Clough John Lesson 2
Outline of the Book: The Logos – John 1:1-2
Last time we covered the background, hopefully showing you a little bit about the author of this book, the fact that it’s a great privilege to study under this particular apostle because of his intimacy with the person of Jesus Christ; that in this Gospel more than any other Gospel we obtain a different kind of portrait, a portrait that could only be given by a very close friend, and therefore chosen by the Holy Spirit as the fourth and final Gospel. John was a man who had meditated long and hard about the doctrines that Jesus had taught, and it was out of this depth of meditation, thought, prayer, that John came up with the statements that he did; probably as far as the Gentile world is concerned, none of the Gospels hit as hard as this Gospel, none of the Gospels make such outright challenging statements as this Gospel.
So we want to see the flow of John’s argument, for the entire Gospel originally was an argument; it was an argument that you ought to see who the person of Jesus is, “These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you might have life through His name.” Obviously John did not follow the procedure that is so prevalent in evangelical circles of just saying “believe in Jesus.” John gave 21 chapters of detailed argumentation and historic fact before he ever asked, ever dared to ask anyone to believe. He always gave people something to believe. So when John said “believe on Jesus Christ” you were not tempted to generate some tingling emotion and then trust inwardly in the emotions so generated. John gave external historical facts and on the basis of these facts one was to believe. So we find then John has a very concise argument; the book breaks down into very key, very distinct parts.
So as we begin with the exegesis I want to
give you an outline of the book in its major sections. The introduction of John covers John
1:1-18. that’s the first section, it
deals with the definition of the Logos,
the definition of what the word is, and therefore in order to appreciate
Christ’s nature, His works and His Word.
Then from John 1:19-12:50 John is concerned with the incarnation of the
Word in Israel and in these twelve chapters the theme over and over again is
the manifestation of the greatest life while on the soil of Palestine, the
public ministry of Jesus, what He did, what He said, some of the little moves
that He made, the little remarks that the other Gospel writers just overlook,
John did not overlook, John preserved them.
And whereas the other Gospel writers give a lot of the public addresses
of Jesus, during these twelve chapters John gives us a close running account of
some of the things that happened in Jesus’ life, from the woman at the well and
what things this woman said, while the rest of the disciples were shocked, on
down to the blind man and his attitude toward his healing. These are little personal intimate portraits
in this period of twelve chapters, the incarnation of the Word in
Then the third section, from John 13:1-17:26; this section of John deals with those last discourses that Jesus gave to His disciples, the briefing for the indwelling of the Word in the world. This was the preparation for the carrying on and the expansion of the ministry of Jesus Christ, whereas the first twelve chapters dealt with the incarnation of the word, these chapters deal with the principles that will be used to carry on the ministry of the Word in the world after Jesus leave. Then John 18-19 deal with the crucifixion of the Word. The Word is not an abstract philosophic platonic principle, it’s flesh and bones, and you can put nails in it. The resurrection of the Word, 20-21:23; when the Word is resurrected He talks, He comes to a campfire and He eats fish along with the other human beings. And then finally the two concluding verses, John 21:24-25, the conclusion of the book. That’s the overall structure of the Gospel and we are prepared to come to chapter 1 at the introduction.
John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the Word was God. [2] The same was in the beginning with God. [3] All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. [4] In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. [6] And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
One of the great modern commentators on the Gospel of John, Dr. Leon Morris, has a very interesting summary statement and it concerns the style of John and we might as well face that question right here. Leon Morris describes John’s style by saying the following: “I like the comparison of John’s Gospel to a pool, in which a child may drink and an elephant can swim.” And this describes very well something that we’re going to get into with the first verse and go on in every other verse in this Gospel. Every time this man gives us a word, particularly those of you studying along in the Greek you’ll see this very clearly, every time he comes up with a word you can take that word, it’s a normal superficial meaning, every day meaning in life, and it makes sense. But then the more you look at it the more you say gee, he’s got to mean more then that, and then conviction grows, the more you study, the more you chew on it, well, he does mean more than that. And there grows this deeper awareness of what he means. And time after time after time one word has two meanings. This is not to confuse us; it’s to drive us deeper into the text.
So therefore the Gospel of John can be read by the newest believer. In fact, if some of you have friends and they’re considering the claims of Christian you would be well advised to have them read in a modern translation the Gospel of John. Just let them read the Gospel of John; it’s a perfect Holy Spirit written presentation of the gospel. So let them read the Gospel of John, say look, becoming a Christian is very serious business; if you are really concerned and if you are really interested, take this and read it, and then let’s get together and we’ll discuss it. And this provides a very fruitful atmosphere for evangelism. This is a book you can use in evangelism very, very effectively. Just let the person read the book and there is enough loaded passages in this book that you need not worry that you can’t make the gospel issue clear. As I go through the Gospel of John I will point to these key places that you can use this Gospel in an evangelistic context to win people to Christ.
