John 1:18

‘No man has seen God at any time. God only begotten, (or ‘the only begotten Son') who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.'

Indeed he sums up by declaring that Jesus is the final revelation of God, as the One Who alone partakes in His essence. He is ‘God only begotten', alone enjoying the very nature and essence of God.

‘God only begotten.' Many ancient authorities have here ‘God only begotten' instead of ‘only begotten Son', and the evidence for the former is very strong (‘monogenes theos' instead of ‘ho monogenes ‘uios'). It is especially likely that it represents the original text because the idea of ‘only begotten Son' (ton ‘uion ton monogene) is found in John 3:16. But either way the meaning is the same. Both mean ‘of the same nature and essence with the Father'. Here was one Who was of the very essence of the Godhead.

‘No one has seen God at any time.' There were those who had awesome revelations of God, such as Abraham in Genesis 15:12; Moses in Exodus 3:2; Exodus 33:21; Job in Job 42:5; Isaiah in Isaiah 6:1 and Ezekiel in Ezekiel 1, but these were but shadows of the great reality. Mainly He was revealed in fire. They had not seen God as He really is. For God is the One Who dwells in unapproachable light, Whom no man has see nor can see (1 Timothy 6:16; 1 John 4:12).

As the hymn writer put it:

The spirits that surround the throne, may bear the burning bliss,

But that is surely theirs alone

For they have never, never known

A fallen world like this.

Yet here He now was revealed in human form. In Jesus the Father was being revealed (John 14:7).

‘Who is in the bosom of the Father.' Compare ‘pros ton theon in John 1:1 - ‘in close relationship with God'. To be in someone's bosom meant to be in favoured relationship, to enjoy the choicest position, and only one could be in a person's bosom at a time. Thus Jesus is being portrayed as uniquely favoured by His Father.

‘He has made Him known, (or ‘declared Him').' The verb is exegeomai, ‘to explain, interpret, tell, report, describe, and thus make known'. It is used of gods making themselves known to men. In this context therefore it means ‘makes God fully known'. He has made God known as none else had or could do (compare John 14:7; Matthew 11:25).

Through Jesus Christ, God's final Word to man, God is revealed as never before, not in the sheer glory of a shining brightness (although a glimpse of that was given at the Transfiguration), but in the fullness of His personality, in His behaviour, in His thought and in His presence. Now we can know what God is really like, for He has sent us His likeness in human form, His final Word to man, and through that Word we can be saved.

We can sum up by considering that behind these last verses (14 onwards) there is a deliberate connection with the Exodus narrative, especially Exodus 33. There God came down to dwell among men in His glory within the tabernacle (Exodus 33:9; Exodus 40:34). Here God comes down, made flesh, to dwell in a humanity which is His tabernacle, and reveals His glory. There the Law was given (Exodus 32:15; Exodus 33:13; Exodus 34:1), here grace and truth come. There God was seen in veiled form in a cloud (Exodus 33:9), here He is more fully revealed, though veiled in flesh. There Moses spoke with God ‘face to face' (Exodus 33:11), yet in a cloud, for he could not see His glory (Exodus 33:20; Exodus 33:22), here we behold His glory, seeing Him face to face. The new covenant is more real and personal, more glorious, than the old. It is the beginning of a new deliverance.

NOTE. Extract from Plummer's Commentary on John In The Cambridge Bible Series Re The Word.

John 1:1

(1) In the Old Testament we find the Word or Wisdom of God personified, generally as an instrument for executing the Divine Will. We have a faint trace of it in the ‘God said' of Genesis 1:3; Genesis 1:6; Genesis 1:9; Genesis 1:11; Genesis 1:14, etc.

The personification of the Word of God begins to appear in the Psalms, Psalms 33:6; Psalms 107:20; Psalms 119:89; Psalms 147:15. In Proverbs 8:9 the Wisdom of God is personified in very striking terms. This Wisdom is manifested in the power and mighty works of God; that God is love is a revelation yet to come.

(2) In the Apocrypha the personification is more complete than in O. T. In Ecclesiasticus (c. B.C. 150 100) Sir 1:1-20; Sir 24:1-22, and in the Book of Wisdom (c. B.C. 100) Wis 6:22 to Wis 9:18 we have Wisdom strongly personified. In Wis 18:15 the 'Almighty Word' of God appears as an agent of vengeance.

(3) In the Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases of O.T., the development is carried still further. These, though not yet written down, were in common use among the Jews in our Lord's time; and they were strongly influenced by the growing tendency to separate the Godhead from immediate contact with the material world. Where Scripture speaks of a direct communication from God to man, the Targums substituted the Memra, or ' Word of God.' Thus in Genesis 3:8, instead of 'they heard the voice of the Lord God,' the Targums have 'they heard the voice of the Word of the Lord God ;' and instead of 'God called unto Adam,' they put 'the Word of the Lord called unto Adam,' and so on. ' The Word of the Lord' is said to occur 150 times in a single Targum of the Pentateuch.

In the Theosophy of the Alexandrine Jews, which was a compound of theology with philosophy and mysticism, we seem to come nearer to a strictly personal view of the Divine Word or Wisdom, but really move further away from it. Philo, the leading representative of this religious speculation (fl. A.D. 40 50), admitted into his philosophy very various, and not always harmonious elements. Consequently his conception of the Logos is not fixed or clear. On the whole his Logos means some intermediate agency, by means of which God created material things and communicated with them. But whether this Logos is one Being or more, whether it is personal or not, we cannot be sure; and perhaps Philo himself was undecided.

Certainly his Logos is very different from that of S. John; for it is scarcely a Person, and it is not the Messiah. And when we note that of the two meanings of Logos Philo dwells most on the side which is less prominent, while the Targums insist on that which is more prominent in the teaching of S. John, we cannot doubt the source of his language. The Logos of Philo is preeminently the Divine Reason. The Memra of the Targums is rather the Divine Word; i.e. the Will of God manifested in personal action; and this rather than a philosophical abstraction of the Divine Intelligence is the starting point of S. John's expression.

To sum up : the personification of the Divine Word in O. T. is poetical, in Philo metaphysical, in S. John historical. The Apocrypha and Targums help to fill the chasm between O.T. and Philo; history itself fills the far greater chasm which separates all from S. John. Between Jewish poetry and Alexandrine speculation on the one hand and the Fourth Gospel on the other, lies the historical fact of the Incarnation of the Logos, the life of Jesus Christ.

The Logos of S. John, therefore, is not a mere attribute of God, but the Son of God, existing from all eternity, and manifested in space and time in the Person of Jesus Christ. In the Logos had been hidden from eternity all that God had to say to man; for the Logos was the living expression of the nature, purposes, and Will of God. (Comp. the impersonal designation of Christ in 1 John 1:1.) Human thought had ' been searching in vain for some means of connecting the finite with the Infinite, of making God intelligible to man and leading man up to God. S. John knew that he possessed the key to this enigma. He therefore took the phrase which human reason had lighted on in its gropings, stripped it of its misleading associations, fixed it by identifying it with the Christ, and filled it with that fullness of meaning which he himself had derived from Christ's own teaching.