The Word
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John i. i.
7M(iy6 OW amazing is the opening of this Gospel! The r iyi writer does not stay to introduce himself to tion his name, or give proofs of his trustworthiness. With singular abruptness, with no attempt to substantiate his own claims or the claims of this marvellous treatise, he casts it into the teeming world of human thought and life, as Jochebed launched the cradle on the bosom of the Nile.
Did he feel that the matter of the book would sufficiently vindicate its truthfulness; and that it would authenticate itself as bread, and light, and water, and spring flowers do? Did he feel that the Spirit who inspired it might be left to care for it? To ask such questions is to suggest the answer. But is there not a marvellous audacity in the casting forth of this Gospel, unannounced, unauthenticated by the recommendations of great names? Yet the result has vindicated the Evangelist. For, as the experience of the Church grows — nay, as our own experience grows — new depths of beauty and truthfulness reveal themselves in its pages, and compel belief in all whose hearts are pure enough to recognise the Divine.
Our writer does not name the gross errors of his time, which were beginning to obscure the dawn of our holy faith, as clouds steal up upon a too radiant sunrise. Why should he preserve these flies in amber? It is enough for him to announce, positively and dogmatically, the Truth; sure that the conscience of man would not fail to recognise her face and the accents of her voice, and eventually turn from all others to cleave to her alone.
Nor can we wonder that the fisherman of Galilee was able thus to write for all the world to hear. Truths of universal importance are perceived less by the intellect than by the heart. Things which are hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed to babes. An intense religious conviction will stimulate the action of all the faculties; as a jar of oxygen quickens into brilliant coruscations the burning phosphorus. But how much must we not attribute to the teaching of that blessed Spirit, who found congenial work in glorifying the Lord through the pen of his dearest friend and aptest pupil! Very majestic are the opening words, and this designation of our Lord: —
The Word. We need not ask whence this term came. It may have been a pebble from the brook of Old Testament Scripture, or a phrase borrowed, as Neander suggests, from the current talk of Ephesus, where this Gospel was written about the year a.d. 97. But, whencesoever it came, it is here re-minted by the Spirit of God, and is most significant.
As words utter thought so does Christ utter God. — A man, newly arrived from the busy outer world, sits among his family, absorbed and rapt in thought. Wife and child are hushed into a great stillness as they look upon his face, which tells a tale of inner conflict; as the foam-flecked surface of a mountain stream reveals the agony of its boulder-broken career. They cannot even guess what oppresses him until he opens his lips and speaks. The friends who gathered te the consecration of the angel-heralded boy had no idea by what name the aged priest would call him, till the trembling hand indented the wax of the writing-tablet with the Divinely-appointed name of Christ’s foreninner.
(Kljdat uttcreir (Bat. 7
So man had not known God, unless Christ had uttered Him. An Egyptian temple bore this inscription on its portico: “I am He that is, and was, and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.” A profound Eastern thinker, in the very dawn of the world’s life, cried: “Oh that I knew where I might find Him!... Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him.” An altar in Athens, the brain of the world, was erected to “the unknown God.” But Christ uttered God. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”
There are three ways in which Christ has uttered God, as these introductory verses prove: in Creation; in his Teaching; and in his Incarnation.
God is Life. — Not simply living, in contrast to dead idols; but life-giving. The fountain of life ever rises from the depths of the abysmal Godhead. Yet that life had been an unknown quantity, had not the Word uttered it in creation, which his hands have wrought; so that the universe is a poem (in the strict meaning of that word) wrought out of the majestic substance of God’s underived and eternal Being.
God is Light. — But the light had been undiscovered, because insufferable, unless the Word had shed it forth on created vision, revealing yet tempering its beauty, passing it through the luminous and yet shrouding veil of his words.
God is Love. — Love is the essence of his being, and all love everywhere is the far-travelled beam and ray of his heart (Eph. iii. 15, R.v. 7nar. But that love had never been realized, unless the Word had embodied it in a human life, with caresses for little children, tears for broken hearts, tender pity for the lost, agony unto death for mankind.
Lift up your eyes and hearts, and behold with devout rapture your glorious Lord, uttering the depths, the hidden depths of God (i Cor. ii. 10, 16). He has not only done so, but He will continue to do so through all ages, as we are able to bear it (John xvii. 26). We have only yet, at his feet, commenced to learn the alphabet, the first broken syllables of the Di’ine Science; but it is probable that the ages of eternity are to witness an eternal progression in this sublime theology. Our knowledge ever increasing our capacity to know; our capacity ever leading to fresh hunger; our hunger ever appropriating the blessedness of the fourth Beatitude. Remember the majestic Apocalyptic vision, in which the seer beheld Christ riding forth on his snow-white steed, his eyes as flame, his head girt with many crowns, his vesture dipped in blood; but this is the name by which He was known — a name symbolic of his eternal ministry — Ms name is called the Word of God (Rev. xix. 13).
Before illustrating in detail our Lord’s three-fold utterance of the Father, there are one or two thoughts suggested by the sublime opening sentences of this Gospel which we do well to notice.