But as we go through this, always remember John has also written in such a way that it’s the product of a very, very old man’s lifetime of thought. And when he writes his words stress the Greek language; the Greek language just yields and collapses before all the powerful meaning that John wants to load these words with. And so as many, many scholars who have devoted their lives to studying the Johannine documents, have concluded that no many how many hours you spend, no matter how detailed your textual analysis you always walk away from this book with a feeling that I just haven’t got all this, I just can’t control all this material, there’s something still there, beyond what I studied. So if you feel frustrated and so on as you study this book and you see that we don’t seem to go all the way with it, you have the rest of your life to go all the way with John, and you can start now and be assured that you will never reach the end of the Gospel of John. You can study it from now until the day you die and you will still come up with deeper and newer insights to what this man is saying, not contradictory to what you first learned, just additional and deeper things. So this Gospel is a great challenge to your spirituality and your ability to concentrate upon doctrine and absorb it.
Now the first two verses have a tremendous amount of doctrine. In fact we’re going to spend at least part of the time this evening in the doctrine of the Trinity because this comes up here very clearly. This is a verse that was one of the great verses used in the definition of the Trinity. But before we get to the doctrine of the Trinity we have to observe the text and look at the text carefully, work through the text, word by word, then we’ll be prepared to think about doctrine.
“In the beginning was the Word,” those of you who have read your Bibles a lot, that word sounds familiar, “in the beginning,” and “in the beginning” obviously rings a bell of Genesis 1:1. Those of you who have studied the Greek and you look at that text and you see this, that’s the Septuagint’s beginning of Genesis 1:1, En arche, “In the beginning,” so John, from the very time he opens his work he insists on going back to the first principle. John does not start with the virgin birth. John does not start, as the other writers do, with even John the Baptist’s ministry. He doesn’t begin with prophecy; he takes us all the way back to the first of the first, and takes us back to the point beyond which he can’t go any more, En arche, “In the beginning.” So he goes back to origins. John, in other words, follows the same format that we have gone over and over and over and over and over in the divine viewpoint framework.
Where do you have to go back to resolve all issues? Creation, origins; this is an inescapable point, there is no way around it; if you are fuzzy and you haven’t thought through the issue on creation/evolution, everything else that you conclude is tentative, tentative upon that time when you’re going to make your decision about origins, about what really went on. And when you make that decision in faith, then the rest of the things that conclude from that become [can’t understand word] but if you’re still debating this issue then everything else is just going to have to wait until you work this through yourself, and John doesn’t allow us to get off the hook like Paul doesn’t; he sticks it to us right away, “In the beginning,” right back to origins, right back to Genesis 1:1. Why? Because John insists on painting Christ’s portrait with such glory and power that when you get through you will believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, or you will curse Him for who He is, but you cannot remain the same after John gets through presenting Christ, there will be a response in your soul.
En arche, arche was a word that has a superficial meaning, an every day meaning, the man in the street knew what arche meant; John would preach in the streets of Ephesus; it meant the word “beginning,” just as it’s translated, and that’s the everyday meaning that it mean. So the average person in the market place who would hear this elderly man and his disciples walk through the market place and they’d talk about ’Iesou Christos, and they’d talk about en arche, oh, in the beginning, in the beginning of all time. But arche was a word that was loaded in the ancient world with a lot more than just the word “beginning.” That word was a word that carried connotations with it. And the connotations of arche came from the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato and the pre-Socratics. Arche also meant the first and prime principle of the universe; the Greeks didn’t have a concept of creation but they did have a concept of arche; arche was the first mover, that which you can’t get back of, you keep going back, what was back of this and what is back of this and what is back of this and what is back of this, finally you stop and wherever you stop is called the arche.
So this was the point when John said En arche, “In the beginning,” at the basic basis of everything. The average man on the street wouldn’t have understood the details of Plato and Aristotle but arche had the flavor so that when he heard this old man preaching about Christ over there in the en arche, it carried a powerful message; he couldn’t help but lift his ear to…what did you say? This man, this Jewish carpenter had something to do with the great philosophic problem of all time, the arche. Yes, John would say, because “en arche He was.” And you’ll notice the verb “He was,” He was already existing, and so Jesus Christ then goes back of. The picture is here’s the arche, here’s the beginning of history, but Jesus Christ was existing at the beginning; en arche, “in,” He was, imperfect tense in the Greek, He was already in existence and existing, motion picture type of thing, the pre-existence of whatever this is coming up that he’s going to discuss.
En arche, and this is different now from Genesis 1:1, he kind of fooled us, we started out just like the Septuagint version of Genesis 1:1, en arche, but the Septuagint changes because it says “In the beginning God created,” it doesn’t say anything about what pre-existed, it just says, “In the beginning God created and the verb “create” is a point, “in the beginning” a point, He created, and it’s talking about an act, but John says no, I’m not talk about an act, I’m talking about existence, “In the beginning this Logos was existing,” he’s not going to get to creation and the acts until verse 3, but he wants to take us back of the arche. Why is John so emphatic, and we know he’s emphatic because in his first epistle he also discusses are arche and the beginning? He is concerned that when we get through looking at the person of Christ that Christ will not be reinterpreted in terms of another category, sort of like the Hindu does, well, you see, Jesus is one manifestation of the God in back of Jesus, and if we would just sit and we’d get a little of Jesus and a little of Allah and a little of Krishna and a little of you name the person, we get in back of all that then we arrive at the real truth. And John cuts it out right here, just like the author of Hebrews, he refuses to permit someone to go back of Jesus. Jesus represents the final backboard and there’s nothing in back of Him. En arche He was, and so this cuts out any hope that we have that what the New Testament gives us is a picture and if we have philosophic speculation we can behind the picture to the real truth. John says no, I am giving you the final most picture; there’s no more philosophic discussion to be said; you can’t get in back of what I’m saying; this is the final backstop, en arche.
