Jesus, in saving us, reveals God to us. He makes known the unknowable God as the image of the invisible (Col. 1:15). He is the light of God (Heb. 1:1–3), who reveals him who dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16). Jesus can do these things because—and only because—he, as the Word, is preexistent Being: the “I Am.”

When you read the first words in the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1), you can place a massive mental wedge between those two words “God” and “created.” On the left side, you have the Creator: God. On the right, you have creation: everything else, all that is not God. This, as we noted previously, implies our doctrine of divine aseity. Nothing on the right side of this Creator/creature divide can in any way define what is on the left side. One of the ways we identify who’s who in this scheme is to ask the questions, Which one doesn’t need the other, and which is defined by its need of the other? We cannot come to imagine the Creator and the creature in a mutually defining way without either making God out to be a creature, on the one hand, or making creation out to be God, on the other. So the first verse of the Bible tells us about divine aseity indirectly, by pure negation. At least part of what it means for God to be God is for him to not be creation, which means that unlike creation, God is independent. But does the New Testament add any texture to this understanding of divine aseity? Yes. Quite a bit actually.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, sitting down with the apostle John, the beloved disciple, after he’s written the first draft of his Gospel. Let’s say you’re invited to hear him recite it aloud and to offer your feedback. Let’s also pretend that you are a well-read, first-century Jew who knows little of Jesus but who knows the Jewish Scriptures well, having been steeped in them from your youth. Also, since (as was the case for first-century Jews) you have grown up within the context of the Roman Empire and have been enculturated in a thoroughly Greek environment, you have some working knowledge of Greek philosophy and its technical terminology. So there you are, sitting in a room with John who holds an open scroll before you. He clears his throat and begins to read: “In the beginning.” He pauses for effect, long enough to allow you to complete the phrase in your mind: God created the heavens and the earth. And you wonder, I thought John was reading something he wrote. Why is he quoting Moses’s words? No sooner do you ask yourself this, however, than John utterly surprises you by changing the words: “. . . was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Just as the opening salvo of Genesis contains galaxies of theological implications, so too do the opening words of John’s Gospel, which intentionally converses with Genesis 1:1.

This slight shift of the Genesis account would remind you—a Jew who knows the Jewish Scriptures—of all the ways Yahweh’s word is talked about and personified in the Old Testament. You would think about Psalm 33:6:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

You would also recall Yahweh’s promise through Isaiah that his word would go out and accomplish his purposes (Isa. 55:10–11). These thoughts would be reinforced as John continues to read: “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:2–3). At this point, your mind would probably rummage through the Proverbs and rest on the description of wisdom in Proverbs 8—personified as a preexistent agent alongside Yahweh, establishing Yahweh’s creation (see Prov. 8:22–31).

And as a Jew whose entire culture had been, since before you were born, thoroughly Hellenized (that is, influenced by the Greek culture of the Roman Empire that governed your people), you would also find it striking that John uses the Greek word logos (“Word”). It would conjure up all sorts of connotations about reason as the underlying structure of the universe—the most fundamental organizing principle that governs all things and the integrating point that ultimately connects any one part of the cosmos to any other. According to some from the Greek philosophical tradition, at the very foundation of the cosmos is eternal, transcendent reason. And this, too, would seem to make sense of what John’s Gospel is saying.

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