Zach’s Theological Musings

John 1:1:

In the beginning was the Word (ho logos)…

  The first 18 verses of the gospel of John are fascinating. One thing that I, and many others, have often wondered about is, why “logos”? Why is the One who was with God in the beginning, who was God, through whom all things were made, in whom was life, who became flesh and made His dwelling among us, that is Jesus Christ, why is He called “the Word”?

  Several times I’ve tried reading what the scholars have to say. Some of them are more helpful than others, but I still feel a bit fuzzy no matter whose commentary I read. In particular, some of them get into the history of the use of “logos” in Greek philosophy. It seems that some guy named Heraclitus was possibly the first to start giving the ordinary Greek word “logos” a technical philosophical slant. Then so-and-so said the logos was like this, and so-and-so said the logos was like that.

  And then I get confused. I mean, I think philosophy is very interesting. I haven’t studied it much, but I know I would enjoy it if I got into it. But whenever I’ve tried to learn about Heraclitus and so-and-so, I haven’t gained any enlightenment towards a deeper understanding of John 1.

  And then finally I realized, “Hey, that’s the point!” Heraclitus and his fellow Greek philosophers were also confused. They never knew the Logos. So they didn’t really know what they were talking about. John knew the Logos personally and intimately, so he knew what he was talking about.

  One time in AP Biology in high school we were supposed to study some topic and give a short presentation. I didn’t really prepare my talk because I thought I understood the subject well enough. But then in the midst of my presentation I got mixed up and explained things incorrectly. The teacher saw through me. In front of the class, he said to me, “Before trying to teach a subject, it is important to understand it yourself.”

  Listening to Heraclitus talk about the Logos is like listening to me talk about covalent bonds (I don’t even know what they are anymore). If your teacher doesn’t have a clear grasp of his subject, then he can’t pass it clearly on to you.

  The best way to understand John 1:1-18 is to keep reading John 1, 2, 3, …, 20, 21. Although we can begin to describe the Logos in words, still a full description of Him can never be reduced to language. You must to behold Him to know Him. While reading John, unlike reading the Greek philosophers, the Logos will be clearly and majestically put on display before your eyes.

[T]hese have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.  John 20:31

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books which were written. John 21:25

  The Chinese Bible translates “logos” as “tao”. That’s the same “tao” as in the ancient Chinese religion/philosophy known as taoism. It can be literally translated as “the Way” (cf. John 14:6). Perhaps the concept is a bit different from “logos”, but then again the English word “Word” doesn’t carry the same meaning as “logos” either. Anyway, based on my limited understanding of the Chinese and the Greek contexts, I think that “tao” is a wonderful choice here. I don’t know for sure why the translators of the Chinese Bible chose this term, but I can tell you why I think it fits.

  Just as the ancient Greeks had some vague sense of this thing they called “logos”, but they couldn’t really put their finger on it clearly, likewise the Chinese with the “tao”. The opening sentence of the Tao Te Ching (the main Taoist text, or “Scripture” if you will) says, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name.” There’s a lot in there about how the Tao is unknowable, and if you think you know it then that proves you don’t.

  Although it is true, in one sense, that the Lord is far beyond our ability to comprehend, and we will eternally be taking in more and more of Him, that’s not what Lao Tze (the founder of Taoism) meant. Rather, I think his words reveal the fact that he had not met the Tao of whom he was speaking. The Way who is unknowable through human discovery is knowable through His personal revelation.

  When Paul saw the Athenians’ altar to the unknown God, he came in and said, “Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23). I think John is doing a similar thing in John 1. He is not building off of Heraclitus’ foundation. John is shining the Light into the darkness. To his contemporary Greeks, and effectively to all pagans throughout the world, John is saying, “You know that ‘logos’, that ‘tao’, that ’spiritual force’ that you sense is ‘out there’, but is somehow beyond you? That one that you’ve been told, or told yourself, is not really knowable anyway so just carry on with your life and don’t worry too much about it? Well actually He is my Master and my Friend, so here, let me tell you about Him.”

