John 1:1

Prayer for Illumination

Let's pray.

Father God, we just ask that you would be with us right now as we examine your word. Lord, even in my weakness and in my frailty as a man, I pray that, Lord, you would give me insight and clarity into your word, and that everything that we share tonight would be from you and for your people.

Lord, we ask these things in Jesus's name, amen. Well, guys, we did it. We actually made it to our second series in the Bible. If you remember, we've been going through the book of Jude. We did that for 13 weeks.

And our goal in that series was to understand what it meant to contend for the faith. Because we are a church, and back in Jude, they were a church that was living in a time where truth was being utterly compromised.

And the things that we learned from that were many. But today, I'm so glad that we are gonna be starting a brand new series. It's probably gonna last for the next 15 years. That's obviously a joke, but I'm so excited that we're gonna get to begin John 1 .1 today.

Because here's the point of John. No matter how short of a time that you've been walking with Jesus, no matter how long you've been walking with Jesus, John, the gospel, has something for you that will encourage you in your faith.

Now, tonight, I want us all to actually listen very, very closely to the sermon. Because there's gonna be some concepts in here that we're gonna have to cover tonight from John 1 .1 that have actually puzzled scholars for millennia.

And I'm gonna do the absolute best that I can to make this content understandable and relevant. I'm gonna do my best to not allow us to devolve ourselves down into this dead theological lecture. And I'm gonna do my absolute best to make sure that this is a Christ-exalting declaration.

But there are concepts in here that must be explained. If we're gonna rightly handle the word of God, then we're gonna need to dig into John 1 .1. So with that, I want you to listen well. I want you to listen almost like you're on the edge of your seats, because I promise you, it will be worth it.

If you understand what we are communicating tonight, you will get a picture of Jesus, perhaps, that you've never seen before. You will have a depth of who Jesus is that will fuel your soul. And that is my prayer, that we would understand what is going on in John 1 .1, and that it would ignite our worship, that we would stand in awe of Jesus Christ, and that we would walk out of here tonight richly and thoroughly praising our King.

The Gospel of John as a Deep but Accessible Book

So with that, let's begin by turning to one of the most astounding pieces of literature that has ever been written. Tonight, we turn to the Gospel of John, which is one of the places where new believers are often told to turn as they begin their journey with Christ.

It's this gospel that many children can understand, but it's also this gospel that has confounded some of the most brilliant minds in all of church history. Many say that this is where the biblical theology of who Christ is is at its deepest.

I would put it to you this way. John is both the kiddie pool for the child, and it's the Mariana Trench for the underwater explorer. It's been said of the Gospel of John that it is a pool safe enough for a child to wade in and find great joy, but yet deep enough for an elephant to drown in.

And we will experience some of that depth here this evening. But before we do, I want us to unpack what is our hope for this series in the Gospel of John. You see, I want us to explore this book verse by verse for as long as it takes.

And I want us, as we do that, to fall somewhere in the middle. I don't want us to remain in the shallow end when beautiful and glorious depths await us in our exploration in the Gospel of John. But I also don't want us to venture down into these underwater caverns of obscurity that many scholars are fond of going down, because that is not our purpose.

I have a book on my shelf that illustrates this well. It's 300 pages before it even starts talking about the first verse. It talks about the authorship and the date and the genre, the literary and rhetorical and historical considerations, and one of his biggest points is trying to discuss if John is an ancient biography, because if it's not, then we don't have to take it seriously about what it says, and we can pass it off as myth.

And over 300 pages. This wonderful godly man is arguing against all of these theories and all of these thoughts, because the Gospel of John has been one of the most highly attacked books in the New Testament.

So praise God that there are people like him who are doing this. But I just wanna share with all of us here today, that is not our purpose. We believe that John wrote the Gospel of John. We believe that the Holy Spirit authored, that every stroke of the pen that it reports to us is true.

So it's not our goal to show the historical veracity in great detail, although we will cover some of that. It's not our goal to do deep studies in order to be able to go and combat in the halls of academia.

We'll go deep. But it's our goal in this series to understand who Christ is. John has some of the most beautiful theology of Christ in all of the New Testament. And our purpose, the reason that we are gathering is not to listen to master level lectures or PhD level lectures.

