The Divine Word
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2020 · 7 June 2020
We begin today a study of the gospel of John. John himself, who never refers to himself in his gospel. Church history tells us who the author is. And while John is mentioned twenty times in the other gospels, he’s never mentioned in this gospel at all by name. He calls himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John was changed much, so much so that he is known as the apostle of love.
John was also concerned about the truth. He mentions truth twenty-five times in his gospel and twenty times in his epistles. But one hundred times in this gospel, he uses the word believe. He wants us to believe the truth so that we can enter in to a relationship of love with the Lord. John has a father named a Zebedee. They run a fishing business in Galilee. His mother’s name is Salome.
The gospel of John is identified by many as the holy of holies of the New Testament. If there’s a most sacred chapter in the Bible, it would be John 17, where our Lord Jesus prays to the Father in that inter-Trinitarian prayer, the likes of which appears nowhere else in Scripture. And John is often called the Holy of Holies because in this gospel, the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ is fully displayed.
John’s message is this: The eternal God Himself has become human. The Creator has become a part of His creation, He is fully God and fully man. Why? In order that He might save sinners from their sin, death, judgment, and eternal hell. The eternal God, infinite, transcendent, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present, unchanging, that one true and living God has become man.
There are four gospels that tell the story. Three of them (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) give us the earthly history, the birth and the life and the experiences. And the calling of Jesus on His followers and the teaching and the parables and the events of His life, including His arrest, His trials, His execution and His resurrection. They’re called synoptic gospels, because they’re the synopsis of His earthly life.
John doesn’t give us the earthly story, he gives us the heavenly story. He gives us the supernatural view of Christ. Ninety percent of what is in John is not in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Ninety percent of this is John’s alone to declare under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. John is not focusing on the history of His life. There are no parables because they were earthly stories. This is a heavenly book.
The purpose of John is to convince the sinner of the true person of Christ. John 20:31 says, “That you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, you might have salvation in His name.” This is a salvation book. This is an evangelistic book. And in order to have salvation, you must believe in the true Christ, not a false Christ, not a Christ of human intuition.
Christ being God is under assault and always under attack. People want to talk about Jesus but they don’t want to define who He is. The message of the New Testament and of the Old Testament, as we saw from Isaiah 53, is that Jesus is God. He is nothing other than God, nothing less than God. He is not a created spirit-brother of Lucifer and Adam, as the Mormons say.
The New Testament is full of evidence that He is God. Philippians 2:6-7 is a good example, “He thought it not something to hold onto to be equal with God but humbled Himself, took on the form of a man.” We read from Hebrews 1:8 that God says to Jesus, “O God, your throne is forever and ever established in heaven.” The Scripture is full of evidences that He is God.
Just look at the titles given to Jesus and to God. God and Jesus are both called Shepherd, both called judge, both called Holy One in Scripture, both called first and last, both called the Light, both called the Lord of the Sabbath, both called Savior, both called Mighty God, both called Lord of Hosts, both called Alpha and Omega, both called Lord of glory, both called Redeemer and on and on.
Titles given to Jesus belong only to God. Our Lord Jesus is described as eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, immutable, unchanging, sovereign and all glorious. Jesus did works that only God can do, He created, He raised the dead, He overpowered the kingdom of darkness, He forgave sin and He received worship on many occasions through His life and ministry.
The essence of what John is showing us is in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” That is the most concise statement in Scripture on the incarnation. “The Word” is none other than Christ. But the Word, who is Jesus Christ, is God who took on humanity. The infinite becomes finite. The eternal one enters into time. The invisible one has become visible.
John doesn’t explain that. He says “the Word” because that was such a perfect term to identify Christ on the supernatural side. There was a philosophical understanding of the word, that’s the Greek term ‘logos’. The philosophers talked about logos as the reality that was visible in creation. But they believed it was an impersonal reality or actually, a non-personal reality.
And even the common people saw the logos, the philosophical identification of this powerful, non-personal force in the universe as being responsible for the way things were. Now John comes along and says, “Let me introduce you to the fact that the logos is not an impersonal force; the logos is a person. The logos is a personal God who came into the world in the man named Jesus.”
And for the Jewish people, they understood it because the phrase “the Word of the Lord” appeared so many times in the Old Testament, and the Word of the Lord was simply the revelation of God. You would know something about God when He spoke. Hebrews 1:1-2 says, “God who, in time past, by the fathers and through the prophets, spoke in many ways at various times, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son.”
So the Word of the Lord is the Word of God to people. There’s no greater manifestation of that, than Jesus Christ. He is God speaking to us. If you want to hear from God, you can read the Old Testament and you will hear what God spoke to the fathers and the prophets who wrote that. But if you want the fullest revelation of God, you go to the New Testament because God spoke to us in Christ.
So John is telling us that Jesus is the exact representation of the nature of God. So “the Word became flesh.” Though God is an immutable, pure, eternal being and is not changing, developing, growing being, yet He enters into creation and takes on humanity, which is in the process of becoming. And He starts out in a womb and becomes a child. He grows in wisdom, stature and favor with God and man.
