Dennis Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is found in John chapter 1, verses 1 to 18. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

John chapter 1, the first 18 verses: “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 nothing was made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He was in the world, the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.

“But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness of him and cried out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me. And of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.

“For the law was given through Moses. But grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared him.”

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for this word, for its beauty. And we pray, Father, that your Spirit would open our hearts to receive this word, that we might be transformed at the innermost parts of our being. We do pray that the light of the Holy Spirit would shine upon us, Lord God, by this word, so that we would rejoice in our Savior and the wonders of his gifts. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

In the beginning—today we begin a series of sermons through John’s gospel, and we’ll play off this beginning phrase of John’s gospel: “In the beginning.” In the beginning, we have in the first 18 verses of the first chapter of John’s gospel what nearly everyone agrees is a prologue, an opening of the book or the gospel that John has written. A prologue means the beginning word, and it kind of introduces the rest of the subject matter of the gospel. Another word for that is opening.

The opening of this book is here. And at the opening of a book, an opening of a piece of literature, the opening of a symphony, there are these notes sounded that describe what will be contained in the rest of the work. The prologue is 18 verses and it is set apart by its literary structure. It is hymnlike, and in fact many commentators have thought that we have here are fragments of hymns sung in the Christian church with some narrative about John the Baptist mingled in.

It is largely poetic—these first 18 verses—whereas the rest of the Gospel of John, of course, is largely a narrative account of the life of our Savior. Although the Gospel of John is unique in that there are long discourses by our Savior, long teachings, little bits of action, reactions of people, and then a long entrance of Jesus’s words into the situation, producing life and an understanding of what’s going on.

So we have here a beginning, an opening of John’s gospel. We have simplicity. We have profundity. We have anticipation developed. And we have some linkage that is very important.

We first have simplicity. Probably many of you know that the Gospel of John is the most translated book of the scriptures. There are a couple of different reasons for that. The purpose statement of John is that he wrote these things so that we might believe, that we might have life in his name. But it’s also a very translated book because it’s easy to translate, relatively speaking. It’s very simple language. Usually in Greek courses, this is the first New Testament book that a student of Greek will translate from the Greek into English because of the simplicity of the Greek grammar.

And as we read this prologue, it’s a little daunting because of that very simplicity. We read these words and we know that they are very simple words: light, the word, came, flesh, darkness, simple concepts, life. But we know that they’re densely packed truths. There’s a simplicity to the opening of John’s gospel. There is this simplicity, and it is a simplicity that has drawn people’s acclaim throughout the last 2,000 years.

Matthew Henry in his commentary says that Augustine says that his friend Simplicius told him that he had heard a Platonic philosopher say that these first verses of St. John’s gospel were worthy to be written in letters of gold. The first few verses that we just read, worthy to be written in letters of gold.

The learned Francis Junius, in the account he gives of his own life, tells how he was in his youth infected with loose notions in religion and by the grace of God was wonderfully recovered by reading accidentally these verses in a Bible which his father had designedly left in his way. He says that he observed such a divinity in the argument and an authority and majesty in the style that his flesh trembled and he was struck with such amazement that for a whole day he scarcely knew where he was or what he did. And then he dates the beginning of his being properly religious or Christian in his perspective of life.

These opening phrases are beautiful, simple phrases, and yet exceedingly profound. They’re simple because the message is simple. The message is the identity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The opening of this gospel begins with the message that will sound throughout the rest of the gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That is the message of the Gospel of John—that Jesus Christ is God, and that this God came down from heaven to save his people, took on human flesh, that he might live a life in obedience in that flesh, and then go to the cross as our sin bearer. This is the story of the Word of God, the Son of God, the Lamb of God that John will call him here later on in this chapter.

Now, this is a simple story. There’s a simplicity to this reality that is beautiful in the way that John states it. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Gospel of John gives us a history of the Lord Jesus Christ, a fuller history, I might add, than the other three synoptic gospels that are lumped together—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The life of the Lord Jesus Christ is sketched out in three years of ministry in the Gospel of John alone. So he gives us a fuller description of the life of our Savior, and we’ll talk about one reason for that in a couple of minutes.

