John 1:5

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

In the beginning, when time began, before anything was formed, when God made ready to create heaven and earth, Genesis 1:1, when God first called things into existence. It is necessary that the evangelist use some expression which will, at least in a way, come within the ideas of men, for eternity itself is beyond the understanding of man. In the beginning was the Word, not: came the Word, or: was brought into existence, but: existed, had been in existence since the timeless reaches of eternity. The Word was in the beginning, 1 John 1:1; Revelation 1:2. The term. Word, or Logos, is strictly a Biblical expression or designation for the second person of the God-head, for Jesus Christ. He is no creature, no part of the creation, for He existed when no part of that existed. He is the Word which God spoke from eternity, begotten of God from eternity. And He existed, not as a dead substance or thing, but He was alive and active. - The relation between God and the Logos is next stated. The Word was with God, in inseparable nearness and closest intercommunion with God the Father. The Logos Himself is God, was God from the beginning and from eternity, was always connected most closely with the Father. He is distinct from God, in person, not in the essence. The text implies intercourse, and therefore separate personality. But though the Word is distinguishable from God in this manner yet the Word was God, in the absolute sense, not with a secondary or derived meaning. The Word is God in kind and essence: Jesus Christ is, according to His nature and essence, true God, 1 John 5:21. A god that would have someone over him as a superior could not be considered God. But the Word is coessential with God, is in full possession of the Godhead with eternity and all the other attributes of the Godhead.

This same Word was in the beginning with God: an emphatic reassertion of the distinction between the persons of the Godhead, and yet not a mere repetition of the first verse. The first statement had characterized the Word alone; the second had declared the personal distinction of the Word from God the Father; the third had expressed the essential unity and identity of the divine essence. Here John states that the eternal existence of the Word and His distinct personality had their being contemporaneously. It was the same Logos that he had spoken of in the first statements, whose deity he was here so plainly establishing. Incidentally, there is some emphasis on "in the beginning. " "In the beginning He was with God; afterwards, in time, He came to be with man. His pristine condition must first be grasped, if the grace of what succeeds is to be understood."

The next statement refers to the relation of the Logos to the world. All things were made through Him, through His almighty power, the entire creation. He was not the instrument of the creating God, being Himself without power; He was not a dead tool. He was Himself the almighty Creator of the universe; He called things into existence out of nothing; the world and everything in the world owes its existence to the creation of the Word. And there is nothing, not even one thing, not a single thing, which came into existence in the beginning, at the time of creation, that was made outside of Him, without His almighty power. Note: There is a great comfort in the idea that the Savior is interested in men not only from the standpoint of redemption, but also from that of creation. There is absolutely nothing in the wide world in which He is not personally interested, with the kindness of the great Creator that cares for all His creatures. The creatures of His hands are to become partakers of the atonement of His blood.

The relation of the Logos to mankind is brought out most beautifully. In Him is life, the true, divine, immortal life, John 3:15; Romans 2:7; Romans 5:10. He is the absolute Possessor of all that may be called life; He is the Fountainhead of life; all true life has its origin in Him. It is not physical life to which John has reference, for that has a different name in the Greek language, but spiritual and eternal life. Of all these He is the Author, the absolute Possessor. Outside of Him, as outside of the Father, there is no life; And the life in Him, which was the fountain of existence for all true, lasting life in the world, was, at the same time, the light of men, of all men. Life and light are synonymous: the two words characterize the work of Christ. The life which Christ gives to men, wants to give to all men, is that which incidentally illumines their dark hearts and minds. That is its glorious purpose, and that purpose is to be realized by the life-giving powers of the light, by the illuminating powers of the life. According to the usage of Scriptures, light is identical with salvation, Psalms 27:1; Isaiah 49:6; Isaiah 60:1. Christ, the Messiah, is the Light of the Gentiles, because He is the salvation, the Savior of all men.

