John 1:1-5

00:00:00:27 – 00:00:28:26
Clint Loveall
Friends, thanks for joining us, as we just are on the very beginning of entering a new study. The Gospel of John. Yesterday, we just did a little bit of background on the book of John. Might be worth checking that out if you’re interested. Today we work our way in the text, but I will do so slowly. Because this opening part of John, sometimes called the Prolog, is is rich.

00:00:28:26 – 00:00:55:23
Clint Loveall
It is unique. There’s not really another thing like this in the other gospels. And I think by way of getting there, Michael, one of the interesting ways to look at chapter one of the Gospel of John is in in what’s absent if if we think for a minute about starting this gospel and what isn’t here, there is no Christmas story.

00:00:55:28 – 00:01:33:40
Clint Loveall
There’s no prophecy, there’s no Bethlehem, there’s no genealogy, there’s no Joseph and Mary. There’s no angels, there’s no shepherds. John either has access to that information and assumes it’s already out there or just doesn’t want to use it to to do what he’s going to do. And so goes directly to a very different kind of opening than we see, much less historical, much bigger, much more cosmic, much more spiritual.

00:01:33:45 – 00:01:58:15
Clint Loveall
But it is interesting. One of the things that that is difficult sometimes for, for people who know the Bible reasonably well is that it kind of blends together in our minds, and we know pieces of all the various gospels, and we tend, in our own experience, to collate them into the Jesus story. So when you break out one gospel at a time, it is interesting to see what John doesn’t include.

00:01:58:15 – 00:02:00:21
Clint Loveall
And I think that’s a pretty significant list.

00:02:00:27 – 00:02:28:04
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, absolutely. The the start of John here is significant because instead of it turning to a kind of historical account, which we largely have in the Luke and Matthew records, you have some history in there, and Jesus comes in really just about ready for ministry. I mean, Mark wants to start that story right away because there’s a hurried ness to telling us about the the overall gospel.

00:02:28:13 – 00:03:01:42
Michael Gewecke
John is interesting because it starts with an idea. It starts with a way of thinking about the world. It starts to put it more simply theologically, about the nature of who God is, and specifically how Jesus represents that in the world. And I think that you could think of the beginning of John as a kind of flourish, almost like a firework show how you often start with quite a few to fill the sky, to let everybody know this is the start.

00:03:01:42 – 00:03:26:45
Michael Gewecke
I think that’s what’s happening here in the Gospel of John. This gospel isn’t hiding anything from us. This gospel is not trying to sort of hide some things behind and then have a big reveal in the end. No, right from the get go, John is is making it clear in this first fantastic flourish that Jesus Christ is the eternal divine wisdom of God.

00:03:26:45 – 00:03:52:55
Michael Gewecke
We’ll talk more about what that means in particular, but that Jesus is, from the start, co-equal with God. That Jesus is theologically, fully God. There’s no baby in the manger. There’s no rooting Jesus in a historical record or account. No, this is John making it clear to us that Jesus is God. Jesus has always been God, and that theological statement of faith is going to start this book off.

00:03:53:02 – 00:04:20:31
Clint Loveall
And to get there, John’s going to use words that would have been familiar to every reader in the beginning. These are almost straight from the Book of Genesis. And in that way, I think John’s subtle, or maybe not entirely subtle way of connecting the story of Jesus with the story of God in creation, in what would be called the Hebrew Bible, or what we would know as the Old Testament.

00:04:20:36 – 00:05:07:18
Clint Loveall
In the beginning was the word. And this word word is vitally important in Greek. This is the word logos. It means writing. It means speaking, it means word. And here you’ll notice if your Bible, I would argue, has done it correctly. It will be capitalized. Because this is not only a description, this is a title. When John says, in the beginning was the word he has in mind the will of God, the proclamation, the pronunciation of the pronouncement of God, the the thing that God wants to say in the beginning was the word, the Holy Word of God.

00:05:07:22 – 00:05:38:22
Clint Loveall
And I’m, I mean, literally books and and shelves of books have been written just on this usage of that word word in this context. It’s hard to overstate. It is deep. It is big. It is important for John, maybe a shorthand way is to think that it represents not only who God is, but what God wants to accomplish in the world.

00:05:38:27 – 00:06:08:27
Clint Loveall
It is the decree, the will, the hope, the plan, the purpose of God. And it is in this instant given to us, communicated to us as a not a spoken word, but the word. And, I don’t I don’t know what else to do with that. Michael mean it again, this is a this is a very deep well here that we start off with right away.

00:06:08:38 – 00:06:47:31
Michael Gewecke
So I think you’re right to point us, Clint, to the historical, even Old Testament biblical reference to this idea of the word, because you have in the Proverbs, a significant section dedicated to the idea that God creates wisdom and that this ordering of the universe, that all of it is a grace that God has given. But in the first century, you have a philosopher by the name of Philo who is writing about the idea of this word, this logos, and it’s connected to that biblical tradition.