We gather for a single purpose and that is to know the living God through his son, Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. And John is gonna help us get there. John even tells us that his purpose in writing the Gospel is this.

Turn with me to chapter 20, verse 31, as we're gonna, before we begin, we're gonna talk about the purpose of the book. John says it this way, but these have been written, that means every word of John's Gospel has been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name.

John tells us that the point of his Gospel is that we would believe three things. Everything that he has written has been structured around this point, every story, every example, every word, all boils down to these three fundamental truths that he just mentioned.

The first that he is calling us to believe is that we would believe Jesus is the Christ. The whole Gospel, it's about trying to communicate that this Jesus is the Messiah. He's the one who the Jewish people have been waiting for for a thousand years.

He's the son of Eve that is gonna crush the serpent's head. He's the true and greater Moses who's gonna lead his people into not law, but grace. He's the true and better priest who's gonna heal his people.

He's the true and better prophet who's gonna teach us the words of God. We, meaning us, and everyone who wrestles with the truth in this book must understand what John is doing. John is teaching us that Jesus is the long-awaited Christ, and that by believing in him, you will have life in his name.

Truth number two that John is asking us to wrestle with is that Jesus is God. John wants us to understand that while Jesus is fully human, he's the Messiah, he's the long-awaited one who's come. While he's fully man, he is also fully God, meaning that at all times, he is both all man and all God without ever sacrificing either one of those.

He is 100 man and 100 God, and we have to believe both of those thoughts if we wanna have life in his name. You see, you can't just believe that Jesus is a man in right relationship with God and receive life.

That's what the liberal theologians have done for decades. They believe that he's just this good moral example, he's just this good teacher, he's just this man who we're supposed to aspire to live life, and that is dead.

But you can't just believe that he's God without believing that he's man. You can't just believe like the Gnostics did in the New Testament times or just after the New Testament times. They believed that he was God, but he didn't wanna corrupt himself by coming to the world and becoming a man, so they believed that he was just a divine image or an apparition or a holographic person that didn't really come to earth, that didn't really die on the cross, he didn't really take on our sins.

You can't believe that. He has to be both. He's the fully flesh-bound man, and yet the fully infinite incarnate Son of God. And by believing both of these things, you will receive life in his name. That's the point of John.

That's what all 21 chapters of his exposition are about. That is the Christological thread that we are supposed to sit down, stare at, and savor. Now, when I say Christology, I want you to know what I mean.

Christology is the word Christ and logos, meaning words, so it's words about Christ or thoughts about Christ or the, better yet, the doctrine of Jesus Christ. When you study John, you are really studying the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

You are studying the God-man, the Redeemer, the Savior, and the Lord who created the universe. And in John, you get some of the highest Christology in all of the New Testament. If you wanna learn about Jesus, there is no better place to look and to study than John.

I would say John is like the Capitol Grill when it comes to Christology. Many other New Testament books are implicit or subtle, and it doesn't mean that they don't talk about the divinity of Christ, they actually do, but John is overt and explicit about it, and I would say that his Christology is some of the highest in all of the New Testament.

So our point in doing this, our point in opening up John, our point is to see and to savor Jesus Christ, the God-man, that we would believe and that we would pledge our allegiance to him and our devotion to him and our worship to him and our adoration to him, and that we would learn how to live this new life that he's graciously given in his name, which brings us to our point today.

The New Creation in John 1:1

Today, we're gonna look at the very first verse in the Gospel of John. And it is entirely centric to John's purpose. So if you will, turn with me to John 1, 1 through 2, and let us revel in who this Christ really is.

John 1, 1 through 2 says, "'In the beginning was the word, "'and the word was with God, "'and the word was God, he was in the beginning with God.'". Now, for our time here today, we are only gonna study verse one.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And we're gonna take that statement, that verse, and we're gonna take it statement by statement, phrase by phrase, word by word, so that we can examine what John is communicating.

And the first phrase that we're going to look at together is in the beginning. John begins his gospel with this wonderful phrase, in the beginning. In arche hein halogos, in the beginning was the word.