And he says in the beginning the Word was existing, and he uses another loaded term in the ancient world, the word Logos. Like the word arche, logos has an every day meaning; it has actually every day meanings. Logos can mean a word that is spoken out of the mouth, something that is heard, something somebody says to you, an expressed thought, the Word, and Logos is usually translated “the Word.” But logos also had another every day meaning; it meant the word before it came out of your teeth, the word while it was still in your head, that is the thought before it was expressed. So logos has two everyday meanings; it means thoughts in your head, any thoughts you expressed in words, outside of your head. That was the everyday meaning, that was the meaning logos had when they would talk about it. But again, John has seized upon a term carried this aurora to it. The average man in the street wouldn’t know what Plato and Aristotle and Philo and the other philosophers had spoken about Logos, he wouldn’t know all those details but he would know enough that the great men of his culture had been struggling to define the Logos of the universe.
And logos has another meaning, and the meaning that it had in the ancient philosophic was the key principle that integrated everything together; the Greeks were like conquistadors in this respect; they battered at reason until they could get back to the principle that would explain every piece of the universe. And when they got back to that principle that would explain every piece of the universe, the overall plan, they called it logos; the logos, the search for the logos, the objective of early philosophy.
So we haven’t gone but one clause into the Gospel and he starts firing the heavy artillery of words at us, exhausting the vocabulary of his time, to try to communicate to us who Christ is. En arche, “in the beginning” Jesus was existing, the Logos. Now John didn’t just get the idea out of the Greek; he got the idea from the human point of view, from the Old Testament. In fact, there’s a passage that started off the Logos concept in Jewish thought. Turn to Proverbs 8 where we have the furthest point at which Jewish thought had penetrated; to comprehend what the Greeks later tried to solve, the principle that would encompass the universe. Proverbs 8:22, it concerns chokmah, wisdom, those of you who were hear for the Proverbs presentation, remember the two women that were always presented in terms of woman; and here that principle of chokmah in every day skills yields before a bigger concept, and that is God’s thoughts, God’s skills, God’s wisdom. And so in verse 22, “The LORD,” Yahweh, “He possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old.” And the word “possessed” means to acquire. [23] I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. [24] There were no depths, I was brought forth—when there were no fountains abounding with tater. [25] Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, was I brought forth.” And you see the vocabulary, verse 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26, the author of Proverbs, Solomon, is exhausting the Hebrew language to get at this same problem. He’s doing everything he can given the constraints of his language, at that time, to express the basic, basic, basic principle of all. What is the basic most principle? Now what he has just taught us in verses 22-26 is this: that creation is limited; creation begins at a point, but he says before creation there existed wisdom. So wisdom is placed above and over and behind creation.
You say so what? This is why this is very, very critical, and in our day it is the failure to observe Proverbs 8; it is the failure to see what the apostles are claiming, such as in John 1, that has led to all modern apostasy. Here’s what is happened. The modern human viewpoint, the argument is that here we have the universe going on in time; out of the universe evolved language. We have… somehow… and then somehow there it is, it came into existence, language, words, thoughts. And the idea is that since nature produced language, language is inside and trapped inside nature. And therefore language has very severe limitations. Thought has very severe limitations, and there’s a tremendous attack against clear thinking and reasoning today. Everybody wants to feel their way along, everybody wants to attack the concept that you can think your way along. Even Christians do this, unintentionally, but they do it when they knock Bible doctrine. Why, there’s more to the Christian life that Bible doctrine; sure there’s more to the Christian life than Bible doctrine, there’s more to air than oxygen; there’s more t life than metabolism, sure there is, but how far do you go if you don’t have metabolism in your body. How do you far go do you go if you don’t have O2 and how far are you going to go spiritually without doctrine?
So here we have the attack against reason; the idea is that since language comes out of nature, therefore whatever you say about God is not really what He’s like, playing word games. You can make statements up about God but that’s just the way language has evolved and we can’t really say anything about God, we can’t really say God exists when He’s not this way. The reason we can’t is because language is just a product of evolution, limited, the universe was there before language was. Aha, but what does Proverbs 8 say? Chokmah, thought, skill, including language skills were there before creation. Exactly the opposite, and you’re going to go one of two ways right at this point. And the Bible insists, both in Old Testament and New Testament, no, no, no, before the universe existed, and encompassing it was language. God’s language, His thoughts, words, plans, and therefore language is a sufficient vehicle to say anything about God; thoughts, we can think thoughts that are correct about God; we don’t have to wonder along with the person who practices Oriental religion. We don’t have to wonder that our thoughts and our mind is deceiving us. The thoughts are fundamental. Who was the first speaker? It was the Trinity speaking among Themselves. Who was the first lover? God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. So the love, the thought and language all preceded creation.
