Archive: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail th’incarnate Deity.”
by Leonard J. Bauer, United Methodist theological student, Wheaton, Illinois
As we began the fifth of a twelve lesson home Bible study, one of the class members startled me with the statement, “Yes, I believe Jesus is the Son of God, but I have never believed He is God.” I was at a complete loss for a response, but not because Scripture is not clear on this point; it is. I was at a loss because that statement came in the middle of a study of the Book of John – the Gospel whose central theme is that Jesus is who He claimed to be … God.
From many pulpits of our mainline denominations, from many seminaries, and in a vast number of books currently available from well-known and otherwise conservative authors, we are presented with a Jesus stripped of His Godly nature and paraded about as something of a model human being. This position is well-illustrated by the recent statement, “We must not substitute Jesus for God and forget that God was loving and gracious before Jesus was born and in places Jesus had never been. We affirm, not that Jesus was God, but that God was in Christ. …”[1]
In contradiction to this affirmation, the first eighteen verses of John (often referred to as “the prologue”) offer a clear statement on the deity of Christ. Jesus, this man from Nazareth, is indeed God.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God (1:1,2).
To grasp what John is saying to us we should read the first chapter of Genesis. The parallelism between its opening verses and those of John is startling, but also instructive. The idea the author of Genesis intends to convey is revealed in the repeated variations of the statement “and God said, ‘Let there be …’ and there was.” This chapter conveys best for us the Hebrew meaning of “the word,” which has been lost by modern cultural usage. To a Jew the word spoken was indistinguishable from the deed it portrayed. A word was not passive but carried with it the activity itself. Thus, a word spoken was a deed done.
In the Genesis account this concept is carried to its fullest in God Himself, where the act of creation rested solely on the word and had no other cause. That is, the deed was done because the word was spoken.
John, being a Jew and speaking originally to a church with a number of Jewish Christian members capitalized on this Hebrew concept. For the Jew who heard these opening verses, whether he spoke Hebrew or not, this understanding of the word would have been a part of his interpretation. This is true even though the Gospel of John was originally written in Greek.
The vast majority of the audience to which John’s Gospel was addressed were not Jewish, but Gentile—with a rich understanding of Greek language and culture. In the Greek John was stating that in the beginning was the logos. This was not startling to a Gentile familiar with Greek philosophy. They already knew that in the beginning was the logos, for logos conveyed more to them than the mere expression of an act or object through a word. A logos was the thought, the mental faculty behind that thought, and the motive expressed by that thought. It had a strong philosophical connotation and a spiritual implication, referring to what the Greek understood to be divine source and initiative. That divine source was both rational and known through reason. Interestingly, the English word “logic” is derived from the word logos.
A second English word derived from the Greek logos is “logo.” The meaning of this word is not limited to a symbol. As I sat in an airport I noticed the logo for a particular airline. It was painted on their planes, establishing them as part of the corporate family. The same symbol was displayed at the gate and ticket counters, establishing that part of the airport as “belonging.” Employees of the airline wore the logo, identifying themselves with the corporation. My ticket had the logo; the envelope containing my ticket had the logo; the baggage claim had the logo. In fact, everything associated with that airline was identified by the presence of the logo. Or, to state it correctly, the logo represented everything you could associate with that airline, all that was tangible and intangible. The logo was not only an expression but all encompassing in its expression. Likewise, the logos that John spoke of was the complete, all encompassing expression of God.
When John said that in the beginning was the logos he told the Greeks nothing new. They fully understood that. What was new to the Greek—especially if he was not a Christian—was that the Word, the Logos, was Jesus Christ.
The Word did not come into being in the beginning, but in the beginning He was. In His pre-incarnate state He was already in existence before the foundation of the world. In other words, before there were any creatures in the world, before there was a world, before space, before time, there existed the Word.
And The Word was with God. A distinct personal being, He was with God, sharing in the glory which He had with God before the world was (John 17:5). Distinctly with God from the beginning, the Word was God. Not like God, not the embodiment of God’s power, not a spirit of love which would become incarnate in the man Jesus at a point in history, the Word – Jesus of Nazareth – was God. Being with God, and being himself God, He was sent forth from God to reveal God among men.
