Barnes
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
The Prologue to John’s Gospel establishes that the primal Logos, God’s Word, was everlastingly Christ. Very Word of God, Christ was and is eternal, even as God is eternal, John’s teaching asserts. Preemptively and immediately, John’s theology declares the unique eternity of Christ, the holy Second Person of the Trinity.
To what extent have believers grasped this revelation? To be sure, it is inordinately deep and challenges our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps that is why John says again, repeating, “He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:2).
John sought to use terminology and ideas with which his readers were familiar, to convey this deepest Truth in answer to their, also, deepest questions. Referring to the Word as Logos, a Greek word familiar to many of his hearers, John appears to have intended to express to those of Greek heritage, their understanding of unchanging truth, or the ” perfect pattern of the universe,” as now having become the enfleshed reality of those ideas in Jesus Who is the Christ. By referring to the divine work of the Logos in creation, John spoke pointedly also to those of Jewish, and now become Christian, faith whose understanding and experience of the life, death, and Resurrection of the Incarnate Christ, and the new creation in Him, was snapped initially by the Hebrew Talmud’s witness of God’s work of creation in Genesis.
John the “beloved disciple,” obeys the Lord’s call on his life, particularly in response to God’s sacred election of him, John, chosen and called apart and equipped to be theologian of the central reality of the Incarnation. Taught as disciple by Jesus Himself, through day-to-day miraculous signs “given that they might believe,” and avid learner of Jesus’ teaching of God the Father’s Will and Kingdom work, and by Jesus’ compassionate feeding and healing of those suffering ones who, by faith trusted Him, John gives informed witness and theological teaching to all believers, then and now.
, John traces the public ministry of Jesus back to the beginning. Back before, and beyond Abraham, Moses, and “even Adam,” to eternity itself, as one scholar has emphasized, John traces the cosmic and primal foundations of the public ministry of Jesus, the Incarnate Christ. At the outset, John declares that the life and ministry of Jesus entire, and the Words of Truth which He spoke, were the eternal Intention and Word (Logos) of God the Father, Creator of all. From the beginning, from eternity, Christ was. Principal theologian of the Gospels, John explicates the meaning and purpose of the Incarnation of the Logos, the Word of God, throughout his Gospel account.
The words which Jesus spoke, and with which Jesus revealed the righteous and holy nature and character of God the Father, is the same Voice which spoke creation into existence, John shows. His christological insights in the Fourth Gospel form the theological core of the Christian faith.
By appropriating traditional terminologies, John made room for perspectives which allowed the creative contributions of differing interpretations, which in their genuine and true grasp of the Gospel, did not forsake, but enriched, the faith of the believing church. That pattern has been supported and maintained even until today.
Confident that his employment of the Logos term, and its rigorous insight and appropriate application to the Truth of the Incarnate Christ, coexistent with and manifesting God, [“and the Word [Logos] was God,”] testified that John’s “unique conviction at the core of the Prologue is that the Word as power…was fulfilled ultimately in the Word as person.”. That person was Jesus. That person dwelt among us, as John declared in 1:14, “full of Grace and Truth.”
“The life of Christ transcended every human frame of reference and could not be adequately expressed by any of them,” thoughtful scholars, and Christians generally, readily agree. Indeed, nothing of our human speech can completely and comprehensively express the profound Truth of that Life. God’s transcendence cannot, and must not, be reduced to immanence in our speech forms. The Logos concept of the eternal Christ as Word expresses the cosmic transcendence of God, without losing the earthly immanence of God affirmed in the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. Both transcendence and immanence are absolute attributes of God.
In John’s similar prologue to the first of his three letters, I John, the Logos theology appears again:. “the Word of life” announced in Christian witness was both ‘from the beginning…with the Father’ and was also ‘made manifest’ to the ear, the eye, and the touch” (I John 1:1-2), in Jesus, the Son.
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4,5). Of that, Professor William Hull writes, “In Genesis, God’s Word created a world in which light and darkness were differentiated. The Gospel of John begins as a new Genesis which depicts the redemptive work of Christ in bringing the creation to its intended consummation” (cf.5:17;9:4-5).
Thanks be to God.