00:06:47:31 – 00:07:10:28
Michael Gewecke
But this philosopher is also doing some connections to Greek philosophy, and there’s a really interesting kind of school happening around that. Now, whether or not that’s what John is writing in, the subtext here is unimportant. What is important is to know that at this moment in history, the church’s theological vision of who Jesus is continues to grow and grow and grow.

00:07:10:29 – 00:07:38:27
Michael Gewecke
It’s doubling upon itself. And what we’re discovering here is this kind of amazing, unified nation of thought that connects ancient ideas with contemporary ideas. And all of it is rooted. That’s a lot of words, Clint. To say what you said very simply at the start, that all of this is a way of providing for us an understanding that when God speaks, remember Genesis, God speaks the creation into order.

00:07:38:39 – 00:08:04:04
Michael Gewecke
What are those words? They’re words. They’re spoken words. So when God speaks, God is not just speaking into the world. God is that word that the order is God itself. But then God is one and all. It’s a beautiful, deep, kind of complicated, cascading layer of ideas that are being combined together in this text. I understand friends up here, we’ve not gotten past verse one.

00:08:04:04 – 00:08:28:01
Michael Gewecke
That may seem like you’re starting very slowly, but we couldn’t possibly overestimate how much has been found, not just at the start of John, but then how this is going to get looped back in throughout the course of the book. This is something like a symphony where you hear those, those important first melodies, and then you’re going to hear riffs on those melodies throughout the rest of the book.

00:08:28:06 – 00:08:46:18
Michael Gewecke
John is setting us off here with the first sort of encapsulation of what the revelation of God looks like when God creates God’s speaks. When God speaks, you know something about God’s character. When you know God’s character, you’re experiencing revelation. And all of that is being encompassed in this text.

00:08:46:22 – 00:09:17:40
Clint Loveall
And this thing, this entity, this, this reality word was not only with God. If we continue the sentence and the word was with God, that makes sense to us. The word was God, meaning that there’s fundamentally no distinction for John, no separation between what God says and does and who God is, that these are both manifestations of who it is that that we point this title at God.

00:09:17:40 – 00:09:47:37
Clint Loveall
God and word are of the same. They are. The word was with God, and the word was God. And from there we go to to look at briefly what it is that this word does. What is the impact of this word? He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

00:09:47:42 – 00:10:12:56
Clint Loveall
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. So what do we they know about the word? The word is creative. The word co-create with God. The word is the partner with God in the act of creating.

00:10:13:01 – 00:10:46:42
Clint Loveall
And it is the word that brings life. In him is life, and that life is a light of all people. And then those beautiful phrases at the end, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. We mentioned briefly yesterday that light and dark are important themes throughout the Gospel of John, and to some extent that’s true of the other Gospels, but John leans into them particularly heavily, and we see it already here in this very opening passage.

00:10:46:53 – 00:11:13:46
Clint Loveall
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. There’s adversity to the word. There is challenge to the light, and yet the light shines. A light is victorious, the light overcomes, and the darkness cannot defeat it. Now this is all setting foundation for the structure, the house that John is going to build. These are the footings, these.

00:11:13:46 – 00:11:29:22
Clint Loveall
This is the base that will hold the rest of it up. And in only five verses here John has preached a magnificent sermon that will help us later build a framework for unpacking who it is that he’s going to introduce us to.

00:11:29:27 – 00:11:53:25
Michael Gewecke
So I have a very meta level. Let’s just look at this and make sure that we don’t miss it. Verse four in him was life. Remember that the Genesis account of creation is God is the the bringer of life. God creates life, God breathes life. And that that breathing is an essential image. And then here that life is the light.

00:11:53:25 – 00:12:18:40
Michael Gewecke
Well, with a word, God creates light. In fact, that creates light before God creates the light source, a reminder that God is the source of all light. Right? So let’s not make a mistake here and think that when John is giving us the Genesis account, that John is simply giving us a physics lesson, that that when John says in him was life, that God, that John just means biological life, he certainly does.

00:12:18:45 – 00:12:43:39
Michael Gewecke
And John doesn’t just mean physical light, he doesn’t just mean the light that is put out by the sun, the light that we enjoy, that that animates the life around us. No. When John is going to give us an account of creation, Clint John is both reading it through the Genesis text. It has behind the scenes all of these physical descriptions, which we know and learned in either the first study that we did on Genesis.

00:12:43:39 – 00:13:17:00
Michael Gewecke
And you can certainly go avail yourself of that or in Sunday school, and that is there. But not just that. John is also reading this with a metaphorical theological lens, that there’s deeper meaning behind that creation story, that if we look and see, we will even discover the source of that life. The source of that light is the Son of God, the wisdom, the Word of God Himself, that Jesus Christ is the one written through that entire account.

00:13:17:00 – 00:13:47:40
Michael Gewecke
John sees that now for thousands of years, Genesis was passed on and it was spoken of, and it was studied and it was debated. And Jesus wasn’t described a single time in those accounts. What John is doing is, is to help us see something truly new, something that that was not known prior to the revelation of Christ. And when John sees the story through that light, he he describes something as he says that cannot be contained by darkness.