The opposite of light is darkness, and the relation of the Logos to darkness is stated. And the Light, that wonderful, heavenly Light, shines in the darkness; it exerts its power, it sheds forth its light; it still shines, even now, through the Gospel. In the midst of the reign of darkness it shines, where misfortune, misery, wretchedness, condemnation are ruling, in this world, as it appears since the fall of man. The world is the kingdom of darkness, in the power of the Prince of Darkness. And the Logos has become the Light and Salvation of the world, just as soon as it had rejected God, just as soon as the darkness set in. In the Old Testament He was indeed preached only in prophecy and type; but none the less clearly for those that believed in the coming Messiah. But the true revelation of the Light took place with the incarnation of the Word. Then He, the Light, the Salvation, entered into the dark world, to give all men the benefit of His glorious illumination. He and His salvation were revealed to the world that all the people in the world might see Him and His redemption. But the darkness did not accept Him, would not understand Him; the darkness rejected the light. The darkened minds of the children of darkness, of all men by nature, do not, will not, receive the heavenly light in the Savior. That is their status, that is their character: opposition to Christ and His life and light-giving Gospel. The great majority of the people in the world rejected the light absolutely, and they continue to do so, even when its glorious beams fall into their hearts. They prefer wretchedness and eternal death to light and life with Christ. Those that do accept His salvation have been filled with willingness by the power of the Light.

The Deity of Jesus

There is hardly a page of Scriptures which unbelief, often parading under the name of science and truth, has not touched and soiled with blasphemous hands. But no other doctrine has so challenged the most desperate efforts of unbelievers inside and outside of the Church than that of the person and office of Christ. The question of Jesus: "What think ye of Christ, whose Son is He?" Matthew 22:42, important at all times since the Gospel was first proclaimed, has become a touchstone in our days; for by their answer to this question men range themselves with the friends or with the enemies of the Church of God in the real sense of the term.

Fortunately it will not be necessary to do more than merely refer to the fact that a few decades ago the very historicity of Jesus was questioned, and that some so-called Bible critics to this day do not hesitate to speak of a mythical theory of Jesus. "They assure us that in the gospels we have not got any 'tradition of a personality. ' Jesus, the central figure, never existed at all, but was a purely mythical personage. " We refer to this in the same way that we would register the idea of some mentally deranged person that denied the existence of the sun.

Far more dangerous are such critics that assume a sanctimonious attitude and act as though they were firm believers in the Bible and all its doctrines, while, as a matter of fact, they are undermining the very foundations of Christian belief by their insidious attacks upon Christ, the Savior of the world. It is by such as these that Jesus is represented merely as a leader in social progress, as the "supreme example of genius in the realm of intellect," whose "wonderful name lifts society upward in character and culture, and will yet lift man back to His Father's side. " Christ is indeed conceded a position as religious teacher, but one that "portrayed as an Infinite Father that God who holds the earth in His hand and rolls the sun like a golden ball along the pavement of the morning. " Christ is pictured in wonderfully flowing language in His relation to the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, and the seer. But it does not seem to occur to anyone to picture Christ, with equal beauty of language, in His relation to the poor sinner in need of salvation. And, with all their harping on the divinity of Christ, a great many of the modern religious leaders seem to have forgotten that there can be no salvation without the deity of Jesus assured.

We believe that Jesus Christ is true God. And, in order to summarize very briefly, let us point to only a few passages of the Bible. Jesus is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, called the Son of God, and not a son by adoption, but one born out of the essence of the Father from eternity. " Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee," Psalms 2:7; Hebrews 1:5. Mary is given the assurance: "That Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God," Luke 1:35. John expressly states of Jesus: "We saw His glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father," John 1:14. Jesus Himself does not reject the confession of Nathanael: "Thou art the Son of God," John 1:50, with horror, but accepts it as a matter of fact. John states it to be the purpose of His entire gospel: "These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God," John 20:31. St. Paul declares that "God spared not His own Son," Romans 8:32. And that the argument from the Sonship of Jesus to His Godhead is valid even the unbelieving Jews knew, thus surpassing many a modern critic: "The Jews sought to kill Him because He said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God," John 5:18.

But that is not all. Jesus is expressly and unequivocally called God; deity is actually ascribed to Him. The words of the prologue of our gospel are so unmistakable that only a flat denial can. remove them and their power. John writes: "The Word was God," John 1:1. He does not say that the Word was divine, but that the Word is actual, true, essential God. He says the same thing in his first epistle, when he declares that Jesus is "the true God and eternal life," 1 John 5:20. And Jesus Himself did not refuse to be honored and addressed as God when Thomas exclaimed: "My Lord and my God," John 20:28.