And that’s what Solomon is trying to get at in Proverbs 8, the Lord possessed me, wisdom, before He did anything else. That’s his argument; he’s stressing the language to get this across, that language, thought, all of it precedes, and when I as a simply believer sit down and I ask, what is the wisest way to run my life, what are the doctrinal principles I need to live this life in this world, I don’t have to sit around and say this stuff is just approximate, this is just tentative until the 21st century rolls along and we have another great reformer and all of a sudden he sheds a lot of new light and undermines what we’re learning. You don’t have to live your life threatened that tomorrow somebody is going to make obsolete the doctrine you’re learning today. You would if language and all the rest had come out of nature, the way the evolutionist insists. But if Proverbs 8 is correct, and if you had prior to nature, prior to the universe, prior to all these things, if you had God thinking, acting, talking, feeling, loving, then we’re made in His image and we have real truth that will never be rendered obsolete.
Said another way, and in Christian circles
this is how it comes out: when I get to heaven then I’ll see how things really
are. You’ll see new things that you
didn’t see before, but there’s nothing you’re going to ever see for the rest of
your eternal existence that is going to undermine what you have in front of you
right now. You can live in heaven for
billions and billions and billions of years, exposed to revelation continually
and there’s not one portion of that revelation that will undermine one part of
the Word of God that you have in your lap.
Not one! Added to it, yes;
contradicting it; never! So we have the
assurance that… we don’t know everything but what we do know is non-obsolescent
material. It will never become obsolescent;
John then uses his Hebrew background, and when he uses the word Logos he has a lot on his mind. And he intends that his hearers have a lot on their mind. In fact they had so much on their mind it took the Church 400 years before they brought the doctrine of the Trinity to full statement. One of the scholars that examined this period said this, and here’s the heart of why I’m getting at all this business, why this Logos, before creation the Logos was existing. Why is it so critical? For this reason: when Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement and Origen set themselves to grapple with the question as to whether the Logos was of the very being of God Himself from all eternity, the discussion was not on some remote point of ancient metaphysics. The question was, is the redeeming purpose which we find in Jesus part of the very being and essence of God? Is that what God is? Is it His very nature to create? Is it His very nature to reveal Himself? Is it His very nature to redeem His creation? Is it, therefore, not some [can’t understand word] or intermediate theme but the eternal God Himself, that reveals Himself to us and became incarnate in Jesus as far as salvation?
This is an adequate summary because what it’s saying is, is God really the way He looks in the Bible or if we really knew God would He be a different kind of person than what we see here. If you do not believe the Trinity you cannot agree with that statement and I’ll proceed to show why as we go on. If you deny the Trinity, deny the deity of the Word, the full deity of the Word, the Logos here, you can never say yes to this question: is God really the way He appears in the Scripture. You’ll always, if you have first denied the deity of Jesus, if you have first compromised in the area of the Trinity, you’re going to have to say I probably think not, that God really isn’t this way, if you’re really honest and a consistent hard, rigorous thinker. You’re going to be driven to the conclusion that God is an unknowable entity out there who projects pictures of Himself but those pictures really aren’t the way he is, He’s really different when you get to know Him.
So this is what John is struggling with and he’s got to settle the issue in verse 1 in this introduction or everything he says or everything else about Jesus’ life is just a picture. If he hasn’t settled this issue we can chuck the rest of the Gospel because we can’t be sure that everything else that’s said in this Gospel really shows us what God is like. We can’t really be sure of that, so we’ve got to say okay, here’s my base, here’s where my starting point is, here’s what I’m talking about, “en arche the Logos was existing.”
And then he says, “the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” “The Logos was with God,” and here he uses a peculiar preposition. The Greek has several prepositions for “with,” one is meta, the other is para, but here he uses the word pros; why is that important? Because pros indicates motion, it means a relationship, not something static, frozen in statue form, pros, it means to or toward to first year Greek students, when he learns this preposition, to or towards; you use it generally with verbs of motion. And yet this verb is not a verb of motion. “Was” is a verb of existence, there’s no motion here, and yet why does he insist upon employing a preposition of motion when he doesn’t have a verb of motion, he just has a verb of simple existence, “In the beginning the Word was,” and we have to ask ourselves, John is very precise in his use of terms and language; why did John pick out a preposition of motion to go with a verb of basically a static thing? The reason can be none other than he’s indicating activity in the Trinity before creation.
The Word was coming to God, they were involved in a deep personal relationship, a dynamic changing personal relationship, not changing in its essence but they weren’t just sitting there looking at each other for all eternity. They were enjoying one another. God, in other words, didn’t have to create because He was lonely. Some people get the idea that God had nothing else to do so He creates. God did not have to create to complete Himself. God created for a reason known only to Himself, and that’s why we have problems with sovereignty and volition because we cannot understand why He made the history that He made. And the basic question is never answered in the Bible; we have no reason under the sun to know why God created the world the way He did. We don’t even know why He created any world, leave alone this one why He did the way He did. It is not told us. One thing we do know though; He didn’t have to create it because if He had to create it to complete Himself God Himself is incomplete, He is not a self-sufficient deity. He needs something outside of Himself to complete Himself and that becomes an insufficient God and Savior. God is not that kind of a God; He did not need something outside of Himself to keep Himself company. The Trinity kept each other in perfect company, and therefore there was not any need to create an object to love. God had a sufficient object in Himself to love; the Father loved the Son, the Son loved the Father. So pros, the Logos was going to God, there was a dynamic personal relationship there.