All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made (1:3).
Two complementary, and yet distinct, statements are made in this very important verse. First, all things which were made and came into being, all of creation, came through and by Jesus Christ. Jesus not only existed from the beginning in a passive sense to be with God, but He was active in the divine operations at the beginning of time. He was active as a co-participant with the Father in that very deed which was the exclusive domain of the Almighty God. The second statement is seen to refute any notion that the opposite of the first statement can be true, for John says that without Jesus nothing that was created came into being. In other words, Jesus was not only a participant in the creation, but the creation could not have come into being without Jesus.
In his commentary, Matthew Henry draws a beautiful parallel: “This proves the excellency of the Christian religion, that the author and founder of it is the same that was the author and founder of the world.”[2] In our worship and praise of Jesus, the founder of our faith, we worship and praise the founder and creator of all the universe.
In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (1:4,5).
The God who created the universe is Himself life. And life is beyond the physical, being manifested in man—who was created in His image as intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual. And it is the spiritual life, not the physical life, which John emphasizes throughout the Gospel. It is that life which does not cease.
Just as in nature life does not exist without light, as God’s uniquely created being, man does not exist without the revelation that he possesses—his ability to perceive, spiritually, both within and beyond himself. To state it in the dimension which John addresses: in Jesus, the Light of the World, is God’s full revelation of the spiritual and eternal life—the essence of life itself. If Jesus is the life and the light—the essence and the revelation—then the light shines in a fallen world. In this world is darkness (the absence or rejection of the light) and death (the separation of man from his Creator). But the darkness did not overcome the light, nor shall it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through Him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light (1:6-8).
Leaving this broad expanse of timeless eternity which is Christ’s domain, the apostle turns to worldly specifics surrounding the events at the time of Jesus. Notice the sharp contrast between the first five verses in which we encounter the Word who was with God and who was God. In these verses, we are introduced – not to another timeless, cosmic being but instead to a man who was “sent from God, whose name was John.” He was a man with a mission.
He came to prepare the way for One greater than he. He came to turn us away from our sinful ways. He came to point us toward God. John came as a witness, to bear a testimony.
That testimony was to the light. But we might ask why that light had need of a witness. A light shines and bears its own witness. Its truth is self-evident and, in fact, cannot be extinguished.
However, that light cannot be seen by those who have shut their eyes to it. To be seen, those eyes needed to be opened. To open those eyes there was a man sent by God to bear witness to the light. John was not that light. His mission was only to give testimony to the light.
The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not. He came to His own home, and His own people received Him not. But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (1:9-13).
The One who was to come, the true light, the revelation of God Himself, is said now to have appeared. In other words, the One who created the world now entered His very creation in the form of a created being … and the people did not recognize their Creator. Furthermore, even the Jews, who had been given all previous revelation, including the coming of their Messiah, rejected Him when He appeared.
But to those who recognize Him as other than an impostor, who receive Him in belief and conviction, they shall become the children of God. Moreover they are empowered in the Spirit to be heirs of everything God has set aside for His children—both in this world and the world to come.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. … And from His fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. … No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known (1:14, 16, 18).
Here, in these closing verses of the prologue John gets to the heart of the matter—the core of the Christian faith. God, the Creator of the universe, became man in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and dwelt among us. He came as truth, the divine truth which only the Father could reveal. And He came bestowing on us grace upon grace—the free unmerited favor of God. He came not from the dust of the earth, as in the first Adam, but from the very bosom of the Father.
Is Jesus God? Certainly, if Scripture has any authority in the matter, no better witness could be found to bear testimony to this than the opening verses of John. By His attributes as the eternal cocreator of the universe, giver of life, and revealer of all divine truth, there can be no doubt of John’s testimony. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of a carpenter, is God.
Scripture portions here are quoted from the Revised Standard Version, copyright 1901, Thomas Nelson Publishing House
[1] Leaders Guide for “Christian Studies for Late Teens,” summer 1981 United Methodist church school curriculum.
[2] Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, Vol. V (Mclean, Virginia: MacDonald Publishing Co., 1721), p. 849.
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