The Word of Life

I John 1:1a – “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,…”

John immediately establishes that he and the other apostles are reporting eyewitness testimony.  The Gospel is not some second, third, fourth, nth hand rumor.  It is not some fairy tale.  It isn’t a fiction devised to take advantage of others.  It is the absolute truth as experienced by real people.

“…which we have looked at and our hands have touched — …”

Neither is the Gospel some cold and remote observation.  It is the result of intimate inspection, years of living with Jesus, years of hands-on experience.  It is the result of looking at Jesus’ life, conducting serious and critical investigation.  Not a few of the disciples were slow to believe, had many doubts and questions.  Jesus answered them all by His life and death and conquest of death.

“– this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

These hard facts of first-hand experience, and only this testimony is offered by the apostles as the Gospel truth.  This is why the gospels were written: so that there would be no embellishments over time, no apocryphal tales added later to make things more dramatic or entertaining.

And what need of embellishment?  Twice, God Himself spoke from heaven and gave His personal approval of Jesus as His Son (at His baptism and on the Mount of Transfiguration).  Incident upon miraculous incident showed Jesus to at least be a prophet on a par with Elijah.  His resurrection showed Him to be much more.  And beyond that, they saw Him ascend into heaven.  There can be only one conclusion:  Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God.

In building his case for the veracity of the gospel and the identity of Jesus, John harks back to the opening of his own gospel account, vv. 1-4 – ‘In the beginning  was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.  In Him was life, and that life was the light of [all] men.’

What is it about the idea of ‘the word’ that so fascinates John that he returns to it as the foundation of his understanding of Jesus and His relationship to God?

We might just suppose that the first chapter of Genesis was John’s favorite passage from the Torah.  But as we examine his letters, it’s obvious that he was a much deeper thinker than that.  He spent years contemplating who and what Jesus was and how the Gospel made everything fit together.  In the process, he gained some insights into the nature of God and what it means that we are made in His image.

Language, the use of words, implies thought.  Psychologist Dr. Larry Crabb says that thinking is speaking to ourselves in words.  We can, of course, think in images, and many people do.  Imagination, ideation and conceptualization use all the senses.  But reason, logic, the perception of cause and effect – these things require words to be understood and used.

If God uses words (as well as images and sounds, smells and tastes), He thinks and reasons as we do on some level.  Rationality and mind are part of the ‘image of God’ which we bear.

If God uses words, He also communicates.  He expresses Himself, shares Himself.  The whole of creation is God telling us something about Himself, as Paul notes in Romans 1.  His eternal power and divinity are obvious to anyone who will look at the universe without bias.  The desire and capacity to communicate is also part of the image of God in human beings.

A good communicator, a true storyteller, can make his or her subject come alive for the listener.  It’s as if we’re there, seeing and feeling for ourselves.  But this is God we’re talking about.  It’s only to be expected that His words are more potent than our own.  When God speaks, His words are active, powerful and creative.  Hebrews 4:12 tells us that,  ‘The word of God is alive and powerful…’

God’s word is so potent that it takes on a life of its own in and through creation.  It is, according to the opening phrases of John’s gospel, a living extension of God Himself, both God and with God.  So vital that it appears to be nearly independent.  The two are one and the same and yet, because God is so much more than any time-and-space-bound human, we perceive them as distinct and separate.

We talk about a man being ‘as good as his word’.  We have to go a huge step beyond that in speaking about God.  God is His word.  There is no distinction or disconnect at all between who God is and what He says.  ‘The Word was God.’ – the two are synonymous and identical, for all that we assign them different roles in terms of their interaction with us in history.

In both this letter and his gospel, John uses the definite article: the Word.  The Word is the sum of all that God has to communicate to us about Himself, about the nature of our lives and the world in which we live.

John goes even further.  In 1:2 of his gospel, John shifts from the definite article to the personal pronoun: ‘He was with God in the beginning.’  This is to develop the understanding made plain in 1:14 – ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’  The word of God took on a palpable existence so that we could not only witness its effects in creation, not only hear it in the words of the prophets – but so that we could touch it.  Just as John says in the epistle, that he and the apostles did.  God communicated Himself in and through a man.  One who not only passed along what the Lord had to say, but one who actually was God.  And John and his fellow apostles testify that this essential, immediate, personal, human expression of God was Jesus

It was by ‘the Word of life’ that life was created in Genesis 1.  It is ‘the Word of life’ because the thought and expression of God is the ultimate source of life.  All life, and especially human life, made in God’s image, finds its root and fulfillment in the continually active and creative Word of God.

‘The Word of life’ reveals life to us.  We know about existence: about what it takes to stay alive physically.  We are born with appetites which drive us to stay alive in that way, even to reproduce life.  But biological, mechanical life is not what John is talking about.  What we have trouble finding is that life of the mind and heart and spirit that brings us joy and peace, the sense that we are loved for who we are rather than what we do, the sense that our lives mean something beyond simple self–perpetuation and that we are realizing, or at least progressing toward our true potential.

The Word of life alone brings us this dimension of living.  It is He who shows us how to live in harmony with God, in the way that we were created to live.