelling of the creation story, he teaches us that the Theos and the Logos created all things according to and through their own sovereign will and desire.
There’s no evidence suggesting any need for them to create; they created because they willed to, because they wanted to, because together they desired to create and to have the creation see. Our divine Creator is also the Divine Sovereign, and despite humanity’s sinful rebellion, we have not overthrown him or impeded his rule.
Every pagan myth suggests that successful rebellion and replacement of the divine order is the natural and intended rule of life. The great universal and false myth that the world tells is that the gods first overthrew their creators, then they created humanity to serve and worship them, and then humanity replaces the gods with ourselves, achieving apotheosis. Thus, the cycle of revolution and replacement bears out in our lives. It may even be said that children exist and participate in this cycle as they succeed and replace their parents.
But this kind of pagan worldview is bleak and hopeless because it reduces the whole of human existence to the satisfaction of the whims and wants of cruel and uncaring gods, including the worst idol of all—our god of self.
So John here denies and refutes the world’s myth as a lie with his preamble: ‘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.’
After reading John’s preamble, when we look back into Genesis and use it as our lens, not only can we discern the eternal truth that he proclaims hidden within the words of Moses, we can also identify the distinct yet uniquely cooperative work of all three divine persons in the work of creation.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.
So you see, in the beginning, the Lord God the Father created everything where previously the Earth had no shape; it was absolutely empty. The Spirit of God was hovering; God the Holy Spirit was moving upon and above the not yet shaped creation, waiting for the command to shape it. And God said, the Logos, God the Son, declared: ‘Let there be light.’
So creation was the work of the Triune God, and it required Trinitarian effort. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united and worked together to create. You had also portrayed a division of labor and roles between the three persons. They’re united by one single shared will and purpose, but divided by their activities.
God the Father willed creation into being; God the Son directed creation; and then God the Holy Spirit formed and shaped creation.
So using John’s lens, focusing in upon the divine nature, we find no contradictions between John and Moses; instead, there’s harmony and unity. This is the continuity of progressive divine revelation that comes only from the Holy Spirit.
But what was true then is still true today. The objections of the past that the Jews and the Gentiles would have had are still the objections of today; only the labels have changed. Today, when many secular people think about creation—if they ever do—and by creation, I mean the created order, the world, the universe, and everything contained within, they generally assume that it has always been eternally existent. Some may suggest that the world was self-created or is self-generating, but those are logical fallacies. Otherwise, they tend to just ignore everything related to ‘in the beginning.’
This is where the failures of science as a suggested arbiter of natural truth and reality become clear. Science is great at generating descriptions of things that are observed. Science is a great tool for generating models of prediction, but science is not great at explaining why.
Science is not great at generating answers because it generates bigger questions with every tiny answer. The Big Bang Theory assumes that at one time, all matter was compressed within one single infinitesimal point called a singularity until everything exploded outward in a burst of brilliant light, as all matter suddenly began to move outward and away from this origin point.
However, there’s two very important questions that this theory fails to address or answer: Where did all the matter within the singularity come from, and what initiated or caused this explosion and the rapid expansion of the universe?
See, this theory either assumes that matter is eternal or self-generating. It also assumes that matter can be put into motion without the application of an external force— that an effect may somehow occur without a cause.
The Greek philosopher Parmenides taught the logical truth: ‘Ex nihilo, nihil fit’ (from nothing, nothing comes), teaching this against that first assumption, refuting the idea of self-generation. Because if his statement was false, then things should constantly be being created from nothing.
Also, logically, if matter’s eternal, then there is no Creator; and if there is no Creator, then there cannot be an act or a moment of creation. But their own used language, like ‘at the beginning of time’ or ‘the moment of creation,’ presupposes involvement and necessity still for a Creator.
Meanwhile, the second assumption is a violation of Newton’s first law of motion, the law of inertia, that states an object at rest will remain at rest unless an external force is applied to it.
So ultimately, this scientific worldview is even more bleak and hopeless than that of the pagans because if the universe is not created, if the universe and life is merely the product of chance happening through the collision of random particles of matter without any willful intent, then there can be no meaning or purpose in life or for existence at all. According to that worldview, there is no implicit value found in any human life, and all things become utterly worthless.
The answer, you can see, to both questions is the requirement of an external force—a person who is outside and set apart from the creation. A transcendent Divine person. The pagans freely admitted this because their gods merely imposed their will upon something that was already there, admitting to an implicit need for an ultimate Creator to be someone who possesses the quality of being within himself, who must himself be non-created and self-existent.
Aristotle satisfactorily addressed this need with his idea of an unmoved mover—an idea that Christians have redeemed and taken to explain the Lord as the non-created Creator and the first cause of everything.
But still, biblical truth requires no such assumptions because it satisfactorily and simply answers both questions. God created, and God said. Whatever truth the philosophers and wise men of antiquity knew was seen only as through a glass darkly, but now, through the fullness of revelation found in Jesus Christ and testified to us by John, we know the true truth.
Only one single God can establish consistent and unified order as found within creation. Even the pagans admit this because their gods establish one single God as ruler over the rest. Only one God who is eternal and transcendent can be both the creator of and the sovereign over creation. Only one omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God can create and preserve order, maintain peace; for otherwise, the alternative rebellion cycle will destroy and prevent any sense of stability.
Only such a God as described here in the Bible can be the source of hope and give us enough confidence of faith to trust that, even in the midst of all the chaos that we experience in life, order will one day be restored. That the rebellion of man will one day cease because the one who made us all is the only one who can and will restore us.
So as we consider the Logos, who is the Theos, we know and believe that he is eternal—eternally with God and eternally God. We know and believe that he is the creator, the person who has made all things. We know and believe that because God, the Logos, the Word, willfully and intentionally created all things, he has declared our lives to have purpose and meaning—even if we do not always know what they are.
We know and believe that since he chose to create us, we are valued. That everyone is valuable and of immeasurable worth to God. Therefore, we can be confident in our faith and trust in Jesus Christ because if Jesus of Nazareth is the Logos, then we can be certain that the one who made us is the one who will restore us to a state of wholeness from our sinful brokenness.
If Jesus is the Logos, the God-man, the Incarnate Word of God, then that shows us how much God loves his people because he came to save us himself. This shows the great esteem that God holds his people in—demonstrating how important and valuable we truly are and are considered by him.
Because through the person of Jesus, God chose to become like us so that we might become like him—holy and righteous, just and merciful, loving and gracious.
So whenever you get discouraged about all the despairing lows in life, look to Jesus and remember that because he was present and involved in the beginning, because he came down into the world for us, because we know that he is sanctifying us, transforming and conforming us to his holy image even now, then surely he will achieve all of his intended plans and purposes.
And when the Logos finally finishes all of his work in creation and surveys all that he has seen and made and done, he will once again declare it to be very good.
And when the Logos finishes his work of creation, then he will enter into the final Sabbath rest and bring all of his chosen people with him—everyone who believes and trusts in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, let us all trust and obey the Logos, who is the Theos, because we find our only hope for meaning and rest in him. Amen.