But understand that it is a life, or a history of Jesus, but of course it begins here by telling us that as we read this life of Jesus, we are to interpret it in light of this great theme that is struck in the very beginning verse in such a simple, yet beautiful, and profound way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

So when we read of the Savior’s accounts of what he does and what he says, we recognize, believing this first verse from John, that we are reading the account of God himself, the second person of the Trinity, coming to earth, becoming incarnate to affect the salvation of his people and to affect nothing less than a new creation, analogous to the beginning creation of the world itself.

So we have this beautiful, simple message telling us: when you read this gospel, do not read it as a dry historical account, but read it as it is. The meaning of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ is understood on the basis of the opening verse of this gospel. The prologue is, as one commentator put it, a directive to the reader—how the entire gospel should be read and understood. So it’s very important we get the simple, yet profound message that is given to us here.

John writes in a style here that has been commented on at great length. He writes in a style that is incredibly accessible to his audience. His audience were, of course, the Jews, and he begins with “In the beginning was the Word,” and that’s a very Jewish statement. But his audience also was the Greek world, and they had a conception of the word that was very important in their philosophical systems.

This word, logos, here is the subject of much controversy, and I am convinced that John is using covenant word roots from the Old Testament. But nonetheless, he writes it in a style that will intrigue the Greek as he listens to this first line being said: “In the beginning was the logos, and this logos was with God, and this logos was God.” An astonishing statement that would surely pick up the ears of the Greek, that he would read on and find himself confronted with the Jesus of this Scripture.

Different cultures, different languages have responded to this gospel in much the same way. The simplicity and beauty of it is part of the reason why it’s been translated so often, because it can be immediately put into the context of a native tongue with the kind of beauty and simplicity, yet deep meaning, that it holds for us here in our English rendering.

Most of you know, of course, that the New Testament was written in Greek. The language of the Old Testament was Hebrew, primarily—most of the Old Testament is Hebrew, New Testament is Greek. But I don’t know if you’ve contemplated the fact that most of the writers of the New Testament, apart from probably Luke, Greek was a second language to them. Greek is a second language. They were Hebrew in their original language.

So John here is writing in a Greek language. And there’s a reason I think why the New Testament is written in Greek. We don’t need to get into that today. But it is important for us to understand that John, by—I think this book is written in the 60s—after many years serving as a pastor at Ephesus, understands the use of language. This is not automatic writing that John is engaging in. We have the scriptures reflecting the style of the men involved. And John is writing here in a highly poetic form in a language that is not his first language. He attended to the language here.

The ministerial conference a year or two ago, they talked about the importance of beauty and poetry, that ministers of the word should understand what poetry is and how to speak in the context of poetry. And John is a wonderful representation of that to us here in this beautiful prologue that he gives us. The opening couple of phrases is a chiasm: “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” Beautiful poetic form from this Galilean fisherman who attends to literacy because of his knowledge of Jesus Christ and the importance of the word.

John used the parlance of his day to communicate the great news of an understanding of the meaning of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is simplicity to this. There is a sense in which this prologue is the opening theme. Some people compared it to an overture to an opera. Well, we don’t go to many operas, but we do watch musicals, most of us. And sometimes in these musicals that were produced in the 50s or 60s or even 40s, as the credits are rolling across the screen, you’ll hear music being played—little snippets of the song that will play in the rest of the musical. The songs, you know, they’ll go from one to the other, little refrains of each. And that’s kind of what this is: the simplicity here is because these various themes—of light and life and glory and the word and the incarnation—all of these themes are being portrayed: belief, the world. There’s a definition here of what the world is. There’s a cosmology, if you want to use that term. There’s a doctrine of the world itself here.