Now the third part of verse 1 is a very, very much of an anchor verse; these little people that come to your door with pamphlets and have their six week course in Greek and proceed to tell you that in verse 1 it says that Jesus was “a God” have not done their homework. They will offer you the New World Translation, in which it says “the Word was a God.” And they will come up with arguments that sound very profound to the person who isn’t much of a student of the languages. They’ll come up with the argument and say why, they’ll even point it to you in the text, they’ll say now we know that you can’t read Greek but let’s just show you one thing here, it says “the Word,” and you see the article there, ho, and the God, in this case it’s ton, and they’ll say see that, in the middle of verse 1 there’s an article, there’s three gods, three words. They’ll say just look, we know you don’t now Greek but just look at that last part of verse 1; do you notice that the word God has no article. It’s a change, it’s different; Theos, the first time it occurs, the first time the word God occurs in verse 1 it’s “the God.” The second time it occurs it’s “a God,” and so they’ll tell you “the God” is the Father, that’s the real God, and Jesus is just “a God” among many gods; Jesus is not really God, He’s something less than God, sort of half-creature, half-God, He’s a God. And they’ll even take you to Moffitt’s translation where it says, “and the Word was divine” and they’ll say see, Dr. Moffitt agreed with us. And for most people who have never studied Dr. Moffitt’s view of Christology they’ll think that that’s right. It’s not.
“…the Word was a God,” moreover they’ll say, and to emphasize the point the word order is changed, literally in the Greek it’s “God was the Word.” And they’ll say when you have a word order like that it’s always emphasizing the essence, the emphasis in that sentence because of the reverse, instead of saying “the Word was God,” it’s reversed there, and that was the Greek way, they didn’t have underlining in Greek so the only way you could underline something was to reverse the order and they reversed the order to draw attention to whatever it was that was reversed. They say, see, that’s drawing that He was only a God. And by this time most people are persuaded that at least the person knows what they’re talking about so they take a piece of the literature and agree to read it and so on. And pretty soon they’re inside the Watchtower Society.
Now, unfortunately, it doesn’t take too much of a specialist in the languages to undo this argument very quickly. The whole point was covered in an article called by E. C. Caldwell, who was not a Christian man at all, he was just a good Greek scholar, and he wrote an article in The Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 52, in the year 1933. So obviously the results of his research have been around for some time; around for time for the translators of the New World Translation to listen to Dr. Caldwell and learn, but since they refuse or it would compromise their theology, they insist on translating this verse wrongly.
So therefore John 1:1 teaches the full deity of the Logos. There is no question that the text is teaching complete deity of Logos. This means Jesus Christ is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, there’s not one divine attribute that Jesus Christ does not have and ever did have; “the Word was God.” John 1;2, “The same was in the beginning with God.”
And so let us summarize what we’ve found in the Logos. Logos is a central word for thought, language, logic. If you want to get the sense of verse 1 substitute those words in there; read it through to yourself and substitute those three words: In the beginning was thought, and thought was with God, and thought was God. In the beginning was logic, and logic was with God, and logic was God. In the beginning was language, and language was with God, and language was God. So that’s what Logos intends to convey; it means therefore that Christianity is a rationale religion, it can be discussed, it can be thought about, it can be preached. This is why Christianity is an evangelical religion, meaning it is preached. If you want to spread Zhen-Buddhism you don’t learn Zhen by preaching it, by listening to preaching, you learn Zhen by participation. You don’t learn Christianity just by participation; you’ve got to have a preached taught Word; it goes back to the very nature of the universe.
Furthermore, we understand by Logos, from the word pros here that it isn’t an impersonal “it,” it is a person involved in a personal relationship with God. The Logos, therefore, is God and yet it’s distinct from God, from the thing called God. Now John’s term for the Trinity is this: he has three words, he doesn’t call Father, Son and Spirit, he calls it God, Logos and Pneuma or Spirit; those are his three words to describe the Trinity; that’s John’s language for the Trinity. John 1:2, “The same was in the beginning,” so he makes it absolutely clear by verse 2, there’s no doubt that at the very arche, before anything, the Logos as there.
Now the reason for doing all this is
because down in verse 14 where you see the word Logos again he’s going to make
a statement that describes the incarnation.
“The Logos,” ginomai, “became flesh,” now verse 14
won’t hit you if you haven’t been thoroughly soaking in verses 1-2 for a while.
Verses 1 and 2 your soul just has to sit there and meditate on it to be hit
when you come to verse 14, “The Logos,”
he says, “became flesh.” Now this just
would blow the mind of any philosophically oriented person in the ancient
world. It still blows the mind of the
philosophically oriented that an eternal principle pre-existing, this Logos can actually become flesh that we
touch and handle and feel and see? You
bet, says John. So when I, John says,
tell you about Jesus Christ, you look into the eyes of Christ and you see the arche, the Logos, that the Greeks were searching for and searching for and
searching for and you don’t have to go to
Now we come to the doctrine of the Trinity. We’ve derived the text, verses 1-2, the full deity of Jesus; now we come to the Trinity and let’s look at the Trinity. Why do we say there is a Trinity; what is the basis for saying there is a Trinity? I will give you the Scriptural reasons, then I am going to give you some illustrations of the Trinity. And we have all sorts of illustrations, some of them are legitimate, some aren’t. These are not easy illustrations; some of you may conclude you’d rather go back to the Trinity and forget the illustrations but that’s all right.