00:13:47:51 – 00:14:16:52
Michael Gewecke
There’s no adversarial perspective. There’s no human or spiritual adversary to the gospel which can contain the truth of the Word of God, spoken the Word of God and flesh the Word of God, who has created that. This is an amazing, depth of understanding of what is happening in the creation. And if you you just read past this, you might think to yourself, okay, there’s some themes that that we see in Genesis.

00:14:16:57 – 00:14:48:14
Michael Gewecke
That’s a very flowery way to say it, but really, I think you’re exactly right, Clint. What John is hoping to do here is for us to understand that there is truth at every layer of the text, and that all of that truth is going to be contained in, as you called it, the building that John is, is casting out for us here, that the idea that this is the foundation, but this book we’re about to encounter together, these are the themes that we’re going to see over and over and over again.

00:14:48:14 – 00:14:56:51
Michael Gewecke
This this is just the first, this is just the first melody. We’re going to see this harmonized over and over again together.

00:14:56:56 – 00:15:32:26
Clint Loveall
I think on the front end it may be helpful if we understand what John isn’t doing. And I would argue that John isn’t lecturing. There are ten things in these first five verses that it would be tempting to stop and try to explain, but that’s not John’s practice. John is not interested in explanation. John is interested in an experience of this living word, an experience of the living Christ.

00:15:32:31 – 00:16:04:31
Clint Loveall
So yes, he’s borrowing language from the creation story. He’s now claiming that this living word was with God, but he doesn’t even bother to tell us then what he means by that. Or he just simply says it states it as fact and then moves on to the story that he’s desperate to tell, which is the coming of this word in human form and what it means and what it accomplishes and who it is that walks the earth in this person known to us as Jesus.

00:16:04:31 – 00:16:39:49
Clint Loveall
And and so I, I think if you if you expected John to be the teacher at the front of the classroom, you’re going to find yourself frustrated with him. John is the excited storyteller who can’t wait to get to the next thing he wants to tell you. And as beautiful and wonderful as this introduction is, and I think, you know, a strong case has been made and certainly can be made that these are the this may be the best gospel introduction.

00:16:39:54 – 00:17:12:00
Clint Loveall
John’s not going to linger there that we’re going to very quickly go to the practical. We have this, you know, very high level theological formula, this beautiful formulation of the word. And then it’s just on to the story. And so, I think if we can if we can meet John there, sit at his feet and let him tell us these stories, we have a much better chance of kind of receiving this gospel as I think it’s intended.

00:17:12:05 – 00:17:33:42
Michael Gewecke
So I love that image, the idea of John as a storyteller. And I think to add to that, I think of John as that storyteller who told you a story when you were a child that you love, that you grabbed on to that that was easy to remember. But then at some point, as you got older, as life went on, you remembered that story.

00:17:33:46 – 00:17:59:20
Michael Gewecke
And through the eyes of an adult, you saw there was a lot more there than what I had ever imagined. Could be the case that the idea that this story has something to teach, this story has something about this character, is more than what first met the eye of a child. That’s what John does. John portrays this story with a kind of beautiful color and flourish.

00:17:59:33 – 00:18:28:48
Michael Gewecke
And then when you really start peeling back the layers, you discover that it doesn’t have an ending in the depth of this is beyond our ability to contain it in even this format of study. I think your point, Clint as well made that as we go through John, what we’re going to be doing together is trying to get a grasp of some of those major themes, trying to understand some of the depth of his spiritual teaching of who Jesus is and what that means.

00:18:28:53 – 00:18:51:21
Michael Gewecke
What we’re not attempting to do is to cover all of the scholarly account over thousands of years, because that would be innumerable. It would be beyond our ability or scope to do in a format like this. It is exceptional. If you start looking for the bottom of John that you will you will never find it. And I think that’s both by design and it’s also inspiration.

00:18:51:21 – 00:18:58:52
Michael Gewecke
That’s how Scripture works. And so that’s what part of the what makes a journey like this. So good. As we seek to do it together.

00:18:58:57 – 00:19:21:04
Clint Loveall
And we’ll take our time, we’ll try to do it some justice, particularly in this early part of the gospel, because it is so monumental. And so, integral to the way that John is going to unfold the beginning parts of the story. So we’ll try to take our time with it and enjoy it and learn from it and listen to it.

00:19:21:09 – 00:19:31:12
Clint Loveall
And so we hope there was something helpful today as you encounter these first opening verses from John. And if you can join us tomorrow, we’ll continue.

00:19:31:17 – 00:19:46:15
Michael Gewecke
If you’ve made it this far, that may be a sign that you should subscribe so you can stick with us through the rest of this series. Certainly give this video a like it helps others find it in the course of their own study. And we will be back tomorrow, live at 2:00 and of course always on YouTube at four.

00:19:46:15 – 00:19:47:00
Michael Gewecke
We’ll see you soon.

00:19:47:02 – 00:19:47:31
Clint Loveall
Thanks.