All these themes are opened up in these first 18 verses. And we have, in what in my way of thinking is an exciting, beautiful trip through John’s gospel, as these various themes that are played here in little, tiny, short snippets will be developed as the rest of the gospel moves on and fleshed out into whole songs. So that when we, by the end of this series going through the Gospel of John, by the end of this series when we read this prologue again, we’ll understand more of it, because the little snippets that we hear now—very little one or two notes being played—we’ll understand whole movements of that song as it moves into the rest of this particular gospel.

And for that reason—the fact that indeed this is kind of an overview, a synopsis, an overture to the rest of the gospel—while we’ve said that there is simplicity in the beginning of John’s gospel, there is great profundity.

Bultmann said that you can’t understand the prologue until you understand the whole rest of John’s gospel. You see, on one hand it’s very easily understood—these simple words—but on the other hand the concepts being dealt with are so massive and so foundational, underlying the foundation of everything else. They’re profound. They have this simplicity and yet profundity to them. So we won’t really comprehend this prologue until we get through with the rest of the gospel. And as I said here, these notes played out for us.

Hoskyns says that in the course of this gospel, the evangelist draws out what is involved in Jesus as the Word of God. The figure of Jesus as the embodiment of the glory of the Word of God controls the whole matter of the Christian religion, and it controls the whole matter of this gospel. And we—while Jesus is simple in the sense of understanding that he is God and his divinity is portrayed here obviously as God—he is infinitely complex. And so as this gospel portrays the Lord Jesus Christ to us in these beautiful terms, there is a profundity to it that we cannot miss.

There’s a profundity to the language that lets us know that something has happened here that is most dramatic in the history of the world. In this opening line—”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God”—as that is an account, an introduction to this person, this work, this historical narrative of who Jesus was, tells us that something radical and profound has happened with the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ that will challenge every man that comes into contact with this history.

The great divide is placed for us here in the context of how one will respond to the historical reality of the second person of the Trinity taking on human flesh to affect the salvation of his people and to affect this new beginning, this new creation of the world.

There’s a great profundity here. A marker has been placed in history, and men will be called from then on to measure their lives—individually in their lives as a culture—in relationship to this marker: that the second person of the Godhead, the Lord Jesus Christ, came to earth and changed forever the history of mankind. There’s a profundity here. There’s a simplicity matched with the profundity that produces a beauty to the text.

Remember we talked about that. That’s just one element of beauty: both simplicity and yet profundity being at the same time found in a particular work of art. And this is—make no mistake about it—a work of art. As we look at these first 18 verses, there’s anticipation here as well.

In the beginning. You know, the very first phrase sets up an anticipation. What’s this going to be? And particularly to those who recognize this as the opening refrain of the entire scriptures, as drawing the narrative of Jesus as a new Genesis, there’s an anticipation. What will this be like? If this is this same Jesus who spoke the world into creation, and now he has come and speaks many words and affects a new creation, over his land of which he is Lord, what will this new creation look like? Can’t wait to get to chapter two, you know, because there we begin to see life in this new creation.

The first introduction of the prologue, and then John’s witness is talked about at some length at the end of chapter 1. And then we get to the first narrative account of Jesus himself. And what is it? It’s a wedding. It’s a feast. It’s a joyous celebration that our Savior not only blesses by his attendance, but he blesses by bringing that miraculous turning of water into wine, that their joy might be increased. What is life in this new creation? It’s joy. We could spend a week talking about that.

But here we have this anticipation in the beginning. Something is happening here. This anticipation is built as you read this prologue. Where does Jesus—the name Jesus—come into this prologue? Do you know? Is it in that first verse? No. Is it in the second verse? No. We have this wonderful account: “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” Well, who is this word? We want to know. If this is so important, why don’t we have the name yet?

