Tag / Divine Logos

by James Ross Kelly

Logos — The Eternal Word—William Barclay


From  The Daily Bible Study Series

The Gospel of John Volume 1

by William Barclay

(John 1:1-2)
1:1-2 When the world had its beginning, the word was already there; and the word was with God; and the word was God. This word was in the beginning with God.

William Barclay 1907-1978

William Barclay 1907-1978

The beginning of John’s gospel is of such importance and of such depth of meaning that we must study it almost verse by verse.* It is John’s great thought that Jesus is none other than God’s creative and life-giving and light-giving word, that Jesus is the power of God which created the world and the reason of God which sustains the world come to earth in human and bodily form.
Here at the beginning John says three things about the Word; which is to say that he says three things about Jesus.
(i) The Word was already there at the very beginning things. John’s thought is going back to the first verse of the Bible. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). What John is saying is this—the Word is not one of the created things; the Word was there before creation.The Word is not part of the world which came into being in time; the Word is part of eternity and was there with God before time and the world began. John was thinking of what is known as the preexistence of Christ.
In many ways this idea of preexistence is very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to grasp. But it does mean one very simple, very practical, and very tremendous thing. If the Word was with God before time began, if God’s Word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God was always like Jesus. Sometimes we tend to think of God as stern and avenging; and we tend to think that something Jesus did changed God’s anger into love and altered his attitude to men. The New Testament knows nothing of that idea. The whole New Testament tells us, this passage of John especially, that God has always been like Jesus. What Jesus did was to open a window in time that we might see the eternal and unchanging love of God.
We may well ask, “What then about some of the things that we read in the Old Testament? What about the passages which speak about commandments of God to wipe out whole cities and to destroy men, women and children? What of the anger and the destructiveness and the jealousy of God that we sometimes read of in the older parts of Scripture?” The answer is this—it is not God who has changed; it is men’s knowledge of him that has changed. Men wrote these things because they did not know any better; that was the stage which their knowledge of God had reached.
When a child is learning any subject, he has to learn it stage by stage. He does not begin with full knowledge; he begins with what he can grasp and goes on to more and more. When he begins music appreciation, he does not start with a Bach Prelude and Fugue; he starts with something much more simple; and goes through stage after stage until his knowledge grows. It was that way with men and God. They could only grasp and understand God’s nature and his ways in part. It was only when Jesus came that they saw fully and completely what God has always been like.
It is told that a little girl was once confronted with some of the more bloodthirsty and savage parts of the Old Testament. Her comment was: “But that happened before God became a Christian!” If we may so put it with all reverence, when John says that the Word was always there, he is saying that God was always a Christian. He is telling us that God was and is and ever shall be like Jesus; but men could never know and realize that until Jesus came.
(ii) John goes on to say that the Word was with God. What does he mean by that? He means that always there has been the closest connection between the Word and God. Let us put that in another and a simpler way—there has always been the most intimate connection between Jesus and God. That means no one can tell us what God is like, what God’s will is for us, what God’s love and heart and mind are like, as Jesus can.
Let us take a simple human analogy. If we want to know what someone really thinks and feels about something, and if we are unable to approach the person ourselves, we do not go to someone who is merely an acquaintance of that person, to someone who has known him only a short time; we go to someone whom we know to be an intimate friend of many years’ standing. We know that he will really be able to interpret the mind and the heart of the other person to us.
It is something like that that John is saying about Jesus. He is saying that Jesus has always been with God. Let us use very human language because it is the only language we can use. John is saying that Jesus is so intimate with God that God has no secrets from him; and that, therefore, Jesus is the one person in all the universe who can reveal to us what God is like and how God feels towards us.
(iii) Finally John says that the Word was God. This is a difficult saying for us to understand, and it is difficult because Greek, in which John wrote, had a different way of saying things from the way in which English speaks. When Greek uses a noun it almost always uses the definite article with it. The Greek for God is theos  and the definite article is  ho. When Greek speaks about God it does not simply say theos; it says ho theos. Now when Greek does not use the definite article with a noun that noun becomes much more like an adjective. John did not say that the Word was ho  theos ; that would have been to say that the Word was identical with God. He said that the Word was theos—without the definite article—which means that the Word was, we might say, of the very same character and quality and essence and being as God. When John said the Word was God he was not saying that Jesus was identical with God; he was saying that Jesus was so perfectly the same as God in mind, in heart, in being that in him we perfectly see what God is like.
So right at the beginning of his Gospel John lays it down that in Jesus, and in him alone, there is perfectly revealed to men all that God always was and always will be, and all that he feels towards and desires for men.

