In The Beginning Was The Word
THE WORD WAS GOD Trinity
John 1:1-5 5.12.21
Some people say that Jesus is just for kids who are easily satisfied with simple stories, and not for thinking people who have big questions and think deep thoughts. They cannot have read the Gospel of John.
God has written things here that are perfect for small children … and which at the same time are mind-blowing in their depth and heart-lifting in their beauty.
Today we are launching into the Gospel of John, where we hope to be, on and off, over the next few years of Sundays. Here there are shallows where children can wade, and deep seas in which older hearts and minds can swim.
We start at the first verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (1:1)
We know from what follows a bit further on, that John is writing about Jesus Christ. Why doesn’t he say “Christ was In the beginning, Christ was with God, and Christ was God.”?
Jewish readers would have known why. Calling Jesus “the Word” was shorthand for saying a lot about him.
When God speaks words, they are more than things that you can hear, or write down on paper – something just to be looked at. God’s words do things. They are really, really powerful. May I tell you a few things that God’s words do?
The beginning of this Gospel sounds like the beginning of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, doesn’t it? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …. God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” (Genesis 1:1,3)
God’s word is powerful enough to bring the whole of creation into being, from nothing. His word creates. Psalm 33:6 says “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.”
Firstly, then, God’s Word creates.
Secondly, God’s Word reveals.
A man I sat next to on a flight didn’t want to talk, which was his perfect right, but it meant that after 8 hours 10 centimetres apart, we knew nothing about each other, and we had no relationship. Relationships depend upon our revealing ourselves – what we think, believe, hope for and love.
Sometimes we reveal ourselves by what we do, but our actions can be ambiguous. If you heard that I had grabbed that guy on the plane and squeezed him tightly, what did that tell you? Was I trying to overpower a terrorist, show affection, or clearing his throat of food stuck in it? Only when I tell you why, will my action become clear.
There are thousands of actions of God recorded in the Old Testament. What do they all mean? When he speaks, his words give meaning to his actions, and he reveals himself. Now, after all those words, and after 400 years of there being no words, THE Word comes. To make it crystal clear what God is like. Look at Jesus, the revealing Word, and you are looking at God himself.
God’s word creates. It reveals. God’s word heals.
When the Israelites were in deep trouble, we read in Psalm 107:19,20a that “They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He sent out his word and healed them.”
How did he heal them? He gave orders to bread to fall from the sky to feed them. He commanded armies to rescue them. He commanded foul water to become fresh, and a lot more.
Jesus has come as the supremely healing Word. By a word healing broken and blind and lame bodies, sure – but in a way that are signs of the deeper healing of sins forgiven and people renewed, and the whole creation reconciled t God.
Since Jesus is God’s Word, he is:
· Creator– he is not one of the things made, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim, but he is the maker of everything that was made … “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” (v3). Everything else had a beginning, but not him. At the beginning he already was. Nothing or no one gave life to him. He IS life. So of course his created wind and waves and demons obey him.
· REVEALER – “In many ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1;1,2). God had spoken so much across 1500 years, but he saved the best and clearest and most beautiful words until the end. If you want to know what God is really like, look at and listen to Jesus, God’s greatest and best Word.
· HEALER – as we look through this gospel, what will we find? The temple is healed of corruption. An outcast woman is radically restored. A lame man walks again. His truth sets people free from Satan. A man born blind sees. A dead man lives again. All signs of the ultimate healing which comes at the end when he is lifted up to die, and all the children of God are saved out of hell and into a new life.
Here is the Word of God: Creator. Revealer. Saviour.
He comes as the eternal God himself. When everything else had a beginning, he was already there. He wasn’t given life – John says he “was life”. The reason you breathe and think and understand anything at all is because of his life … “his life was the light of men” (v4b).
This Word, this Jesus, was “in the beginning with God” and he “was God”. Which is it? With God or was God?
He is not God the Father. We can say that all that God the Father is, in his being, Jesus is. Fully God, and yet a person distinct from God the Father.
Can you get your head around that? Completely? I hope not. There is something mysterious in all this, isn’t there?
Just as well. A god who is no bigger than what you can think is no bigger than you. That is certainly not the God of the Bible. We praise God for the mystery.
However, what is clear is very clear, isn’t it?
When we see this clearly, where does it leave us?