What is the Scriptural basis of the
Trinity? Here it is: (1) there is a
plurality inside the deity in the Bible, proved by Genesis 1:26; proved by
Genesis 11:7; proved by Isaiah 6:8. All
of these places use plural nouns and pronouns with Elohim; the Hebrew word for
God is even a plural, Elohim, but that by itself doesn’t prove it. It became kind of a sloppily used term, you
can’t prove Trinity just from that. But
in those three passages Elohim is used with plural. For example, what does it
say in Genesis 1:26, “Let me create man?”
No! In Genesis
So Genesis
How do we handle “the angel of
Jehovah?” The following passages prove
that the angel of Jehovah is Jehovah.
Genesis 16:7-13; Genesis 31:11-13, there are many more but these are key
passages. They prove that when the angel
of Jehovah is seen by people, people turn right around and say I have seen
Jehovah. So that shows what the saw was
the angel of Jehovah, so when they walk away they say I didn’t see the angel, I
saw Jehovah Himself. So those verses
show that the angel of Jehovah is Jehovah.
But then we have other passages that show that the angel of Jehovah is
distinct from Jehovah, such as Zechariah 1:12-13. These passage we have a strange scene of the
angel of Jehovah turning around and talking to Jehovah. Yet we just got through saying that the angel
of Jehovah is Jehovah. How do you
explain that the angel of Jehovah, who is Jehovah, turns around and talks to
Jehovah? Because He does, He makes a [can’t
understand word] in Zechariah
Now what do we do about certain objections to the Trinity? One objection is that we’re dealing with something that men created, men thought this up, it wasn’t there really and men just screwed up when they came up with the doctrine of the Trinity. The answer to this is that nowhere in ancient thought was there ever the doctrine of the Trinity. So if men really did come up with this thing, boy, they came up with a beaut, the most marvelous example of creative thinking that the world has ever seen. It did not get imported into Christianity from some circle outside of Christianity because there wasn’t any circle outside of Christianity that discussed the Trinity. Next time somebody gives you that garbage, that the Trinity is a product of somebody importing something into Christianity from the outside, ask them were it came from. If they can answer it they’d be famous.
The problem with the Trinity is this: every thought of man, whether it’s been Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, whatever the thinking, and I might add the backyard philosopher also, because all of you at one time or another have secretly answered this question yourself, and you didn’t word it this way but when I get through explaining what this problem is I think you’ll all recognize that this thought has run through your own head many times. And it’s this: if you get down to the basic point of everything, the whole universe, are you looking for a basic principle that explains everything? Are you looking for unity? In other words, the further back you go do you get unity or do you wind up with, kind of like a bag of marbles, a lot of diversity? And every thought system of man has always wound up either this way or this way, most have gone this way, they’ve gone to unity, they say certainly the most fundamental, fundamental, fundamental, most basic, basic, basic, basic, basic thing encompasses everything else, and they’ve gone to unity.
Wrong. If the most basic, basic, basic, basic, basic thing is one, then all the differences between good and bad, large and small, liquid and solid, all those differences are illusory, they’re not part of what really is there because there’s some more basic, and you get back to that most basic thing and all the categories are erased. You know what happens to good and evil? They’re categories, aren’t they? If you keep going back, back, back, back, back and you say if I can go way, way, way, way, way back I’ll get at unity, what did you do with good and evil? Good and evil become some secondary thing so you have started out with what is a unity… unity starts and out from unity you get all these differences; one of the two is good and evil, but if the most basic thing is unity behind good and evil, what happens to good and evil? It means that whatever is most basic is neither good nor evil so why worry about all the moral problems of the world. The universe really is amoral after all. Cruelty, non-cruelty, goodness, badness, it really doesn’t mean anything, there are just trivial differences, the most basic thing is unity. And that’s what you up with pantheism in Oriental religions. Always go back to unity and you lose the significance of diversity.
An example of this would be you; if the most basic thing is unity, your individual life doesn’t count either and that’s precisely why salvation in Oriental religion is divesting yourself of your individuality. Lose your individuality, contemplate your navel forever, don’t be different. Extinguish yourself. It all follows if you’re going to locate everything in unity; your individual life doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, it has no value.
Then on the other hand, if you take the opposite tact and say it all goes back to diversity, then what are you left with? A bag of marbles on an inclined plain that’s constantly moving and you’re trying to keep the marbles all together. And so philosophies that always emphasize the diversity principle wind up in chaos; they can’t get any unity so they’re holding this together and that together, and they’re all problems, you can’t get anything together.
