Believer, your Savior is the eternally begotten Son of God, the Word, the revelation of God, the One by whom we come to know God in salvation, who not only revealed God but who was in the womb of the virgin Mary, who by the mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit, took on our humanity, who obeyed in our place, who died for us, who was raised for us, who ascended, and who intercedes for us.

AGR’s Chris Gordon is preaching through the gospel of John. If you are an AGR listener (subscribe in Apple Podcasts or directly or use our free iOS/Android app) then you are getting these broadcasts delivered directly to your phone. The gospel of John is often presented as simple, which, in a sense, it is but it is also remarkably profound and yields great wealth to the patient. Consider the first clause of the gospel, “In the beginning was the Word.” What a remarkable way to begin an account of the life of Christ, not with the incarnation but in eternity. When John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wrote, “In the beginning” he was intentionally invoking and alluding to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning…”. John is saying that “the Word,” whom he has not identified yet, was “in the beginning.” The “beginning” in Genesis 1 and in John 1 is before there was any creation. We cannot even call it a point in time, since time had not yet been created. There was the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and nothing, which the Hebrew Bible calls “Tohu wabohu,” formless and void. We cannot even really imagine what nothing is. When we try to think of nothing, it becomes something. John says, that the Word was there. John is saying that there were multiple divine persons, co-eternal persons, of the same substance with each other yet personally distinct from each other, present in the beginning.

So far we have not even mentioned that John begins by using a term which had roots in Greek philosophy dating back 800 of years before the birth of Christ. The Platonists and the Stoics (i.e., the school of Zeno, who met on the porch, the Stoa) both wrote and thought at length about the “Logos,” the Word. The Stoics and Platonists thought of the Logos as a sort of universal rational principle, to which the reasonable soul should ascend, to gain understanding and to see reality. For John to invoke this term, with all its baggage, and to redefine it radically is nothing short of breathtaking. Those educated persons who first heard this gospel read out loud, which is how most would have first encountered a gospel in the first and second centuries, might have gasped audibly. For John, however, the Word is not a principle but a divine person.

Do you see what I mean when I say that the gospel of John is both simple and profound simultaneously? John says that ‘the Word” was “with God,” which is to say that he is not personally identical with the other divine person named so far but equal in divinity. We have nothing in Genesis 1 of creation yet. God had not yet spoken into nothing to create all that is. Thus, the ancient heretics, the Arians, have no ground in Scripture neither do their modern heirs, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Word is not an ancient creature. He is with God. We might even translate it, before his face. The preposition can signal, “toward.” This invokes the Hebrew phrase “before his face.”

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