  To summarize the previous three posts on John 14:6: Jesus is not only the guide but also the path, Jesus is not only the teacher but also the subject, Jesus is not only the vine that imparts vitality but also the vitality which is imparted.

  One final question: in my explanation of John 14:6 have I gotten carried away and gone beyond the original context? I don’t think so. Jesus had already begun talking about His departure back in John 12:23ff. He knew His hour had come. Jesus had said, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”

  Simon Peter asked him,

“Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

  Just moments later, Jesus further said,

“I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”
Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

  It appears that the disciples were quite curious to know more about this place where Jesus was going, and were pressing Him to describe it more clearly (see John 16:25). But Jesus, the Word of God, always has good reason for speaking the way He does.

  Get this. The amazing thing is that Jesus responded to their curiosity about where He was going by telling them… more about Himself! Do you know where Jesus is right now? Yes, you do. Do you know what the greatest thing about that place is? Jesus is there! That’s right, the greatest thing about wherever Jesus goes is… that Jesus is there!

  I don’t think that Jesus was rebuking His disciples here, at least not harshly. He was gently retraining their curious minds to turn more and more towards what actually matters most: HIM!

  The disciples were very interested and excited about something called the “Kingdom of Israel” (see Acts 1:6), that is, the powerful Messianic earthly kingdom in which Mount Zion “will be established as the chief of the mountains” (Mic 4:1). But you know what the greatest thing about the Messianic kingdom is. That’s right, the Messiah!

  Christians nowadays are interested and excited about a place called heaven. But you know what’s the great thing about heaven? Reunion with old family, friends, lovers, pets? No. Freedom from the stress of work, money, and relationships that we are facing today? Nope. The really great thing about heaven, without which it would literally be hell, is the presence of God in His saving, covenantal, lovingkindness towards His people. “The tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (Rev 21:3).

  In John 14:6, as so often, Jesus was doing far more than answering the question that was asked of Him. He was reshaping the questioner. He was answering the questions that should have been asked. Our condition is not merely that we lack answers, but that we are asking the wrong questions. Fortunately, Jesus doesn’t leave us alone in that condition. He answers the right questions before we even know to ask them.

  In the last post, I said, “Creation is what it is because God is who He is.” Likewise, what the new heavens and the new earth will be like is an overflow, a manifestation, a demonstration of who God is. You can only imagine what IT will be like to the extent that you know what HE is like.

  As Jesus’ hour to depart from earth was nearing, the Good Shepherd was preparing His disciples. And the same message is for us. Don’t be anxious about the place to which Jesus has gone ahead of us. Do not let your heart be troubled. Continue trusting in Jesus, abiding in Him as the only Way, understanding all truth as Truth about Him, realizing that life in Him is the only Life. Eternity will be all about abiding in Christ. So abide in Him now and make the path smooth, prepare the way for the Lord’s return.

“If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:3)

  We’re going to be taken by Jesus, to be with Jesus, where Jesus is, in Jesus’ Father’s house! Any more questions? I’m satisfied. Amen!

Jesus IS the Life.

  1) He is not a branch, He is the vine (John 15). Again, He has life in Himself (John 5:26, John 1:4), whereas all other life saps from His. In our mother’s womb, we were entirely dependent on her life for our life. In that sense, she was our life. Later our bodies developed, and we became independent, so that even if our mother died, we would continue to live. But as a branch connected to the vine of Jesus, we will never be independent of him. Any branch not connected to the vine will shrivel up, die, and be burned (John 15).

