The LOGOS Factor
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Intro to John
Make no mistake: Jesus is Lord
All four Gospels are written to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. And by Lord, we don’t mean anything like an honorary or projected divinity; we mean that Jesus is God The Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. They claim this from the outset, though we battle today with false popular notions that Jesus wasn’t initially considered divine by His disciples and early followers, but rather he “became” God in time.
You’ll find this lie everywhere— cable tv specials, the History Channel, Amazon documentaries, and most major secular publications. It is a lie popularized by academic elites who neither read nor study the Scriptures themselves but who like to make lots of comments on the commentaries of others, picking and choosing what they like.
Christian brothers and sisters, we are in nothing less than a fight for the truth. We represent the truth as revealed in Scripture rightly read and interpreted. We must be ready to counter the false claims of cultural elites and stand against their popular distortions.
The simple truth is that the proclamation that Jesus is divine appears in the thesis statement of each gospel. It is the dead-center bulls-eye of every gospel proclamation. To look at Christianity and miss it is like sitting in box seats behind home plate at Dodgers Stadium thinking you’re at a Lakers game.
The gospel of Mark—the earliest written—opens with:
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Luke reveals Jesus as the Son of Man, the mysterious divine figure from Daniel.
Matthew’s first chapter associates Jesus with the fulfillment of Isaiah’ prophecy, which we look at every Christmas: Matthew 1: 23:
“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”
which means, “God is with us.”
God is with us—not just a mere human being, rather special or otherwise.
The last gospel written, John has an eye to clarification—to correct some of the wrong-headed notions about who Jesus was that arose in the first few decades of gospel’s spread into the pagan-dominated world. John begins with a rewrite of Genesis.
Text: John 1: 1-18 New Revised Standard
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. †
John’s Genesis
Behind the Curtain
Genesis begins, “In the beginning, God created the Earth and the heavens,” but John begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” See the difference? Whereas Genesis begins with the activity of God—“In the beginning, God made…”— John begins with the Being of God—“In the beginning, God was….”
John goes behind the curtain of Creation to say something about who the Creator was before He began creating things:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Greek “logos”
The Word is more than a word
The Greek word for word is logos. Logos isn’t just a word for word; it is a much larger religious element in the ancient Greek world. I want us to have a fuller picture of the meaning of Logos before we seek to make sense of this passage—John’s introduction to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
For the ancient Greeks, the Logos was much more than a word meaning word; it was a divine character—an agent in the creation of Earth. They believed in something called the Demiurge, which was a mediating force between Heaven and Earth. The world we know was fallen, impure, and unspiritual. All humanity is like angels who have lost their wings and fallen to Earth (remember: the Earth was flat and Heaven was up). Our pure spiritual form, which is meant to traverse the heavens fell to Earth and took on the cage of flesh. The world is like the precipitate in a chemical solution. The mix causes a solid to form, and it floats down and settles in the bottom of the beaker—that’s the world, that’s us, that is matter and materiality.
They believed that God—the capital G God above all the lesser gods—was perfect and pure; therefore, there is no way that perfect God could have anything to do with matter, substance, material, and flesh. So God has all things created through the Demiurge, also known as the Logos. The Logos is divine and carries out God’s intentions and purposes in shaping the world.
So when we read in the first verses:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
The Greeks would have yawned and said, “So tell us something we don’t know.” The Greeks already believed in the Logos, which is something much more than a word for “word.”
Logos meanings
Our future hope is our present joy.
We translate Logos to “word,” but other translations are equally valid. Logos can mean reason, purpose, or intention. Think about how differently the text would sound with these translations:
•In the beginning was the Reason, the Reason was with God, and the Reason was God.
•In the beginning was the Purpose, the Purpose was with God, and the Purpose was God.
•In the beginning was the Intention, the Intention was with God, and the Intention was God.
Logos means so much more than word. It means God’s divine purpose or God’s divine intention—the perfect and ultimate why of creation—all this.
Christian poet T.S. Eliot spoke of “The word within a word, unable to speak a word.” The Logos is something like that—the unutterable Being of God spoken through the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God that could not be otherwise uttered. When you and I talk to each other, the only way our minds’ thoughts, purposes, and intentions can be understood is by us putting them into words and speaking them or writing them. Just so, God’s thoughts, purposes, and intentions—His WORD—is Jesus Christ, The Son Incarnate.