So either way you go you’ve got a problem, except for the Trinity. The Trinity insists on unity and diversity as equally basic. The Trinity argues that the unity is the Godhead but the permanent eternal diversity is the Father, Son and Spirit. And so in the Trinity, and nowhere else, no other religion, no other philosophy, no other idea has ever resolved it this way. The Trinity is absolutely unique. It solves the problem of age old men’s philosophic quest for the unity and diversity is answered by the doctrine of the Trinity. God the Father and God the son and God the Holy Spirit are important distinctions that will forever bear, and yet there’s no marbles loose, everything is tied together. So you have unity and diversity located in the Trinity. That’s the reason why we say the Trinity did not come out of philosophic speculation. That is philosophic speculation; nobody in hundreds and thousands of years ever thought of putting it together. How come the Christians in the 300 years of the Church thought of putting it together? Obviously because they had help.
Now the second objection to the Trinity, besides its philosophic import, is the objection that over and over again, Jehovah’s Witnesses will do this to you and a lot of other people, they’ll take you to text after text after text where Jesus is obviously inferior to the Father. Let’s turn to John 14:28 as an illustration. This is a favorite text; surely they say, when you read John 14:28 you can’t hold the doctrine of the Trinity. After all, they would argue, doesn’t John 14:28 say that Jesus is clearly inferior to His Father; see what it says, “I go unto the Father, for My Father is greater than I.” Aha, the Father and Son aren’t equal, the Father is greater than the Son. How do you explain that? Very, very easy, this is talking about the Second Person after He has become incarnated and when He’s incarnated, obviously He inferior to pure deity, He’s God-man together, He’s in a state of kenosis, which we’ll get into later on in John, a state of humiliation. So all the passages that are trotted out to show that Jesus worshiped God who was greater than He was don’t prove that the Trinity is wrong because they are cases when Jesus is under kenosis in His incarnation. He’s in His incarnation time and therefore you’ve got another problem, Jesus in His humanity is inferior to God the Father. Humanity is always inferior to deity. You’ve got too complicated a passage here, you just can’t go in there at 65 miles an hour, pull out a verse and say I got it. There’s a lot more detail than just doing that.
Then finally, another objection, this is an objection I mentioned when I was with a group of people and we were discussing this and some lady piped up, well I don’t see why if God wanted us to know Him He had to make it so hard. And I suggested to her that God might be a topic that was slightly difficult. Now there is Biblical precedence for showing this and one of the places is Matthew 11:25. The incarnation, and its coupling doctrine, the Trinity, is a mystery that is deliberately made difficult. I say it is deliberately, deliberately made difficult for men. And there’s a spiritual reason why. Matthew 11:25-27, “At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. [26] Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight,” … “good in Thy sight,” to make it difficult. [27] “Al things are delivered unto Me by My Father, and no man knows the Son, but the Father; neither knows any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” And what this passage teaches is selective revelation, that some men will never understand the Trinity, it has been permanently hid from them, because of the rebellion against the revelation that they had. They didn’t choose to submit to the revelation available so God says phooey on you, I’m not going to reveal anything more to you; I’ll clog your minds so you’ll never understand this doctrine. And that’s why I sincerely believe that people involved in many of these cults, these cults that viciously deny the deity of Christ, are very sincere people when they say I cannot understand it because Matthew 11:25 says they can’t understand it, and it’s good in the eyes of God that they don’t understand it. So here we have the mystery of the Trinity, defended on the basis of Scripture.
All right, what is the doctrine of the Trinity in its most simplistic statement, the most concise statement that we can say? Concisely stated, the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity says that God is one in essence and three in person… one in essence and three in person. Granted, you can go in the right tone on what person means and what essence means but that’s the concise statement of the Trinity.
Now I want to give some illustrations of the Trinity; you’ve heard illustrations of the Trinity but the most profound illustration of the Trinity is given by a man who was President at one time of Gordon College in Boston, Nathan R. Wood. The book is called The Secret of the Universe, I think it’s out of print though about every 20 or 30 years they reprint this book in a small volume because it’s a lasting Christian classical work. Dr. Wood in this book dismisses all of the illustrations of the Trinity with which you’re so familiar as not illustrating the Trinity. And then he raises the question, is there, not necessarily an illustration that perfectly shows the Trinity but are there in the very nature of creation around us in every day life something we can look at that would give us confidence that this creation in which we live is indeed made by a Triune God, because after all, we know that God is rationale from Scripture and when we look out into the external world we know the world is put together quite beautifully. And the more you study in science, the more details you get, the more you realize that somebody here knew how to map before you came along. So you get confidence that the Biblical picture of God is valid from the study of your environment.
Can we say the same for the Trinity, and Wood said yes. He says isn’t it remarkable that in empirical studies or observations of the world, that everything that is measurable and describable is measurable and describable in only three ways. (1) in the units of space, (2) units of energy and (3) units of time. Given these three units I can describe any physical phenomena, I can describe my force, work, energy, chemical transaction, biological transformation, describe anything in terms of these three, units of space, energy or mass and units of time. Mass and energy, space and time, now those of you who have been in physics know all sorts of formulas where this takes into account F=MA, Force equals Mass times Acceleration, what is your acceleration term for something employing space and time, and there’s your math term, and so on. Think of it, any formula you want to work with. So why is it that the universe is only described in these three units? Well, let’s look at those three units and see if we notice something about them. Here we are dependent on Dr. Wood’s investigation.
