NB247
Christ and God
D. Thomas, D. D.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…
”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). As the translation of this passage cannot be improved, and the words are plain, no verbal exegesis is required. The subject is Christ and God, and we are here taught —
I. THAT CHRIST IS THE ETERNAL REVEALER OF GOD. “In the beginning was the Word” — the Logos. He is not a word but the word. As the Revealer, this Word is distinguished —
1. By its faithfulness. Christ is the exact exponent of the Divine intellect and heart.
2. By its fulness. Other words only speak part of God.
3. By its forcefulness. Human words are sometimes powerful, they are not always air; they are sometimes a force. God’s words in nature are mighty.
II. THAT CHRIST IS THE ETERNAL SELF OF GOD. “And the Word was with God.” The expression implies that He had a conscious existence distinct from the Absolute One. He was with Him. He that is with me is not me.
1. Christ was with Him in the sense of agreement. There was a perfect concurrence.
2. Christ was with him in the sense of contact. Never out of His presence, living in His light, breathing His inspirations.
III. THAT CHRIST IS THE ETERNAL SELF OF GOD. “And the Word was God.”
1. “He was God” in form. Deep, it would seem, in the constitution of moral soul, is the craving for some form of God. As He appears in the universe, He transcends the limits of human vision. Christ is the form He has assumed; the form in which, in all probability, He appears to His intelligent universe as well as to man.
2. “He was God” in action. Through Him the eternal volitions are carried out and realized. He is the Actualizer of God’s eternal ideas.
Controversy About Christ
Bp.Ryle.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…
This verse is an unanswerable argument against three classes of heretics. It confutes —
1. The Arians, who regard Christ as a Being inferior to God.
2. The Sabellians, who deny any distinction of Persons in the Trinity, and say that God sometimes manifested Himself as Father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as the Spirit, and that the Father and the Spirit suffered on the cross.
3. The Socinians and Unitarians, who say that Jesus Christ was not God, but man, a most holy and perfect man, but only a man.
Christ the Word of God
J. Cumming, D. D.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…
What is a word? It is a thought in the depths of the heart made audible to a second person. If Christ be the Word of God, He is God’s love sounding in the language of mankind, God’s truth reverberating among the centuries as amid the corridors of a grand temple, God’s justice revealed to our comprehension. Once this orb was a bright mirror which reflected God’s image, but sin darkened it, and it is dim. Once the rolling of its waves, the murmurings of its streams, the noise of its winds, was the word of God; but sin has laid its hand upon all its heart-strings and deadened and disordered its vibrations. Christ is now what the world once was, and more than the world was — God’s love, God’s truth, audible to men. So that in hearing Christ speak I hear God; in seeing Christ’s portrait I see God’s; in seeing the picture of Christ delivered in the gospel I see all that is comprehensible of the High and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity and the praises thereof.
On Books
Charles Kingsley, M. A.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…
1. What is it which makes men different from all other living beings we know of? Is it not speech — the power of words? The beasts may make one another understand many things, but they have no speech.
2. But where did this power of uttering thoughts come from? The beasts have been on the earth as long as man, and yet they can no more speak than they could when they were created. But Adam could speak at once, and could understand what God said to him. Who gave him that power but Jesus, the Word who was in the beginning with God, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
3. By Christ the Word God has spoken to man in all ages. It was He whom Moses and the seventy elders saw, for “no man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father He hath declared Him. He put rote David’s mouth those glorious Psalms. “The Lord… hath put a new song into my mouth.” He, as the Word of God, came unto the prophets. When He became incarnate, He spake as never man spake. And since then He has given to all wise and holy poets, philosophers, and preachers the power to speak and write the wonderful truths they have thought out.
4. Ought not the knowledge of all this
(1) make us better and wiser;
(2) make us reverence the Bible;
(3) reverence all good books?Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book, a message from a human soul thousands of miles away which can amuse, terrify, comfort, teach us. Why is it that neither angels, nor saints, nor evil spirits appear now to speak to men as they once did? Because we have books by which Christ’s messengers and the devil’s can communicate with us. If they are good and true, they are the message of Christ, the Teacher of all truth. If they are false and wicked, we ought to fear them as evil spirits loosed among us. This is an age of books, a flood of writings of all sorts is spreading over the world. We ought not to stop that. It is God’s ordinance. It is of His grace and mercy that we have a free press. It was dearly bought. The men who died to buy us this liberty knew that it was better to let in a thousand bad books than to shut out one good one, for a grain of God’s truth will outweigh a ton of the devil’s lies. We cannot silence evil books, but we can take care what we read, and that what we let others read shall be good and wholesome.
The Divinity of Christ Revealed in the Gospel of John
Dr. Pentecost.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…
I remember once talking with a lady who said she did not believe Jesus was the Son of God, although she believed He was a good man, and admired very much the teaching He had left. Strangely enough, I found her (with all the beautiful inconsistency of a woman’s mind, and that inconsistency is frequently very beautiful and much better than the logical consistency of man’s mind) particularly fond of the sayings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of St. John; such, for instance, as “In My Father’s house are many mansions; I go to prepare a place for you.” “Now,” I said, “will you go home and read again the Gospel of St. John, and cross out every word that intimates He is Divine, and say you don’t believe that and that?” She thought it would be a good idea, and I gave her little Testament and told her to mark and cut it as much as she liked. She came back in a week, as she had promised. “Well, how did you get along?” “I didn’t get along at all. The truth is, I found I had to cross out the whole of the first chapter, and I began to think, ‘If it’s like this, what’ll become of the beautiful promises and sayings?’ so I stopped and cried, ‘Lord, I see it is so. I accept Thee as Son of God, my Lord and my God.'”