And he has two very important reasons for beginning his gospel with in the beginning. The first is that Jesus is bringing a new creation. He's bringing a new creation. He begins in arche, in the beginning.

Now, where have we heard that before? When we think about in the beginning, where do we think? We think the book of Genesis. In the beginning was God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.

John begins with in the beginning because he is telling the story of a new beginning. You see, in the beginning would have been a very common Jewish phrase that would have pointed to the book of Genesis.

In the beginning was actually the name of the book in Hebrew, the beginnings. And in the Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, Moses starts it with in arche, which is the exact same words that John starts his gospel with when he says in the beginning was the word.

Now, isn't it interesting that Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, used in arche to signal the bursting forth of the first creation? And this is the exact same phrase that John uses when he talks about a new creation that has burst forth into the scene.

And this is not a generic phrase. The people reading this, just like you and I, who when we hear in the beginning would have thought about Genesis, and they would have thought, what is John doing? But that's not all that he does.

John also incorporates this word, word, just like in Genesis one. In the original creation, it was God's words that created the cosmos. He says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and earth. You're right, but how did he create it?

Did he grab a tool and a chisel or a brush and paint it? Did he snap his fingers and animate the sky?

No.

Look at what God did. Genesis one, it says, the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. And then God said, then God said, let there be light, and there was light.

Do you see what's going on here? God is creating by speaking by the word. I want you to imagine the scene for a second. Nothing is existing, and by nothing, I mean not even darkness, because darkness is something.

Whatever nothingness is, there was a lot of that, and then all of a sudden, God speaks words, and there was light. God opens his mouth and he speaks, and then brilliant beams of obedient photons instantly from out of nothing leap into motion and joyfully obey him, flooding the void with this unimaginable brilliant light.

The text says, then God said, and it was so. Then God said, and then it was so. Then God said, and it was so. Whatever God says, it is. His word never returns void. Whenever God says something, it's always so.

And this happens nine times in the Genesis narrative. Then God says, and then it was so. Let's look at a few examples. Verse six, then God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and then separate the waters from the waters, and it was so.

Verse nine, then God said, let the waters below the heavens that be gathered in one place and let the dry land appear, and it was so. Verse 11, then God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit, great vegan verse, after their kind with seed in them, and it was so.

Every time God speaks, something happens. His words have unimaginable power so that when God says, it always is so. This chapter goes on. He says, then God said, let there be lights in the heaven, and it was so.

Then God said, let sea creatures be in the sea, and it was so. Fowls to fly in the skies, and it was so. Let animals and living creatures inhabit the earth, and it was so. When God speaks, the most distant stars are formed, and the fur on the lion's back, all of it came into being by the word of his mouth.

The only time that God deviates from this pattern is when he speaks and he says, let us make man in our image. Let us make. Let us make. And what I find so fascinating about this is that the sun, the moon, and the stars were created by the spoken word.

The animals, the plants, the trees, the birds, all created by the word. But yet here, God makes it personal. God literally kneels down into the dirt. He condescends himself, and he fashions the man. And then he, what?

He breathes his life, giving breath onto the man, and the man becomes alive. By the same breath that he animated the galaxies is the same breath that holds every atom inside of you together. As we come back to John, this is incredibly important.

Because John not only begins with, in the beginning, which most definitely is alluding to the first creation, but he also uses the word. God uses his word to bring things into being in Genesis. And in John, that same word is present in the beginning, but he goes even more in depth than that.

You see, my contention is that John is telling the story of a new creation. So he has the beginning, he has the word. In verse four, he says that that light has come into the world. This is also a reference back to Genesis where God's first act of creation was creating light.

In the original creation, God also creates darkness to rule the night. But in John 1 .5, John introduces that the word in all of his splendid light is here to overcome the darkness. Same word that's in Genesis is now here in John again.

The original creation is all about non-life bursting into life. And John talks about life in verse four. And at the pinnacle of God's creation in Genesis, God comes down, makes his human beings, and then he walks with them and talks with them and dwells with him.