  2) But Jesus not only supplies life and not only is in Himself the source of life, but moreover, true life consists in knowing Him and being connected to Him (John 17:3). This fact should be obvious, the only reason it even needs to be explicitly stated is because our sinful nature has made us confused about reality. The abundant life that Jesus offers is an abundance of Himself. A creature walking around and breathing, and doing so in defiant rebellion against his Creator, is in a much worse position than merely “living an empty life”. The Bible accurately describes this state as death:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world. (Eph 2:1-2)

  Note that the Bible doesn’t speak in terms of “spiritual death” like evangelical Christians often do. The phrase isn’t necessarily totally bad, but we can learn something from the Bible’s language. God didn’t say to Adam, “The day you eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil you will die spiritually,” He said, “You will die.” Expressions like, “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22), “she… is dead even while she lives” (1 Tim 5:6), “excluded from the life of God” (Eph 4:18), “abides in death” (i.e. lives in death!, 1 John 3:14), “you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead” (Rev 3:1), show that from God’s perspective, the qualities that a biologist would label as “life” are, apart from Him, not worthy of the title.

  Apart from Christ we are spiritually dead indeed. But when we get our new bodies (1 Cor 15) and experience a reinvigorated sense of what it is to love God in Christ with all our strength, and when the heart-hardening effects of sin are taken away and we begin to reciprocate from the heart more of Jesus’ passionate devotion toward us, and when the fulness of revelation and the imminence of the Lord’s presence opens us to love Him with all of our minds, then we will certainly look back on the days spent in our sinful nature and realize that we were not just spiritually dead. Anything not centered in, abiding in, and vitally attached to Jesus is truly dead.

  Jesus IS The Truth.

  One reason that I used to reject Christianity was that I assumed that any “universal truth” should be “universally accessible”. Let me explain by example. Even if a person never learned mathematics from another person they could, if they had a mind for mathematics and if they put some effort into it, potentially deduce mathematical properties on their own. Though ancient societies may have developed their mathematical understandings independently, once they came together they would agree on the results. Any absolute truth, I assumed, should be like this, only more so. Many people would find it difficult to discover mathematical properties on their own. But any absolute spiritual truth of any significant value should be something that any normal person can discover on their own if they are willing, so I assumed! In contrast, you have to read or hear the Bible it in order to know its message. You can’t discover the gospel through scientific inquiry in a lab or even through meditation under a tree. So I assumed it couldn’t be  universal truth.

  Although this reasoning seems to make sense when it comes to mathematical and scientific inquiry, there are problems. Perhaps the main problem is there is more to the universe, and more to truth than that which is accessible to the scientific method, logical deduction, and inward meditation. In particular, my former way of thinking begins to break down when we consider personalities and personal relationships. You cannot know a person by subjecting them to the scientific method. You can know some things about them by observing them, but you cannot know them except to the extent that you have a relationship with them and they choose to reveal themself to you.

  Someone could argue that what I am talking about now doesn’t deserve to be called “absolute truth”. People change: today I like peanut butter but tomorrow I might get tired of it (unlikely). But even if I do like peanut butter for the rest of my life, that fact is not “universal” in the sense that it is not part of any overarching pattern in the universe, it has no relevance to anything except for what kind of snack I’m likely to munch on.

  But when it comes to God, the situation is radically different. God’s personality is not a personal matter. God’s personality is a public, universal matter. Just as a person’s personality affects what they work on, how they work on it, etc., likewise God’s personality determines what kind of a universe He will make, what kind of laws will govern it, etc.

  Therefore, in a universe created by a personal God, a God with a particular character and nature, and especially a God who does all things for His own glory, “Truth” is not a collection of facts independent from God’s own personhood. But rather eternal, universal, absolute “Truth” is that which proceeds forth as a reflection of the True, Eternal, Universal, Absolute Being. If you want to know truth, you have to know Jesus. If you want to see truth, you have to see Jesus.

  Certainly Jesus does speak the truth (John 8:45, John 18:37). But you could listen to Jesus speak the truth for a million years and you still wouldn’t have all the truth. Jesus does not merely speak the truth, He is the embodiment of Truth because He is the very image of the invisible God (Col 1:15).

  Here are a couple of specific ways that demonstrate the dependency that truth has on God’s personhood:

1) Morality.