And in fact, the first name we get is verse six: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all through him might believe. He was not that light.” So now we have this light concept coming in. We want to know, who is this? This anticipation of the prologue builds to verse 17. And finally, in verse 17, after telling us in verse 16 that “of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace”—abounding to grace, abounding to grace, one grace after another, is the Christian life—and it’s only at that climax of this prologue that finally we read that “the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

So the prologue builds this sense of anticipation, and in the prologue it anticipates the naming of Jesus. But then that anticipates what will happen as Jesus begins to affect this new creation. And then finally, the final verse: “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son is in the bosom of the Father. He has declared him.” And the word here is the same word for exegesis. Our English word “exegesis” sounds just like the Greek word, pretty much. And it was the word that was used when rabbis would exegete the Old Testament word.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the exegete of the Father. He is the Word of God, and he is the exegete of that word. An incredibly important Reformed truth: that the scriptures interpret themselves. Jesus is the exegete of the word, and Jesus is the exegete, the revelation of the Father. And then now really the anticipation hasn’t ended by verse 18. Then we’ve got the name, but now we’re going to see how does he exegete the Father? How does he reveal the Father? How does he correct the false preaching of his word? How does he take that word and bring it to truth once more? The Lord Jesus Christ will declare him, and he will declare him and exegete him in the context of this gospel.

There is anticipation. There is a beautiful building through this prologue that then prepares us for yet more anticipation of the great things to come as the beautiful story of the Savior is articulated for us.

Anticipation, and there is linkage. We are not free to interpret this gospel and the words used in it in any way we want to. Now we should from the get-go recognize that when we read that “the Word was God,” as this word is being written here and as this word is being revealed to us, we want to be very careful to accept God’s definitions for what these words mean that make up this speech, so to speak.

What is the linkage? And here people have said, “Well, you’ve got this logos concept, and that was the foundation for Stoic Greek philosophy. So really we have here a philosophical prologue to the life of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Or maybe there are gnostic elements—you know, these kind of mysterious, vague concepts of word and what all that is. So maybe we have here a philosophical or a logical introduction to the book. One commentator, Gordon Clark, says, “In the beginning was reason or logic.” And that’s what this means. It’s kind of a philosophical or intellectual introduction to the gospel.

But of course, we believe that to interpret the scriptures, you link it to what it intends itself to be linked to. And there is no clearer linkage given than the opening phrase of this book: “In the beginning.”

Now, in Hebrew—was the Old Testament language primarily, the Greek is the New Testament. Then there’s a thing called the Septuagint. S-E-P-T-U-A-G-I-N-T. The Septuagint comes from 70 guys translating it. Well, the Septuagint was a Greek translation, excuse me, a Greek translation of the Old Testament. And in that Greek translation of Genesis, these are exactly the same Greek words that are used in this Greek translation of the Old Testament. So in other words, we don’t have to guess here. This is the Greek rendering of the first verse, first phrase of Genesis 1:1.

“In the beginning”—immediately in this gospel, linkage to the old covenant, so-called, the rest of the word of God is made to us, that informs us. And we, you know, as people of the book, as people of the word of God, we know what he means when he says “In the beginning was the Word.” And it’s not reason. It’s not rationality. It’s not the basis for Greek or Stoic philosophy. It’s the declarative word of God that brought the heavens and earth into existence. It’s the declarative word of God, his speech as Calvin translates it, that brings about reality and then determines whatsoever comes to pass.

The linkage is solid. This gospel is looked at in various ways, but in point of fact, I think it’s correct to say it’s probably the most Jewish of all four gospels. We’ll see that more next week. But as I said, we have three years of the Savior’s ministry, and we have three Passover accounts. We have the Savior at the Feast of Booths. We have Jesus in the context of this very prologue when it says that when we read in verse 14, “the Word became flesh, dwelt among us.” That word for dwelt is “tabernacled.” It’s a reference to the Old Testament tabernacle.

And what happens in the context of this tabernacle amongst us? “We beheld his glory.” This is a statement of the deity of Jesus as we understand the Old Testament roots of that verse. He is the tabernacle. He is the temple. Remember that’s what he tells them when he at the beginning of his ministry cleanses the temple: “Tear it down and I’ll raise it up in three days.” That took root with those men. They remembered that saying. They remember it better than we do, unfortunately, because that was the charge against him three years later.