And look at what John does in verse 14. In verse 14, he says, the word became fresh. That word that had all of that creative power became fresh and dwelt among us. This is God coming to live with man, which means John is incorporating all of the same elements of the original story.

He's using words like beginning, word, light, life, darkness, and this is not just a literary accident. This is not some kind of circumstantial coincidence. This is highly intentional. John is deliberately telling the tale of a brand new creation story, and he's writing the beginning of a new beginning.

From the awful fall that the world had, limping along in cursed misery, now a new beginning has dawned. That's the first thing that I want us to notice what he says in the beginning is that God, through this word, is going to bring about a new creation, which means that people now are gonna be able to live with God, that God started this new creation 2 ,000 years ago when Jesus Christ came on the scene.

And while we are still living in the old world, that old world is passing away. That old world is dying, and the new world, the new creation, the kingdom of God is what is taking that over and leading us to where we get to Revelation, where we see that the new world has come in full.

That's the first thing I want us to know is that in the beginning in John, God does the first act of a new creation. The second reason I think that John uses this word, in arche, in the beginning, is to signal an altogether different kind of beginning.

Remember what we said, in arche is a common way of describing the beginning of something. So if you look at a thing and you look back to its origin or its birthday or whatever, that's when you would say in arche.

In arche, Kendall would mean the day that I was born. In the beginning, Kendall. Kendall was born September the 5th, 1983. That was my in arche. Examples of this in the New Testament abound. This is a very common word.

Matthew 24 says it like this. Matthew 24 alludes to this when he says in arche because he alludes to the physical beginnings.

Of planet Earth.

Mark 1 .1 begins his gospel with the beginning of Jesus's earthly ministry, meaning the first day Jesus started his ministry is where Mark 1 .1 begins. Later in the book, Mark 13 .8, he talks about in arche, meaning the beginning of sorrows that are going to accompany the people of God in the last days.

So in arche means the beginning of a thing. The beginning of a life, the beginning of a ministry, the beginning of the pain that will be associated at the end of time, the beginning of the world. That's what an arche means.

John does something different. John uses an arche totally unique to any other instance of an arche in all the Bible. He's not only signaling the beginning of the creation, he's signaling before it even began.

He's saying that the beginning was before time and space even began. He's talking about what happened before the beginning. Notice what he says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

So if we were to just stop there at verse one and we were to say in the beginning was the word, we could do like Jehovah's Witnesses do and we could say in the beginning was the word God, in the beginning created this thing, this being called the word who in verse 17, we find out is Jesus.

In the beginning, God created Jesus and he used Jesus to make the planets and the sun and the moon and the stars and all of that. And we could really come up way thinking that that's what John meant, that Jesus was the first created being of God.

That's why we have to continue reading because in verse three, that point is thoroughly devastated. Verse three says, all things came into being through him and apart from him, nothing ever came into being that has ever come into being.

What he's saying is that everything that has ever come into being, the word predates it. The word is preexistent. The word is before all acts of creation, meaning that he could not have been created. If he was just the first created being, then he would have had a birth date or a timestamp.

He comes before the timestamp. He comes before time itself was even made. He comes before the creation of light. He comes before the creation of space and time. When John uses the phrase beginning, he's signaling to something before creation began.

Now, which would have been a pretty provocative thing for him to say. Think about it this way. John is a faithful Jew. He spent his whole life as a Jewish man. He grew up in the synagogue. He believed in one God, Yahweh, but as he's writing this book, the implications were incredible.

He's writing to Jewish friends who will be reading that this one God that all of them worshiped was not alone, that there was two persons. And we know later in the gospel where he talks about the Holy Spirit that there's three, but he's writing that two persons were there, not two gods, one God, multiple persons.

He's saying to his Jewish audience in the beginning, God, yes, but also in the beginning was the word, which would have been an incredibly difficult thing for a monotheistic Jew to have understood. What do you mean that there's someone else there in the beginning with God, but John doesn't stop there.

John says that this word became flesh, that this word entered the pages of human history, that this word is the fully incarnate Jesus Christ that all of them had heard about, that they had seen crucified, that they had seen born.

