John 1:1 The Beginning
Everything has to have a start, and yes I'm going to restart this blog after many years of letting lay fallow. I'm going to try to at least on a personal level wrestle with the words of God intellectually in order to make those words real and more meaningful. I never second guess providence, and I'm starting in a path of new things, and with these new things I plan to slow down and start writing a bit more. For the last two years at our church we've been listening to sermons from the Gospel of John, an amazing rich book of hope for Christians, but also a path for many others that leads to Christ. I do hope that as you read this blog, I can help simply point you back to the scripture. Please don't take my personal words as "gospel" they are not, they are just the musings of a follower of Christ, I do hope to point you to the true Christ, and my hope for you is that the Holy Spirit will work in your heart to kindle a relationship with Christ.
Everything has a beginning, and the gospel of John begins there, at the beginning. The creation of the world was chronicled by Moses in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1-2. John writes this from his prison cell on the island of Patmos, where he is recounting the personal relationship he had with Jesus Christ. He does not miss the connection to Genesis, and so he starts.... In the beginning, because everything needs a point to start. This point to start his book is a concept - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is a profound place to begin because words have meaning, but what was the word he was referring to in his writings?
In Genesis, everything starts with nothing. It is by the spoken words of God that everything comes into existence. First from this observation is the spoken words of God have real power. I once had a conversation with a dear friend about this, he was a physicist, and he believed the words of God were God speaking energy and matter into existence. When we speak, our vocal cords vibrate air molecules that each vibrate of each other until it reaches our ear, which redirects the vibration into a small hole in our skull, which has a tunnel that leads to something similar to a drum head. This skin covered entrance to another chamber, we call the "ear drum" simply transmits the vibrations to a set of bones which moves pressure that stimulates small hairs on nerves which sends electrical signals to our brains. Words - Vibrations - Motion - Electrical signals - and eventually meaning. It's amazing that our words are so complex. Think about God's words which we can't even fathom. I personally believe the words spoken on the day of creation were beyond our ability to perceive.
This amazing power, is where John starts his gospel. He is reaching into the power of the words being spoken and says this word was pre-existent, which means it existed before the point of creation. What is he saying here, something existed before there was nothing. To have an effect, there must be a cause, this is a general rule of logic. To have an action, you must have something that causes that action. John is saying here is the cause is - the word. Before there was everything there had to be something, and that something is "The Word".
Next John tells us "The Word" was more than a simple word, it was a word inline with every attribute of God, it was a Holy Word. The Idea of holiness escapes many today because we see things in skews of relative hues. In computer electronics we deal with logic not in shades of gray, but everything boils down to boolean logic, the ones and zeros. Every computer on the market today be they as powerful as a supercomputer or as simple as some eight-bit electronic gadget all work on boolean logic, on or off, true or false, yes or no, one or zero. When we see gray, we don't see the computer working behind the scenes... but its' speaking a very complicated simple command of turn this on or turn this off. When it comes to being holy, it isn't a shade of grey. To be Holy means you are with God and his nature or you are an enemy of God. The word here is "With God", it's Holy.
But now John goes to the level, the logical conclusion - The Word is more than with God, though it is with God, now he leaps to the mind blowing conclusion - The Word was God. That means if there was nothing before there was something, but the only thing to exist in the nothing was God, and the Word was spoken by God, but now, we see the word pre-existed creation. The Word existed with God and was God.
Tomorrow... I hope to answer the question - What is the Word?
Everything has a beginning, and the gospel of John begins there, at the beginning. The creation of the world was chronicled by Moses in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1-2. John writes this from his prison cell on the island of Patmos, where he is recounting the personal relationship he had with Jesus Christ. He does not miss the connection to Genesis, and so he starts.... In the beginning, because everything needs a point to start. This point to start his book is a concept - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is a profound place to begin because words have meaning, but what was the word he was referring to in his writings?
In Genesis, everything starts with nothing. It is by the spoken words of God that everything comes into existence. First from this observation is the spoken words of God have real power. I once had a conversation with a dear friend about this, he was a physicist, and he believed the words of God were God speaking energy and matter into existence. When we speak, our vocal cords vibrate air molecules that each vibrate of each other until it reaches our ear, which redirects the vibration into a small hole in our skull, which has a tunnel that leads to something similar to a drum head. This skin covered entrance to another chamber, we call the "ear drum" simply transmits the vibrations to a set of bones which moves pressure that stimulates small hairs on nerves which sends electrical signals to our brains. Words - Vibrations - Motion - Electrical signals - and eventually meaning. It's amazing that our words are so complex. Think about God's words which we can't even fathom. I personally believe the words spoken on the day of creation were beyond our ability to perceive.
This amazing power, is where John starts his gospel. He is reaching into the power of the words being spoken and says this word was pre-existent, which means it existed before the point of creation. What is he saying here, something existed before there was nothing. To have an effect, there must be a cause, this is a general rule of logic. To have an action, you must have something that causes that action. John is saying here is the cause is - the word. Before there was everything there had to be something, and that something is "The Word".
Next John tells us "The Word" was more than a simple word, it was a word inline with every attribute of God, it was a Holy Word. The Idea of holiness escapes many today because we see things in skews of relative hues. In computer electronics we deal with logic not in shades of gray, but everything boils down to boolean logic, the ones and zeros. Every computer on the market today be they as powerful as a supercomputer or as simple as some eight-bit electronic gadget all work on boolean logic, on or off, true or false, yes or no, one or zero. When we see gray, we don't see the computer working behind the scenes... but its' speaking a very complicated simple command of turn this on or turn this off. When it comes to being holy, it isn't a shade of grey. To be Holy means you are with God and his nature or you are an enemy of God. The word here is "With God", it's Holy.
But now John goes to the level, the logical conclusion - The Word is more than with God, though it is with God, now he leaps to the mind blowing conclusion - The Word was God. That means if there was nothing before there was something, but the only thing to exist in the nothing was God, and the Word was spoken by God, but now, we see the word pre-existed creation. The Word existed with God and was God.
Tomorrow... I hope to answer the question - What is the Word?
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