Jesus is the tabernacle. Jesus is the temple. And Jesus is the glory of God that dwells in the context of his people.

So the references are very striking—Hebrew references or Old Testament references—as we begin this Gospel of John in verse one, and then throughout the rest of it. And we’ll see that—we’ll see, for instance, as we go through this gospel that the seven days of creation can be seen to pop right through the entire gospel. It’s structured that way. It’s interesting that we’ll see this in the next week or two, that in the rest of the account of chapter 1, this is “the next day,” and then “the next day,” and then “the third day.” It wants us to think in terms of days. Why? Well, it’s already told us this is the creation again. This is in the beginning of the new creation. And it wants us to think of a sequence of days the way that first creation was outlined for us in terms of a sequence of days.

There are strong linkages here in this beautiful, sublime, simple and yet profound anticipation of what the rest of this gospel will provide to us. It wants us to know from the get-go that this history of Jesus and the meaning of who Jesus is must be seen as fulfilling everything that Old Testament word has said. The book that this gospel relates us to and wants us to think of right out of the shoot is the book of Genesis. And the term “the word” is that word that is God’s declarative word in the context of the Old Testament.

Calvin says that “In the beginning was the speech.” That’s how he translates word. A little better translation in some ways, because “the word” is kind of an ambiguous context to it, but it’s declarative speech. James B. Jordan translates this as the “Holy of Holies,” which seems odd to talk about maybe, but the reason for that is that the Hebrew word for word—a variant of that same word that is we translate “word”—is the word that is interpreted as “Holy of Holies.” The Holy of Holies is referred to as a word in the context of the Old Testament.

And if you put that construction on it: “In the beginning was the Holy of Holies, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy of Holies became flesh. Tabernacles amongst us. The glory of God in the context of the Holy of Holies tabernacles in the midst of a human body,” the way the Holy of Holies represented the glory of God in the context of the Old Testament system. Don’t think I necessarily translate it that way, but the imagery is sound. Jordan is trying to get us to think in terms of Old Testament terms as we read these words and not to miss the meaning of them because of our own whatever context we bring from our culture to what these words mean.

No, we want to take his words. This word is important. John in 1 John 1:1 says, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have touched concerning the Word of life. Him we declare to you. The word is important to John.” Again, in John 19:13, as John gives a portrayal of Jesus, he’s clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God.

You see, it’s not some abstract Greek word. He’s the Word of God. He’s the Word of life. That’s the word that’s being spoken of in the context of this. And that’s the word that the Lord Jesus Christ comes to exegete, to declare, to reveal the Father and his word.

This is very important that we understand this, because if we make this term “word” into some abstract philosophical reason or rationality, we have done completely the opposite, I think, of what God wants us to do. “In the beginning” is not rationality. “In the beginning” is the pre-existent, pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, a person—that person, the persons of the Trinity—who decide to communicate to us, not primarily via reason or rationality. God communicates to us by means of word, a word that is accompanied by his Spirit that brings life and light to us.

Augustine said, “I believe in order to understand.” I believe in order to understand. We don’t understand to the end that we might then believe. As we present to people’s rationality or their system of thought, their ability to logically think things through, and may build a case for the Lord Jesus Christ on the basis of that, then all we’ve done is bring Jesus under the dominion of their thought system.

But God’s word invades that darkness that he describes here. Jesus comes, and the world is darkness—same way there was darkness at the beginning, and God said, “Let there be light.” Now, after Adam, the world is darkness once more. And Jesus comes as the light to dispel that darkness. That darkness dwells in the context of the supremacy of rationality or reason or image, sight. We don’t get to walk by sight. Sight comes later. Rationality follows a simple submission and a belief in the word of God.

History does not change primarily by way of image or by way of rationality. But history changes, it’s developed here, by word. “In the beginning was the Word.” That word is uttered forth. Jesus declares the Father, and as a result, this mile point of history is developed as that word goes forth.