Without apology or qualification, John begins the masterpiece that he is writing by winding back the clock before the shepherds and wise men existed, before gold, frankincense, and myrrh were laid at his beautiful feet, before a manger in Bethlehem held that beautiful Messiah, before John leapt in his mother's belly, before the wondrous night of Mary's visitation in Nazareth where she conceived of the Holy Spirit, before the prophets of old, before Moses and the giving of the law, before material matter or time itself began, John is saying that Jesus Christ was there.

John is saying to the Jewish readers, you may have heard him preach. You may have even been lucky enough to see him in his manger. You may have been one of the ones standing there as he was hanging on a Roman cross, but he was also there in the beginning with Yahweh when the world was created.

He was there knowing the moment where you were conceived. He was always there. He doesn't have a beginning. That's what John is saying. Now, the next phrase after the beginning, which again, we've learned that it means new creation and it means eternality.

The next phrase that I want us to notice is was the word, hain ha-gagas. Hain ha-gagas was the word. Now, this phrase has both a noun and a verb. And I want us to look at the verb first because it's important that we understand what John is saying.

He says in the beginning was, past tense verb. Now, I want you to follow along with me for a second and I want you to understand something about the Greek language and what it's trying to do versus the English language and what it's attempting to do because this is monumentally important.

This verse is where Jehovah's Witnesses go wrong so badly and where Arians in the early church go so wrong so badly because in English, we just have one word to communicate was. In Greek, there was actually two and it really matters which one of those that you use.

The first word is agenata which means when something came into existence and the other is amie, not your friend Amy down the street, amie, E-M-I-A, E-I-M-I. The first, agenata, let's look at that.

There are several examples of agenata in John 1. In John 1, he says, John 1, 3, all things came into being through him and apart from him, nothing came into being that has being. That's agenata. So basically, John is saying all things that was came into being through him.

That's agenata, meaning that it goes back to when something started, when something came into being. John 1, 6 is another example, an even better example. It says, there was a man, John the Baptist, who was sent from God.

What John is saying is there agenata, there was a man, a man that is not eternal, a man that at some point came into existence, a man who name is John the Baptist and who was born and who is not eternal.

He was sent by God. That man was sent to tell the message of the word. That's agenata and I'm gonna tell you, this is incredibly important to understand, especially if you're a Jehovah's Witness because while John uses the word agenata, talking about the world coming into existence or talking about John the Baptist who came into existence, if he's using that word to talk about Christ, then he's saying that Christ is not eternal, that Christ has a birthday or Christ has a moment where he began to exist, but John is not arguing that.

John is saying that you might know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, yes, but he existed prior to that, that he existed eternally prior to that, that he did not have a beginning because he was in the beginning with God.

If you believe that Jesus is not eternal and if you believe that this word agenata is right, then we should all just abandon our faith because none of it matters. He is not God, he's just a man. But praise God that that is not what this text says.

It doesn't say in the beginning he agenata, it says in the beginning he was, Ami. Ami is not a word that talks about something's beginning or its origins, it's something that talks about its existence.

It's a word that simply describes being in the Old Testament,.

In the Old Testament.

Perhaps the most well-known example of this is when Moses is standing before the burning bush and he asks this God, what is your name? And God responds with, I am that I am. I am pure existence. I didn't have a beginning and I will not have an end, I simply am.

That's what verb John is using here. When John says in the beginning was the word, he's saying in the beginning the word existed already. Jesus also uses this example in John eight. He uses this word, Ami.

He looks at the Pharisees and he says, truly, truly, I say to you before Abraham was agenata,.

I am.

Notice how both of those verbs were used in very different ways. Truly, truly, I say to you before Abraham was born, before Abraham came into existence, I am.

I was existing.

Jesus is claiming that he existed before Abraham was born, before the beginning began, that he ameed. He's saying I've always existed. There was never a moment where I did not exist. And it's important that we understand that.

That's the verb. In the beginning was, meaning in the beginning, he already was and always was. Now let's look at the noun. In the beginning was the word. In Greek, this word is logos. And it's important, again, that we understand this.

John is saying a lot of material in a very short amount of time, very densely compact words, logos. Now logos is a word that means word. It means speech, message, logic. It means the intended meaning of a transmission.