And this is what would have made the Greeks gasp. We already noted that they already believed in the Logos and accepted his role in the creation of Earth, but when we get to verse 14, we read:
And the Logos became flesh and lived among us.
This would have made their jaws drop because they had no conception of the Divine Logos becoming the lowly evil stuff of flesh. That would have been the shocker, and that is John’s gospel proclamation—that the Logos—God’s Divine Intention—became flesh and dwelt with us in the world of solid precipitates.
Word & Word
Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible by itself
This is a very different idea than most of us Evangelicals know. When we Evangelicals speak of “the Word of God,” what do we usually mean? Right, the Bible—but this is not the best understanding of Logos. What is the Word of God? Jesus Christ is the Word of God—the Logos made flesh. The Bible itself is not the Word of God—we need to be very careful how we speak about it—Jesus Christ is the Word of God.
When we call the Bible God’s Word, we indulge in a bit of symbolic speech. The Bible is the authoritative witness to Jesus Christ; it is a pointing finger directing us to Jesus, who is the Word of God. We talk about the Bible as the Word of God in the same we talk about drinking a cup of coffee: we don’t drink the cup; we drink the liquid contained by the cup. Scripture is how Jesus Christ meets us. It is not Jesus Himself, so we can hardly call it God’s Word. We don’t worship the Bible; we worship the One to whom the Bible makes its witness, right?
Yet we can talk about the Bible being God’s Word to us safely as a figure of speech because as Jesus is our light, life, and guide, the Scriptures are to us as a lamp or flashlight. But this is a secondary matter. The first matter is that John is proclaiming from the start that Jesus is Divine—God with us in the flesh—and this proclamation continues to drop the jaws of all humankind.
John: Light!
Jesus is the light that has dispelled darkness
John proclaims Christ as the light that comes into a world of utter darkness and whose light casts out the dark forever. Where Christ is, there is light; wherever Christ is not seen as Christ, there is only darkness.
John’s portrait of Jesus is the divine Logos made flesh. Jesus does not struggle but is clearly and confidently God’s plan to redeem humankind, to bring light to those born in darkness, and to complete the project of redemption with no significant help from any of us.
Who is God? What can be known about God? Jesus is the answer—God’s Word made flesh. Jesus is God’s self-revelation—what God says about Himself to humanity—and the end of people needing to guess or make things up about God.
Clarifications
Corrections then and now
We all know how quickly information decays—how quickly even the simplest of messages can be distorted, spun, or co-opted in order to advance someone-or-other’s personal agenda.
It happened in the first century as the fist of Rome crashed down on Jerusalem and sent the Jews and Christians out to the four corners of the earth. Greeks, Romans, Persians, Africans, and Barbarians heard the good news of Jesus and couldn’t help but spin their newfound faith to fit their longstanding, traditional sentiments.
John sees this happening and writes his gospel to a world of people who may have missed the subtleties of the more Jewish-flavored gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is clarifying for all who did not get it and could not take the hint or catch the poetry of the other gospels.
We clearly need that same clarifying work done today with us as for the first-century world.
John gives us the mystery of Jesus, who is the Logos in the flesh—a jaw-dropper for the Greco-Roman world and a timeless proclamation needed today because it is clear that many in America and the west still don’t get it.
The Logos becomes flesh in Christ, and as we come to the table this morning, let’s be awake and mindful that the Logos is given to us in the bread and cup. †
Questions
- What are some of the other words for “word” translatable from the word LOGOS?
- How is John’s “Genesis” different from Genesis 1-3?
- Light is one of John’s favorite figures of speech for describing spirituality. Why does it work equally well today as in John’s day?
- What, specifically, is darkness. How does this illuminate our understanding of good and evil?
- The Greeks believed in the LOGOS, but they believed that it was immaterial. How does John speak a shocking word into their worldview?
- Which is the LOGOS of God, the Bible or Christ? Why is this confusing for many Christians?
- In what way is Scripture “the Word of God” and in what ways is this a misunderstanding?
- Why is it utterly crucial that God be self-revealed? What is the alternative?
- What is human enlightenment? What do you consider an enlightened person?
- How do you experience your spiritual walk in terms of darkness and light?