What does John do when he comes? Does he come to, you know, make rational the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ? He does not. He comes to witness, to bear witness to the light. And as his words bear witness to the light, then we see more people coming to the faith. Paul speaks the word of God to people, and they become his spiritual children. They’re begotten, as it were. They’re born not of their own will or the will of flesh. They’re born of the Spirit. And they’re born of the Spirit who uses the word—not sight, not rationality, ultimately, but rather uses the word of God to invade the darkness of the human soul to bring hope to that soul, not hope you know based on anything other than the meaning and identity of that word, which is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

God is word, not picture. And from the beginning to the end of the scriptures, there are admonitions against worshiping via pictures. We don’t do that. We don’t bow down to pictures as the way to worship. Pictures are okay. It’s good to have symbols in the church. They’re not the way we worship. God is word and wants to be worshiped in the context of his spoken revelation of himself.

God initiates history through language. Language is exceedingly important to a Christian culture. We’ve said this before, but Jesus is Alpha and Omega in Revelation. Those are letters. It doesn’t just mean beginning and end—He’s that, too. He says he is—but he is letter. He’s Alpha and Omega. He’s language. What distinguishes us from the animals? Language. We’re made in God’s image. What’s important for us to develop in our home schools and in our private schools and in the church with children of the church? Language and a sense of language to use it correctly.

Any place the Christian culture has invaded and transformed, those places become literate. Those people become like John. They think of poetry. They think of language. They think of chiastic structures. They think of cycles of language. They think in terms of word, because this is the way that God transforms culture. And he calls us as well to use language in the context of changing and transforming history in our lives.

We begin by voice. We hear him. We hear his word, and we come under submission to that. And as a result, as Augustine says, we then understand. We then understand Jesus’s word. The word of God always produces historical development. And here it is, the word of God connected to the Old Testament, that is portrayed simply and yet profoundly as “In the beginning” of all things.

So linkage—in the beginning of the world, what do we find? We’re told here, in the beginning of the world we have Jesus, our God. Jesus’s identity is declared in the context of this gospel to be quite simply put: the God who is the creator of all things. And we read this immediately in verse three: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

Jesus Christ is declared here to be the creator. He is identified as, I said, with God himself. And that is exceedingly strongly developed in the context of this gospel: Jesus is God.

He explains some of the ways that this prologue tells us about Jesus being God. As we’ve said already, it’s made this point quite strongly in the opening verse, where the Word of God is identified with God and yet distinguished from him in a sense as well. Let me explain that.

Those of you who have any contact with Jehovah’s Witnesses know that they’ll tell you that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The Word was God.” There’s no definite article that precedes the word God here. So the word doesn’t say “the Word was the God.” It just says “the Word was God.” Okay. Well, why is that? Why is the definite article left out?

Because there is both identity with the word—and we could take the time to go through the Greek grammar, but suffice it to say that any Greek grammarian worth his salt, believers and non-believers, reject that argument of the Jehovah’s Witnesses completely. There is no need for the definite article here. The word “was” is a specific verb which, while close to another verb that means “became” or “become” or part of, is identified apart from it to show total identity between the Word and God. So there’s no doubt that this word strongly says that Jesus is God.

But why then the absence of the definite article? Because there’s a sense in which there’s a distinguishing from God as well. Because we don’t have a God who is just one person. This second person of the Trinity is not all that God is. There is Father, and there is Holy Spirit. But in any event, we’re told immediately, of course, the very first thing that this text tells us is that Jesus is God.

G.K. Barret, an English scholar, says this: “The absence of the article indicates that the Word is God, but is not the only being of whom this is true. If ‘the God’ had been written, it would have been implied that no divine being existed outside of the second person of the Trinity. John intends that the whole of his gospels be read in the light of this verse. The deeds and words of Jesus are the deeds and words of God. If this be not true, the book is blasphemous.”

Now, just a side comment here: if these words are true, that Jesus is God, then he is identifying himself with the God of creation, then that means we do not expect to find a great disjuncture between the New Testament and the Old Testament. That linkage and claim that Jesus is God links him to the old covenant. And so we have the same God permeating old and new covenants.