The One who is a pure being becomes a man, becomes flesh and dwelt among us. His humanity is not an apparition. He didn’t take on the appearance of humanity or some apparition of humanity or some illusion of humanity, He actually took on flesh and dwelt among us. Philippians 2:7 says, He was made in the likeness of men. Hebrews 2:14 says, “He partook of flesh and blood.”
For thirty-three years, Colossians 2:9, “the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily”, fully God and fully man. That’s John’s message through this book. You must be right about Christ. Any assault on His deity is a heresy; any assault on His humanity is also heresy. Now, in order to demonstrate that Jesus is fully God in human flesh, John takes us through three very important truths.
There are three things that demonstrate the deity of Christ: His preexistence with God, His coexistence with God, and His self-existence with God. “In the beginning was the Word.” What beginning? In the beginning of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The Word, who is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was already in existence when God created everything that exists.
Now, if you’re not a part of the creation, you’re not a part of time and space. If you’re not a part of time and space, then you’re eternal. John affirms His preexistence. He existed before the beginning of everything that exists. He already existed. That’s described in the imperfect tense of the verb “to be”. The imperfect tense means continuously. He was continuously existing when the beginning began.
Time began with creation. Time began on the first day when God created and the second day and the third, and time has marched on until time will one day end, and we will live in eternity without time. That is why Jesus used a title that God uses to describe His own eternality. When Moses wanted to know the name of God, God said, “My name is I AM WHO I AM.”
In John 8:58 Jesus says to the Jews, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” He only speaks of Himself in the present tense because there never was a time He didn’t exist. This is reinforced in verse 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” The Word was with God is repeated in verse 2, “He was in the beginning with God.” This is an emphasis to make sure we don’t miss the point.
He not only exists as the eternal God, and it says it in verse 1, “The Word was God,” so He existed eternally with God. This is very important because what it tells us is that not only is He the eternal God, but He is distinct from the eternal God. And this is where we come to understand that there is one God and yet there are three persons. Here we find two of them. The Word was God, but the Word was also with God.
Only in a Trinitarian way can that be explained, to be God by nature and yet be a distinct person, being with God. We know from Genesis 1 that the Holy Spirit was also there, brooding over the face of the waters and bringing shape into the creation. The whole Trinity is involved in this creative work. Yes, God the Father is the Creator, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves over the creation and brings life to it.
Alongside the truth of pre-existence comes the second truth of co-existence. If He preexisted time and space, creation, then He has to be uncreated. If He’s uncreated, He has to be God. All angels were created. All fallen angels fell from heaven in which God had made them holy, and they rebelled and fell. Every person in the universe is a created being except the Creator Himself.
Colossians 2:9, “In Him the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” He is full deity. God was the Word. These four words in Greek are the clearest, most direct declaration of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ in all four gospels. So He is preexistent, outside time and space, before anything that is made is made. And He is co-existent, He is fully God. These are essentials for salvation faith.
Thirdly, He self-existed. If you’re not created, then you’ve existed outside creation. Pre-existent, co-existent, self-existent. How do we establish that? Verse 3, “All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being.” This is a reiteration essentially of what is in Hebrews, that God made all things through Jesus Christ.
Listen to 1 Corinthians 8:6, “There is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.” God is the Creator. The Holy Spirit is an agent in creation. But at the end, God does all His creating through the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. This doesn’t deny God as Creator. But it says that the Son of God is the agent by which the creating is done.
Now, this also leads to another conclusion in verse 4, “In Him was life.” Nobody gave Him life. He is alive and the source of life. And the word used is not ‘bios’ because we’re not just talking about biological life, which is one form of life. But the word is ‘zōē’, which has to do with spiritual life, the reality of life. A baby has biological life, but it has also a spiritual life that comes from God.
God has the power in Him for all of that kind of life. And spiritual life lasts forever. The Lord Jesus Christ is Himself life. He said that, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” He is the fundamental reality of all that exists. He is not the Jesus of the cults; He is not the Jesus of Liberalism. He is the Jesus who is fully God, fully man, who is the means by which everything that exists exists.
And not only is He the means that came into existence, but Hebrews 1:3 says, “By His power, He upholds all things.” He not only gave life, but He sustains life. He not only created, but He sustains the creation because in Him was life. And then in verse 4 John continues, “The life was the Light of men.” That’s why He came into the world, to shine light into the darkness, to reveal God.
Jesus is the eternal life source, manifest in the world like light shining in the darkness. And the Light, verse 5 says, shines in the darkness and the darkness didn’t comprehend it.” Light always overcomes darkness. What is the darkness? Well, in Luke 22:53, Jesus was coming to the cross, and He said, “This is the hour of the power of darkness.” The darkness refers to Satan and demons.
This opening of the gospel of John is such a powerful statement of the person of Christ and His impact on the world. The demon darkness cannot extinguish the Light. The Light is shining in the world, it has been shining in the world for a long time. It has been available to any who would listen. Do you believe that Jesus is God in human flesh? That’s the foundation of saving faith. Let us pray.