John 1:1-34 In Story Form
John the Revelator and John the Baptist Identify Jesus
John the Revelator Establishes The Deity of Christ
Before everything began, when nothing had been created, when the world was without
John 1:1-34 In Story Form
John the Revelator and John the Baptist Identify Jesus
John the Revelator Establishes The Deity of Christ
Before everything began, when nothing had been created, when the world was without form and void, Jesus Christ—the Verb, the visibly (for humans) active part of the Godhead, the one chosen to reveal God’s true nature and character to this world—existed, and He lived with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
But this Verb did not merely live with God, He was God. In fact, Jesus Christ was with God so far back into eternity, before everything, that the finite human mind cannot understand it.
God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son—Jesus Christ/Logos—worked so closely together as a team, or as a family unit, and each one was such an integral part of creation that nothing was created without all their efforts being combined. And since they worked together so closely in everything, in effect, all things were made and came into existence through Jesus Christ. If He was not present and working with God, nothing that we can hear, see, feel, touch, or taste could have been created.
Jesus is Life
Jesus was the fountain of eternal life, and His eternal life serves as a beacon of Light to men, to guide them, to draw them to heaven. That Light continues to shine to this day because the darkness of sin and Satan could not obliterate it or quarantine it. However, Satan has made it so dark that some don’t understand The Light.
Jesus is The Light
Because the rays of The Light of God were getting so diffused by Satan’s machinations, God sent a prophet, John, a man, to give evidence about The Light so that people would be prepared to receive The Light Himself when He came. John was not the Light from heaven. His mission was to bear witness to or to clarify and point to The True Light. Then, when The Light came, the people would believe in and accept The Light because of John’s testimony.
The true Light—Jesus—whose job was to enlighten, educate, and inform every man, woman, and child about the true nature of God, was already in the world when John began to testify about Him, though He had not begun His ministry yet.
No One Recognized Him
Here He was, the God who was an integral part of forming and creating this world, and yet the world did not recognize Him. In fact, Jesus came to His own people, the Israelites, whom He had redeemed from slavery in Egypt and set apart as a Holy Nation, but even they did not recognize Him or accept Him as a nation.
Believe and Become a Child of God
But everyone, regardless of gender, race, nationality, or religion, who does recognize Him as the Son of God, accepts Him as the Messiah, their Savior, and believes in His name, to these He gives the right to become children of God and heirs of salvation. All believers who do this are born into the family of God, not because of anything they did or any merit they possess, nor because of the passing passion of a man, or the deliberate decision of a father, but because God, in His great love, chose to pay the ultimate price to adopt them as His own.
Jesus Became a Human
And so the Son of God—called the Verb or Jesus Christ—became a human being, a man of flesh and blood. He was born of a woman, grew up in Israel, lived, worked, and ministered in the very midst of us. And we, his disciples, saw and recognized His glory, His character, the glory that only One who had been directly connected to God the Father could possess and so be able to carry that glory and reveal it to us. Thus, every element of His life was saturated with grace and truth, mercy and justice.
That is why when John boldly pointed Jesus out to the crowds, he proclaimed,
“This is the man I told you about, the one who would come after me. He is greater by far than I am, as a mere human prophet, because He existed way before I did.”
Jesus Reveals Grace and Truth
As a result of Jesus’ saturation with grace and truth, we have all immeasurably blessed with the same. And while the truth has always been there for us, (After all, Moses was given the Law on Mt. Sinai and passed it on to us.) we have never understood grace as we do now because of what Jesus has done for us.
Yes, there was grace before, but now there is even more abundant grace because we understand it better. No one has ever seen God or understood Him before, except Jesus, who was in such a close relationship with God the Father from the beginning that the nearest example we have of their relationship would be that of father and son—especially since Jesus was sent to earth to be born a man. So, He is the only member of the Godhead that has experienced birth. And Jesus came specifically to visually represent and explain God to us who live in this sin-darkened w