So as you are listening to this message, it has an internal logic about it, and it has a meaning behind it so that you are getting the logos of my message, even though you are not sitting there thinking about the words that are on a page that I'm preaching from.

You're interested in the message. Now, a question that we might ask ourself here is, why does John use that word? Like, if we know that John is intending to communicate that this word means Jesus, then why didn't he just say that?

Why didn't he just say in the beginning was Jesus? Or Jesus has always existed or something like that? Why does he feel like it's important for him to say in the beginning was the word? It almost seems like John is intentionally complicating things.

But there's an important reason that John uses the word word or the word logos. And that's because he's writing to an audience of both Jews and Greeks. He's writing to people who he's asking them like a good apologist to consider the evidence, to repent and to believe in Jesus.

And what we know from history is that both cultures, the Jewish culture and the Greek culture had a well-defined and very densely formulated understanding of what they thought logos meant, what they thought this word, word, actually meant.

And this is important because John uses this exact word, logos, because he knows that it's going to challenge both the Jew and the Greek with their understanding of the world and reality. And we have to look at a little bit of history in order to understand this.

Logos is a word that is as old as the Greek language and it means word. It generally means word or speech. And it is usually, especially in its earliest days, meant the content of a message. It meant the message underneath the physical words on the page.

It would be like me saying the word green. Most of you right now, I would dare say all of you are not, as I say the word green, imagining the letter G, imagining the letter R, imagining the letter E, and then another E, and then finally an N.

You're not doing that. Your brain is hearing me enunciate letters that are combined together to form the sound green. And what your brain is doing is it is imagining a color. It's imagining a different hue of light that we call green.

That's the content of the message. That's what the meaning of the message is. That's the logos of my message. Now, as this word came into existence around 500 BC, it's 500 years before Jesus was born, a Greek philosopher by the name of Heraclitus began adopting this word into his philosophy.

He used the logos to signify the meaning, and the order, and the logic, and the structure that exist in the material universe and holds all of it together. Heraclitus looked at a river and he said, this river is always flowing.

So that if I step into the river right now, and then I were to come back and step into it again tomorrow I cannot and never will I be able to step into the same river twice. Because the water molecules that I interacted with when I stepped into the water have now flowed downstream so that this river that is before me today is not the same river that was in front of me yesterday.

So his famous phrase was, you can never step into the same river twice. And his point with that was that he was actually amazed that because this river is constantly changing, because this river is constantly in a state of movement, he was wondering, and he puzzled himself with this question, how does it not flow into chaos?

If everything is constantly in movement, what is actually holding it together? He might look at the sun and say, what's holding it in its place? Or the moon, what's keeping it in orbit? Or the planets, what keeps them in motion?

What silent, invisible force is under everything that we see and is keeping all of this from devolving into chaos? And his solution to that question was Lagos. He believed that there was this internal, invisible force underneath everything that gave it meaning and purpose and order.

Just like when I say the word green, you get the meaning underneath the words that I'm using, he says, when you look at the universe and when you look at the world, there's meaning underneath it, and that's Lagos.

Now, his ideas were taken up by a group named the Sophists who didn't believe that this was something that affected the entire material universe. They believed that it was only in our brains and that when we thought about anything, like if I were to say to you the word grapes, and then you start imagining what a green grape looks like or what a red grape tastes like, that was the Lagos, that was the order, that was the structure that was in your brain so that the Sophists would say that things only appear logical because you've got Lagos in your brain.

Later in Greek history, we come to a group called the Stoics, and the Stoics are actually mentioned in the New Testament because now we've gotten to the point to where we're at the contemporaries of Jewish culture.

The Stoics lived at the same time as the New Testament, and their idea of what Lagos was, and they went back to Heraclitus, and they said, no, this is a material force that runs through all of the universe, and it's almost like a god.

It really is the only god that the Stoics had. They believed that it was blind, that it was impersonable, but it was like God. It was this unique force, almost like a Star Wars thing, I haven't seen Star Wars, so I hope that that's a good example, but it's almost like this force that holds everything together, and that you have to harness it in order to harness your own reality.