There is one other point I wanted to make here, and that is that in John 1:1, many commentators have seen an expression used here that links to chapter 20:28. In chapter 20:28, it’s post-resurrection. We have doubting Thomas, and Jesus comes and reveals himself to Thomas. And Thomas, in response to this revelation of who the Lord Jesus Christ is, declares to Jesus—he calls him—”My Lord and my God.”

So it’s interesting that the Gospel of John begins with this bald assertion that Jesus is God, and it concludes, or comes very close to concluding, in chapter 20:28 with the declaration by Thomas that indeed he is “My Lord and my God.” And that’s a challenge to us to assume Thomas’s confession. But it shows the totality of the gospel is bookended by those truths. Even though the kind of explicit expression that we find here in chapter 1:1 doesn’t permeate the gospel, yet there are these explicit beginning and ending statements, again a literary device used by John to tie the whole thing developed together.

This idea that Jesus Christ is the creator is the second demonstration in this prologue of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The first one is verse one: “The Word was God.” And the second one is verse three: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made.”

Jesus Christ is declared to be the creator of all things here. The creator of all things. So it’s very important to understand that the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ are linked in the context of verses 1, 2, and 3. And that is why it’s so important to resist the teachings of evolution and those who would change the historical account of the opening chapters of Genesis.

But the point here is that we have a double witness already to the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s God, and he created all things. So Psalm 33:6 says, “By the Word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” The Lord Jesus Christ is the Word of the Lord by which all things were brought into existence.

The same truth is given in Ephesians 3:9. We read there that “He was to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ.”

Colossians 1:12 and following: “Giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness. Conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of his love. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created that are in heaven and are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things consist. And he is the head of the body of the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may have preeminence.”

The Lord Jesus Christ is uncreated. He exists eternally in the context of the Godhead, the triune Godhead. And in fact, he is the active agent of creation. Hebrews 1:2 and 3: “In these last days, God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.”

The saints around the throne in Revelation 4 saying, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they exist and are created.” The Lord Jesus Christ is declared to be God because God created the heavens and the earth. And the Lord Jesus Christ is explicitly stated here to be him by whom all things were made. Without him nothing was made that was made.

In the third place, Jesus is declared to be God. So how do we know that Jesus is God? One: the declaration, “The Word was God.” Two: Jesus being designated as the creator in verse 3. And then we could also say that Jesus is declared to be God because of this verse referred to earlier, verse 14: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

God has chosen to dwell among people as he did in the context of the physical structure of the tabernacle. And Jesus is identifying himself as the temple of God. And the glory that dwells in the context of that temple is a declaration that Jesus is indeed God.

Finally, Jesus is declared here to be preexistent. One commentator has said that this prologue is the most complete, indeed the most explicit study of Christ’s pre-existence in the New Testament. What do we mean by pre-exist? Well, it means he pre-exists everything. He is before anything else exists apart from the Trinity, apart from the Godhead. He is before his incarnation. That’s what’s stated explicitly here.

And John himself says here that Jesus has preeminence over him in verse 15: “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me.’” The pre-existence of the Lord Jesus Christ, the fact that he exists prior to the rest of the created order being described here for us, is another very strong demonstration of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ in the context of this opening prologue of John’s gospel.

Verse 9 says this: “This was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. Every man that’s come into the world was given light in some fashion by this one. So all mankind are preceded by this Word that we are speaking of here.”

The deity of the Lord Jesus Christ is declared in rapid-fire, staccato terms here throughout this prologue. If this is to give meaning to a history, the centrality of the meaning of that history is the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Even this expression of glory and truth coming with the Lord Jesus Christ—in Exodus 34:6, we read that “the Lord passed before him and proclaimed: ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth.’” Throughout the prologue, we have these references, properly understood on the basis of the whole word of God, to assert the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the central message of the prologue. This is the central message of the gospel, the good news of…