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:20-21)

  Here “practicing the truth” is contrasted againg “doing evil”. The universe was created to tell a story about God, and in that story/parable/drama mankind is supposed to play the role of God (Gen 1:26ff).

  However, mankind rebelled against God, and chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, attempting to define those qualities for ourselves (relativism). Still, the truth remained that good is ultimately determined by what God is like and evil by what God is not like. The Day of Judgment will prove that there is a fixed absolute standard for good and evil in this universe, they are not a matter of personal opinion.

  When we do evil, we are not practicing the truth, we are proclaiming lies about the God in whose image our father Adam was originally made. The second Adam tells the true and full story about God in every aspect of His life, His character, His deeds, and His teachings. He IS the truth.

2) Science.

“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. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light….” (Gen 1:2-3)

  God’s work in this world is, and always has been, the work of bringing order out of chaos and fullness out of void. That is His nature. He is a God of order not disorder, of peace not confusion, of abundance not emptiness. Therefore science, in which man tries to discover laws and overarching patterns that govern God’s creation, is ultimately the study of God’s character and nature itself.

“He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” (Col 1:17) If not for Jesus’ integrity, particles could not hold together in the nucleus of an atom. The reason philosphers since ancient times have sensed a relationship between “the one and the many”, the reason physicists hope (or expect) to a find a grand unifying theory, the reason that mathematicians continuously discover deep relationships between topics that were formerly considered independent, is because all the vast diversity of the world was conceived in the mind of The One God for one ultimate purpose.

Creation is what it is because God is who He is. If you want to know the ultimate Truth behind why beautiful, grand, far reaching scientific theories hold together, you need look no further than Jesus. Truth is a person.

  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) It would have been easier to understand if He had said, “I can show you the way, teach you truth, and tell you how to have life (or even `I can give you life’),” and those would have already been some big claims. But Jesus’ claims are much greater. His actual words are an expression of His deity, so looking into them is no more of a simple matter than looking into the deep nature of God. Here are some thoughts about what it means that Jesus IS The Way, The Truth, and The Life.

  Jesus IS The Way. In order to see how Jesus is The Way, it helps to contrast Jesus with other people and other things which are not The Way.

  Moses, David, Peter, John, Paul, along with all the prophets, apostles, and preachers of the true gospel have pointed us in the right way, but they were not and are not the way. The Bible reveals to us the way, but it is not the way. All of the above sources exist to point us to Jesus. Jesus is The Way. Jesus doesn’t say to us, “Go here, go there,” He says, “Come to Me”, and “Follow Me.” Jesus is not just waiting for us up in heaven at the end of the road. He is the road that leads to… Him!
  The discussion between Jesus and His disciples which prompted this quote was

  “My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.”
  Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?”
  Jesus said to him, “I am the way… No one comes to the Father except through me.”

In reply to the sentiments of so-called agnostics, who claim to not be sure about God’s existence, but generally have a back up plan just in case, it needs to be noted that no one comes to the Father by saying, “At least I wasn’t a murderer, a bank robber, or a rapist.” You can’t approach God that way — not now, and not on the Day of Judgment. The only way to come to the before the Father and be accepted is through the Son, Jesus Christ.
  But for our sake as Christians it also needs to be noted that Jesus said this to His disciples in a very theistic environment. Virtually everyone around them believed in God. And in that context Jesus said to Thomas, “*I* and the Way, … no one comes to the Father except through *Me*.”
  So can I even dare to say that “belief in God” is not the Way? Yes, of course, because Muslims believe in God but they are not following The Way. The Pharisees believed in God but their way was contrary to The Way. Theism is not The Way.
  Passing alongside Jesus, walking next to Him, or even following His example are not The Way (Matt 7:22-23, Lk 13:25-27). “No one comes to the Father except through Me” (cf. John 10:9). The fact that Jesus is the Way means we must abide in Him (John 15).