If we look at space for a moment, one of those three terms… and before we go any further, when you describe something that’s real you always have to specify all three of the terms. Suppose I only specify time; I haven’t specified anything that’s real, have I? Suppose I just tell you space and distance, I say traveling at such and such feet per second, space and time, I haven’t described anything real yet because I haven’t specified what it is that’s moving. And to tell you what it is that’s moving I’ve got to put a math term in there. So, there’s no way I can get around to describing something with just two or one; I’ve got to always have my three coordinates to adequately describe something that’s real.
Now isn’t this interesting; I can’t have four, I can’t have two, I only can have three, and I always have to have three and not some other number. Now it’s interesting when we look at space, how many dimensions of space are there? Three, so we now take one of the terms, which are three, and we break it down and again we have three, length, width and height. Those of you who want to deal with physics, the x y z coordinates. So we always have three coordinates that describe the every day world around. Now I’m talking about philosophic mathematical systems where you can come up with n dimension. I’m talking about the very day world around us, the x y z axis. Now again, if we describe something real, if I describe this pencil, this pencil can’t be drawn on a two-dimensional surface. I have an artist and I say okay, draw me a pencil, so she draws me a pencil on a piece of paper, it’s a two dimensional image of this three dimensional object, but that’s not the pencil she’s drawn, that’s a picture of it. But it’s not a pencil, this is a pencil and the pencil has dimensions in three ways. So I never have a world of just two dimensions; I never have a world of four dimensions in every day experience. I have a world only of three dimensions. So of one of those three terms, space, we can clearly divide it in terms of three.
Then we come to mass and energy, and this can be broken down into a subset of three again, and that is that you have energy, which, by the way, no one has ever defined energy, they’ve described it with an equation but nobody ever defines it. Energy, motion and phenomenon, and any time you have a mass you have all three of these things involved; you have energy, that’s obviously there; you have motion of sorts, if it’s just the molecular motion of the object you’ve got motion, when you have temperature, temperature the result part to motion, so you’ve got energy manifesting itself in motion, and we have phenomena, optical phenomena that are basically visible because of differential in motion, a phenomena. We have diversity of motion. So we have not just motion but diversity of motion. Now all three of these are necessary and if you want to into the details Dr. Wood goes into them but in the interest of time we’ll go to the third set of terms.
Space, mass, energy and time: now how many dimensions to time are
there? Three, past, present and
future. Now as Dr. Wood points out, isn’t
this remarkable, that in every day experience we have a triunity of space, mass
and time; we go to space and we have a triunity there; we go to mass and we
have a triunity there, and we go to time and we have a triunity there. Is that just an accident? You can’t prove the Trinity, we’re not
proving the Trinity this way; we have first stated the Trinity from the Word of
God and said okay, if the Creator of the universe is a Triune God did He leave
indications on His handiwork that indeed this is the kind of God that works;
kind of like three. So let’s look at
time, and lo and behold we look at time and we have a perfect illustration of
the Trinity within time itself. For example, again we have the same feature we
had with space and mass; can you describe some event only in one
dimension? No, because if you take
But there’s more to time and here’s where we get into a very interesting picture of the Trinity and maybe this will help you see the relationship in the Biblical Trinity. Let’s look at time for a moment and look at the future and visualize time as something, a river that’s flowing toward you and you find the river is flowing toward you out of the future. You meet the river in the present and the river goes behind you in the past. Just carry that image for a moment. The river comes to you out of the future; the future is unknown and the future is only made clear to you in the present; it’s only in the present that you can live, you try living in the future or the past you’re a candidate for the funny farm. But when you’re sane, sane people live in the present. We have future oriented, yes, on the basis of the Word, but that’s trust and hope. You don’t eat, live, sleep and breathe in the future or the past, you do it in the present. So we have the future made known to us in the present, and only in the present.
Now observe what happens conceiving this as a flow going by you; after it goes by you it’s in the past and your turn around and you look at the past and what does the past do for you in every day experience? It helps you live in the present. Meditation upon what happened in the past guides you into the present moment, it helps you, it gives you guidelines to run your life by, by what happened in the past. So now isn’t this interesting; the unknown future met only in the present and we live our life in the present aided by looking at the past.
Now let’s look at the Trinity and see if we see an analogy; the Father, unknown says John, known only by the Son. Where do we meet God? No man has met God at any time, says John; where do you meet God? In the person of Christ. He’s like the present, God comes to you in the Person of Christ; you don’t meet God the Father and know Him as you do God the Son; we meet God at the point of… see, we don’t have a personal relationship, we have a personal relationship with God through one member of the Trinity, the Second, not the Third and not the First, the Second, just like we live our real life in the present moment. Then what is the role of the Holy Spirit? Not, certainly, to glorify Himself but glorify Christ and make Him known better, just as we look backwards in time at the past helps us to live in the present. And where does the Christian live his life; in the Son, and the Holy Spirit helps him live his life in the Son. And in the Son we meet the Father. So these are not accidental, and for a fascinating discussion I refer you to the book, he has other illustrations using the human person and the personality but these are sufficient to show that if you look carefully around you in the world the Trinity is not an irrational concept; it’s not something that’s totally at odds with the every day world around us. And if we are to be of the same faith of John this shouldn’t surprise us, because the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the persons that we’re going to meet in this Gospel.