1. ON OUR FACES
Years after John wrote this, the risen Lord Jesus walked into his room. He says “His eyes were like a flame of fire … and his voice was like the roar of many waters … from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.” (Rev 1:14-17)
Of course he did. How could you see the Creator-Revealer-Healer, and just go on eating dinner? This is the One who had no beginning, unique in a world of made things. It is a wonder that John was able to keep breathing when he saw Jesus in all his glory.
If the Queen walked in here, I imagine most of us would bow our heads. If Jesus, the Eternal God walked in, we would fall to the ground on our faces. If he then spoke, would any of us contradict him? Brag about who we are, or about our achievements? Lift our preferences over his? Slap him on the back as though he were not more than a good pal? Like John, we’d be speechless.
A few years back David Wells did a 10-year survey of evangelical churches like ours. He looked at the words of the songs we sing and of the sermons preached at funerals, at the way we promote our churches, and the programs we organise.
What he found was there was little concern for doctrine, more concern with image than integrity, and churches to be more like entertaining nightclubs than God-fearing families.
Why had it become like that? he asked. There may be several reasons, but he said that if he had to boil them down to one, it would be that “God rests too lightly on our churches.”
The Lord Jesus is not part of a slogan like “things go better with Christ”. He is not a boyfriend to whom we sing love songs, or a pal who puts up with anything. He is not someone with whom we can make deals. He is not some pathetic little god who can do what he wants only when we let him.
Jesus is the eternal God. He was there when all there was, was God. Yes, a person distinct from God the Father, but all that his Father is in himself, Jesus Christ is in himself.
Pray that as we read and think our way through this Gospel, that you see Jesus increasingly for who he really is … so that all of us see in a fresh way that our place is on our faces before him.
2. ON OUR FEET
Which people in your street or family, school or workplace were made by Jesus? Every single one of them was, because “all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.” (v3)
Which of those people know anything (from maths and science through to seeing God himself), or can do anything, apart from Jesus working in them? Not one of them, because “in him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (v4)
What an insult to this God that people should think they are self-made, and understand anything because of something in them? Or when at formal occasions, someone speaks about the Rainbow Serpent who created human beings and gave life to all things? How is it that we don’t burn inside with jealousy for his Name, as Paul did when he saw the false gods of Athens?
How is it that we are so slow to get to our feet to speak, and to make the real God known? Telling our workmates and friends and family members that there is only one Creator and giver of life and light. It is not them, it is not Allah, it is not the Rainbow Serpent. It is Jesus.
How is it that we can ever think that it’s okay that so many of the 8 billion people out there refuse to honour their Creator? When of them all Jesus says “They are mine, I made them for myself.” How are we not on our feet doing what we can do to change that? In Tamworth, Tokyo or Timbuktu.
Are people blessed when they hear and believe the gospel of Jesus? More than they could ever have imagined. It is not that that gets us on our feet. It is the knowledge that Jesus is God, great and glorious in every way, and we want him to be honoured.
On our feet, friends. Whatever it takes.
You say, people don’t want to hear. At least in our culture. The Rainbow Serpent gets a hearing in the name of respect for indigenous culture that Jesus never gets. The environmental song “We’ve got the whole world in our hands” is much more welcome that the song that says Jesus has the whole wide world in his hands.
People just like to think that they are self-made – they resent being told that life is not all about them.
Of course it is like that. As John is going to tell us in 3:19 “people love darkness rather than the light”. It’s the nature of spiritual darkness to want to snuff out the light … to try to overpower it (v5). Of course people don’t want us on our feet for Jesus.
So are we wasting our time getting to our feet for Jesus?
No, no. Such is the power of the light of Jesus that “the darkness has not overcome it” (v5). The power of Jesus is such that by the end there will be “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev 7:9)”.
Along the way to that there will be injuries, and some people will die, and there will be costs to pay. Christians are much more likely to be sidelined than saluted.
The darkness will not win when there is only one kingdom that is guaranteed of absolute and magnificent success. It is not the kingdom of darkness in any of its forms.
At COP 26 in Glasgow last month the message was “this planet is all that we have”, and it’s in our hands? Really?
Or is there a God over this planet, who made it and everything in it? Who landed on this planet to reveal the Living God spectacularly? Who, in coming to heal and save, overcame the darkness that tried to overcome him?
There is so much more to see about Jesus in this gospel, but that’s a great start, isn’t it?
Where does this vision of Jesus leave you? I do hope it’s on your face before him, and on your feet for him, before others.