I. The Eternity of the Being of the Lord Jesus. — “In the beginning was the Word.” Is there not here an evident reference to the opening words of the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But what a contrast! At that moment, described as the beginning, and which may be pushed back far enough to include all the demands of modern geologists, you do not find the heavens and the earth, which as yet are not; but you do find the Word already in existence. The words in the one case expressly exclude the eternity of matter; but in the other they expressly include the eternity of the Word. Moses strikes the chord to descend the stream of Time; John strikes it to look out on the expanse of Eternity lying beyond created things, but in which the Word was already existing.
It is not so difficult to wend one’s way slowly back into the past, or to imagine the successive ages during which the world was being prepared for man’s habitation. But when we reach the place where the links of the time-chain stop, and we stand at the first moment of the creation of time and matter, and look out into the void on the other side — it is then that thought staggers and gives way.
There is no light to guide us — sun, moon, and stars are not created. No spirit to lead us; cherubim have not begun to love, or seraphim to burn. No stepping-stone for our feet; for space is unoccupied save by the all-pervasive presence of God. No sufficient unit of measurement; since, when arithmetic has reached its uttermost, the mighty aggregate is but a mote floating in the sunshine of the Being of God. What shall we do then, as we learn the pre-existence of the Word, but worship Him?
That mind must indeed be slow to perceive which does not recognise that what is eternal must be Divine. If it be true that before the mountains were brought forth, or the earth was formed, the Word was, then, from everlasting to everlasting He must be God. Wherefore “unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever.”
II. The Personality of the Lord Jesus. — “He was with God.” We may not at first perceive the significance of this clause, any more than the casual tourist sees the importance of an embrasure in the fortifications where sheep browse, and soldiers stand at ease. But if ever there should come again days of conflict, like those which swept across the early Church, in which men should assert that the Word was but a momentary and impersonal manifestation of God, we should instantly revert to this significant clause, and cry, It cannot be — TJie Word was with God. The same was in the beginning WITH God.
The preposition selected by the Evangelist is very significant. It means communion with and movement towards. It denotes the intimate fellowship subsisting between two, and well befits the intercourse of the distinct Persons of the one and ever-blessed God. “The face of the everlasting Word was ever directed towards the face of the everlasting Father.” He was in the bosom of the Father. “He makes the Divine glory shine outwardly because He is filled inwardly. He contemplates before He reflects. He receives before He gives.”
We are not then surprised to hear the Divine colloquy: “Let us make man “j or to learn that Jesus knew the Father (x. 15).
lo %ht Wiatt,
How could He do other, when, “trailing clouds of glory behind Him,” He proceeded and came forth from God?
Let us never forget that our Saviour, who lived, and died, and rose, and is our familiar Friend, is a distinct personality, who was before all worlds, and will be unchanged for evermore. This is what we want. It is not enough to give us an abstraction, an ideal, a word. Our hearts crave One, and, blessed be God, they may have One whc may be a living, bright reality.
More present to faith’s vision keen
Than any earthly object seen;
More dear, more intimately nigh,
Than e’en the dearest earthly tie.
III. The Deity of our Lord Jesus. — “The Word was God.” He is not said to be flie God; for that assertion would ascribe to the Son the totality of the Divine Being, and contradict the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. And He is not said to be Divine, which would lessen the emphasis. But He is said, distinctly and emphatically, to be God. “God manifest in the flesh.”
He was born of a woman; yet He made woman. He ate and hungered, drank and thirsted; yet He made com to grow on the mountains, and poured the rivers from his crystal chalices. He needed sleep; yet He slumbers not, and needs not to repair his wasted energy. He wept; yet He created the lachrymal duct. He died; yet He is the ever-living Jehovah, and made the tree of his cross. He inherited all things by death; yet they were his before by inherent right.
And what is the Word to us? — In his first Epistle, the holy Apostle tells us his intention in declaring that which he had seen and heard and handled of the Word: it was that others might share with him his fellowship with the Father and the Son. And fellowship means partnership, a common participation in a common stock; and, in this case, a blessed share in the very life and light and love of God.
But how may such things become ours? There is a sense in which the orator, the thinker, the friend, is able to infuse himself into us by his fervid and quickening words. And is
**(Bttb manifest in the fleslr.””
there not also a deep sense in which Jesus is the Word of God, because through Him God is ever pouring Himself into our hearts and lives? As a man puts himself into his words, and by them communicates himself to others, so has God embodied Himself in Jesus, and those who receive the Son receive the Father, who has sent Him ( Matt. x. 40).
As the Father has put Himself into the Word, so has the Word put Himself into his words. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” Live then in meditation on the words of Jesus; so that his being may become infused into yours, and through the Word the eternal Father may come and make his abode within you (John xiv. 23).
So shall you be inspired by the vevy life and indwelling of God, and be lifted increasingly out of the time-sphere into the eternal; into fellowship with all noble souls, with all saints and angels, with all who, through all worlds, live on Him, who is the Eternal and Divine Word, ever-blessed, ever to be adored.