Deity of Christ; John 1:1-4
John 1:1 NASB “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
There are several
different beginnings in the Scripture. The first beginning as far as we can
tell was the creation of the angels. We know that the angels were first in
order of creation because in Job 38:4 we read: NASB ““Where were you
when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell {Me,} if you have understanding,
When God first created the
universe it started the space-time continuum. Space and time are related to one
another. You can’t have space without time; you can’t have time without space. So
at the very beginning of the space-time principle, this is the arche, this is the beginning. What John
is saying is, at the beginning—the verb is in the imperfect tense of eimi [e)mi], which is the verb to be. It means was, or her e the
best translation “was existing.” So what John does through this verb is to break
right through this wall at the beginning of time and go into eternity past. Basically
what he is saying is, in the beginning when everything began the Word was
already continually in existence. The imperfect tense of the verb is a
progressive imperfect of description which denotes continual action in past
time. It vividly represents the action as going on and on without end,
indefinitely, in past time, with no reference to its completion or its present
state. So in the beginning, at the time of the beginning, at this point when
everything began, the Word, the logos,
was already existing; continuously existing without
end. This was one of the strongest ways that John could use to express the
eternity of Jesus Christ.
Logos [logoj] is
a very interesting word. If you look up in the Liddell-Scott Greek-English
lexicon there are three pages of meanings listed. Just a hint of what this word
entails: account, reckoning, measure, esteem, consideration, value, relation,
correspondence, proportion, ratio, explanation, plea, pretext, ground, reason,
a statement of a theory, a logical argument, a proposition, a rule, a
principle, a formula, the inward debate of the soul, thus is refers to thought that
is then expressed outwardly as a word. There is another Greek word for “word,” rhema, which refers to the spoken word. Logos goes beyond the simple spoken word
to the thought that underlies the spoken word. Logos
means thinking, therefore, reasoning, reflection, deliberation, mental conception.
It has the idea of scientific reasoning and right process of thought, logic,
abstract reasoning, discursive reasoning, reason as a faculty of the soul, the
reason that pervades the universe, creative reason, speech, narration and
verbal expression or utterance which relates to revelation. So logos is a title
that has a vast array of meanings, it is a title for the seco0nd person of the
Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ who is the expression or revelation of God the
Father.
John
“In the beginning the logos continually existed.” In Greek are
two different words for “being.” The first is eimi
which means to be; it is the basic verb of existence. In the present tense or
the imperfect tense which has to do with continual action it would have to do
with continual existence. When Jesus said: “Before Abraham was, IAM,” they
understood that as a technical title, a technical reference to God the Father. When God revealed His name to Moses as Yahweh that comes from the basic word which means to be. The
second word is ginomai [ginomai], and that is to cause to be or to bring into
existence. We see this in John 8:58 NASB “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly,
truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born [ginomai], I am’[e)gw e)imi]” – “Before Abraham
came into existence, I continually existed.” When He used this word and this
phrase he was claiming for Himself deity. This is demonstrated in the next verse
by the reaction. They knew what he was saying. “Therefore they picked up stones
to throw at Him…” They were going to stone Him right there for blasphemy. They
knew he was claiming to be God.
“In the beginning was the
Word.” Ultimate reality in the universe isn’t emotion. Today we live in an age
of emotion at the expense of reason, and what the Bible says is that if you want
to get in touch with the ultimate reality of the universe it is related to
reason: logos, logic, rationality.
Christianity is not anti-rational, it is not irrational,
not some sort of subjective leap into emotional experience or feeling. It is
based on cold, hard facts. That is the point of this whole Gospel.
John begins his Gospel to
demonstrate the deity of the second person of the Trinity. “…and the Word was
with God…” In the Greek the preposition is pros
[proj] plus the accusative, which means “face to face with
God”—proj ton qeon. A definite
article in English is the word “the.” It adds specificity. In English there is
either a definite article “the” or an indefinite article “a” or “an” which could be anything in
a class or a category. That is not how the definite article in Greek functions.
When John writes this phrase the definite indicates the identity of God. He was
face to face with God, so immediately we see two different persons. The article
emphasizes a specific person. So we see here two persons: the logos and theos. The logos
is face to face with theos. So theos here refers to God the Father. When
the article is absent, then identity or individual person is not the prominent
idea. It can be indefinite, a god, but it can also emphasize quality—the quality
of a thing, the essence of a thing. That is how the Greeks often did it, to
bring emphasis to a particular word and its essence as opposed to its
individual identity they dropped out the article. This is exactly what happens in
the next phrase: “and the Word was God.” It is in the reverse word order in the
Greek: theos en ho logos, [qeoj h)n o( logoj], God was the
Word. Why did John put theos at
the beginning for emphasis? He also did something else; he left out the
definite article.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses
are really a modern incarnation of a very ancient heresy called Araianism. Arius was a fourth
century presbyter from
In the New Testament there
are 282 occurrences of the noun theos
without a definite article. In only 16 of those 282 occurrences do the Jehovah’s
Witnesses translate it as “a God” or with a lower case g in their
In Greek when there is
that word without the article what the author is emphasizing is the essence,
the quality of that noun. So when John says, qeoj h)n o( logoj, what he is
saying is that the Word is identical in essence to God. He is claiming absolute
identity.
John 1:2 NASB “He
was in the beginning with God.” That means that God the Son was intimately
involved at the beginning. [3] All things came into being through Him, and
apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. [4] In Him was
life, and the life was the Light of men.” In God part of His attributes is that
God is eternal life; man is not. God wants to share His eternal life with man,
he wants to give that to every single human being. John