[*italics of the 1955 edition restored but not text, which differs slightly]

by James Ross Kelly

John 1:1 — “it is not simply that the Word was with God” from Holloman’s Apologetics Commentary on the Bible


 

XPIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1):

In this opening verse of John’s Gospel, God is set in relation to the Word. The Word, which in verses 14-18 is clearly identified as Jesus Christ, is an eternal being that existed prior to creation. However, it is not simply that the Word was with God (so, too, was Isaiah’s personified Word and Wisdom), but John refers to the Word itself as God. This is quite a claim coming from a Jewish monotheist. From the patristic era (Arius) to the present (Jehovah’s Witnesses), some have argued that, because there is no definite article in front of theos, this verse merely identifies Jesus as a god rather than as God. Interestingly, around 1950 there was a change in how Jehovah’s Witnesses dealt with this verse. Before 1950, they carried a copy of the American Standard Version of the Bible. However, the problem they faced was that the ASV rendered verse 1 accurately with the phrase “the Word was God.” In an effort to resolve the difficulty this rendering posed for its theology, the Watchtower Society (the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publishing group) issued its own translation of the Bible, which rendered the verse as “the Word was a god” (Reed 1986, 71). However, there are several reasons why this translation is inaccurate.
First, John, as a monotheistic Jew, would not have referred to another person as “a god.” The Jews had no place for demigods in their belief system. Second, if John had placed a definite article before theos, he would have abandoned the distinction between the two persons he established in the previous clause (“the Word was with God”). Third, the view defended by Jehovah’s Witnesses misunderstands Greek syntax. It is common in Greek for a predicate noun to be specific without having an article. For example, later in this chapter reference is made to Nathanael’s confession of Jesus, “you are the King of Israel” (1:49), with no article being before “King” in the Greek (for other NT examples of this construction, see 8:39; 17:17; Rom 14:17; Gal 4:25; Rev 1:20). From these examples, it is clear that the lack of an article in Greek does not necessarily imply indefiniteness (“a” god). Finally, John could have used the word theios if he were simply trying to say that Jesus was “divine” (i.e., that he had God-like qualities) rather than being God himself. The anarthrous (article-less) theos is most likely used to explain that Jesus “shared the essence of the Father though they differed in person” (Wallace 1996, 269). As D. A. Carson explains, “In fact, if John had included the article, he would have been saying something quite untrue. He would have been so identifying the Word with God that no divine being could exist apart from the Word. In that case, it would be nonsense to say (in the words of the second clause of this verse) that the Word was with God” (1991, 117).
The Word was with God, and the Word was God (1:1): Critics often say that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is unbiblical. While it is true that no verse specifically spells out that God is “three divine persons in one essence,” as our historic creeds have stated, the fact is the biblical witness demands the Trinitarian doctrine. The present verse disproves any monistic model of God, for the Word is at one and the same time “with” God, meaning there is some way of making distinction between Word and God, while at the same time the Word is God. Hence from this verse one would conclude that there are at least two personal beings united in the one godhead. A sampling of other verses supporting Trinitarianism includes Genesis 1:26; Isaiah 9:6; Matthew 28:19; 1 Corinthians 2:10; and Colossians 1:17.

Holman Apologetics Commentary on the Bible – Gospels to Acts.
page 505