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Spiritual Thoughts – April 20, 2018

God is love: the word made flesh
rob sutherland

In his gospel, the apostle John writes:

John 1:1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 1:2 The same was in the beginning with God. 1:3 All things were made through him. Without him was not anything made that has been made. 1:4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 1:5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness hasn't overcome it. 1:6 There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. 1:7 The same came as a witness, that he might testify about the light, that all might believe through him. 1:8 He was not the light, but was sent that he might testify about the light. 1:9 The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.1:10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world didn't recognize him. 1:11 He came to his own, and those who were his own didn't receive him. 1:12 But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become God's children, to those who believe in his name: 1:13 who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 1:14 The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.1:15 John testified about him. He cried out, saying, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me, for he was before me.'" 1:16 From his fullness we all received grace upon grace. 1:17 For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 1:18 No one has seen God at any time. The one and only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.

John used the Greek word “Logos,” literally translated “Word,” to describe Jesus for a reason. The Word was a bridge between the Jewish and the Gentile worlds.

For the Jews, the divine word was not simply a sound; that word was the creative energy and power of God which always effectively brought about what God intended. The paramount illustration is God speaking the world, and all it is, into existence. When John says Jesus is the incarnate Word, he means Jesus is the very voice of God, a divine person embodying the dynamic and creative power of God, his truth and his love in action. In the ancient synagogues of Jesus’ time, the Jews used targums or Aramaic translations of the Hebrew scriptures to supplement the scriptures and make them more understandable to the people. The targums used the Aramaic word Memra as synonym for God hundreds of times. For example, the people go forth to meet God becomes the people go forth to meet Memra (Exodus 19:7). The literal translation of the Aramaic Memra into Greek is Logos. As the Logos, Jesus is the very mind and will of God come to earth. (Barclay, W., Jesus as They Saw Him, p. 422-423. SCM Press, London, 1962)

For the Greeks, the Logos was uniquely Heraclitus’ word for God. Heraclitus was the man who famously said “you can never step into the same river twice.” Heraclitus wrestled with the problem of permanence and change. In the conditions of space and time, all things flow like a river. Everything is constantly becoming another thing. Every person is constantly changing into another person. Heraclitus asked how is it that form, beauty and personhood are sustained and move forward through the stream of time still whole while everything around them, everything within them changes. His answer was all things and all persons are grounded in and sustained through the Logos: God. God is the one and only I AM. Our created being: our existence, our permanence, our personhood, our rationality is an image of God’s eternal being: his existence, his permanence, his personhood, his rationality. Human beings can only say I am, because God is. Were that not the case, human beings in the river of flux could only say I used to be or I am coming to be, but never I am, because at the instant they might say it a great deal, if not all, of who they are has already passed away from them and all of who they will become is yet to be. Moreover, this rational Logos created a rational world, putting an enduring rationality into the enduring minds of each and every human being such that they are able to discover, understand and experience truth and love. These thoughts permeated Greek thinking from the eighth century BC when Heraclitus first formulated them down to the time of Jesus. Interestingly enough, Heraclitus lived and wrote in the same city, Ephesus, that the apostle John wrote his gospel. (Malcolm Guite on Light in the Gospel of John, http:www.youtube.com) As the Logos, Jesus is the very mind and will of God come to earth.

For John, Jesus was the Saviour of the world, coming down from heaven, uniting Jew and Gentile, and raising all who accepted him up to heaven.

Rob Sutherland is a graduate of University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School He is a criminal defence lawyer with 30 years experience, a member of the bars of Ontario, Alberta, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. He is a Senior Canadian Fellow at the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Studies of the Great Ideas, an American think-tank based in Chicago. He has published one book “Putting God on Trial: the biblical Book of Job,” a defence of God’s goodness in the face of his authorization of undeserved and unremitted evil in the life of Job and the world, which is taught at a number of Canadian, American and Indian universities and available through Amazon. He is writing a second book “Putting Jesus on Trial: the biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” a defence of Jesus’ divinity.

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