If we confine ourselves to the gospel of John alone, there is so much material to defend the deity of Christ that the sifting alone requires long and careful work. There is the testimony of the evangelist himself, John 1:1; John 2:11. There is the testimony of John the Baptist, John 1:15; John 3:23. See John 1:37; John 10:41. There is the testimony of Christ Himself, John 4:25; John 10:24; John 9:35; John 13:13; also John 3:16; John 5:17; John 10:30; John 8:19; John 10:38; John 14:7; John 5:19; John 14:26. There is the testimony of the Father, John 5:31; John 8:17; John 12:23; John 19:34; John 20:12. There is the testimony of the disciples of Jesus, John 1:41; John 1:49; John 6:67; John 11:27; John 20:28; John 21:15. There is finally the testimony of the people, John 6:14; John 7:31; John 10:41; John 12:12; John 4:42.

The Logos of the Prologue

The opening verses of the Gospel according to St. John have given occasion to numerous expositions which refuse to distinguish between inspiration and philosophy. John's choice of a name for Christ especially has brought on a veritable flood of opinions concerning the influence of pagan philosophy upon the doctrine of Christianity. It has been stated that the evangelist tried to effect a compromise between Platonic and Stoic ideas, on the one hand, and the fundamentals of Christianity, on the other. The old Greek philosopher Plato had written much about nous and logo s, and the later schools of philosophy had carried out the ideas and founded a philosophical system which, about the time that John wrote his gospel, began to be known as the Neo-Platonic. One man especially made use of the terms of Plato in the attempt to harmonize Jewish theology and Greek philosophy. That was the Greek Jew Philo, of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived from about 20 B. C. to about 42 A. D. He makes use of the term logos throughout his writings, sometimes in a definite, then again in a vague way, to bring out his mystical speculations. For this reason many critics have stated that John borrowed the term from Philo, together with many of the latter's philosophical deductions. But a careful comparison of the works of Philo with the gospel of John and with all other New Testament books shows that Philo's logos is a vague, shadowy conception, as unreal to himself, perhaps, as it is to anyone else, that it is merely a philosophic conception, the joint product of a peculiar theory respecting the nature of the Deity and the fact of the existence of the material universe. "The mere thought of an incarnation of the Logos would have been in the highest degree abhorrent to the tastes and sensibilities of the Alexandrians."

Other critics have identified the Logos of John with the memra of Jewish philosophical reflections. They refer to the Targum of Onkelos on Genesis 3:8, who substitutes "The voice of the word of the Lord" for "The voice of the Lord God"; the Jerusalem Targum, which has, on Genesis 22:14: "Abraham invoked in the name of the word of the Lord," and many others. Critics have even found many parallels in the Persian Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrian and in other writings. But the memra of the Jews in their Chaldee paraphrases of the Old Testament is nothing more than the product of theological reflection, just as that of Philo is the result of philosophic speculation. It is a device invented in order to render the notion of revelation conceivable to Jewish thought. Hilt of such an idea there is nowhere a trace in the prologue of John.

The conclusion that the believing commentator is bound to reach is "that, inspired by God, the Apostle John fixed on the word Logos (which was entirely familiar to him from the inspired writings of the Old Testament, especially from Genesis 1:1; Psalms 33:1, and others) as a designation of Jesus Christ, not only because the teaching of the Old Testament suggested it as singularly appropriate, but also in order to expose the futility of the Logos theories that had sprung up in the soil of pagan and semi pagan philosophy. " "Where among Christians Logos was mentioned without further restriction, nothing else could have been meant and understood, nor intended so, than the Word which was now preached and believed... But this Word is now Christ Himself: He personally is the Word which God has sent into the world, He is personally the essential, not only the final revelation. For in both respects He may be called the Word, inasmuch as He is spoken by God into the world, and inasmuch as He is now preached in the world... Only one Word the apostles brought, but a Word of whom they could testify that He was with God and was God, before the world came into existence, because this is true of Christ whom they preach, and who is even now, wherever He permits Himself to be preached, the Word intended for the world, to be believed by the world, just as it was in the days of His flesh". Since John begins his book with a statement concerning the Word, he surely means the Word which is now in the world for the purpose of being believed and for giving to the believers eternal life."

"Further we should know that there is a Word in God, unlike my word or thy word. For we also have a word, especially the word of the heart, as the holy fathers call it, as, when a person meditates upon something and diligently searches, then he has a word or conversation with himself of which no one knows but he alone,... Thus God also in eternity, in His majesty and divine essence, had a word, speech, conversation, and thought in His divine heart with Himself, unknown to all angels and men. That is called His Word, which was from eternity in His fatherly heart, by which God has determined to create heaven and earth, But of such will of God no person ever knew until that same Word became flesh and declared it, as is stated afterwards: The Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him."