The Word

 

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." 

 

It is accepted as a fact of faith that God created the world and everything in it. We read about this in the beginning of the Bible, but it is when we get to the end of the Bible that we find out, through the praises of the 24 elders in Heaven, that God did it for His own pleasure; "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created" Rev. 4:11 (KJV). There are some translations that state that God created "by His will" rather than for His pleasure. These seem rather contrary, but when we look at the original language we see that the original word 'theléma', G2307, means both the will and also pleasure. While it makes absolute sense that God created the world by His own will (after all, who could overlay their own will over God's), I like the thought that God spent six days in creation out of His own good pleasure. You can almost equate it to a child forming a city in their sandbox, designing houses and roads as they see fit, deriving entertainment from the very act of creating.

But of course, the world and all that it contains is so much more intricate than a sandbox city. There are so many marvels in creation that human beings take for granted, never even considering their intricacies or how they work with other intricacies. Think of the complex systems of the human body. Doctors spend years in school to understand the basic functions of the body, and most doctors specialize in only one or two fields; no one doctor understands all of the functions of the human body. Even with thousands of years of study, the human body still stuns and amazes doctors and scientists at the things that we still do not know or understand. Yet as wonderful as the human body is, we can also look at something as insignificant as the eyes of a fly and wonder at the complexity of that tiny, specific organ of that tiny, specific and insignificant creature.

As humans, we have the ability for creation and invention as well, yet our skills and abilities are mere shadows of the creative powers of God. We can spend days, weeks or even months perfecting a simple recipe for a dessert that we are trying to invent. How many hundreds or thousands of hours are spent designing buildings, even though we are using tried and true construction methods, hardly ever reinventing the wheel, so to speak. 

 

Yet we are told that God spoke the world into being. After the first paragraph in Genesis 1, every new paragraph begins with "Then God said", and it was. Even if God had spent eternity prior planning every little detail of everything that He accomplished in those six days, He still created everything with simply His Word. 2 Peter 3:5 tells us that "by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water", and the Psalmist writes in Psalm 33:6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made." But what is really meant by those words, "the word of the Lord"? I believe that it is more that just Him speaking. We get a picture of what creation was like when we read John 1. 

 

I love the way that John writes the beginning of His account of the life of Jesus. He opens with phrasing that immediately brings us back to Genesis; "In the beginning". As a spoken statement, I don't think that those words would have as much impact as they do in written form, especially because they are recorded in these two places in the same book. Those who read the Bible regularly should make this connection. In spoken conversation we are less likely to make this connection. So John brings us back to creation, the beginning of time, and he tells us that "the Word" was in the beginning. Notice that he capitalizes "Word"; this is because this is a name, not a noun, though the word structure can be and is often used as a noun; the Greek name is Logos. This word is listed in Strong's concordance as G3056, which includes in the definition, "something said (including the thought); reasoning, motive, a computation; (with the article in John) the Divine Expression;-account, cause, intent". I think there could be an entire separate article just delving into that definition in relation to the Word, but not this article.

John then goes on to tell us that "the Word", Logos, was with God in the beginning. This is easy to overlook. What do we know about how things were "in the beginning"? Genesis 1:2 tells us that "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." So there was nothing, at least as far as earth was concerned. There was darkness and water, the earth had no form to it and it was void. Merriam Webster tells us that if something is void, that means that it is containing nothing, it is vacant. The American Heritage Dictionary adds that it contains no matter. So in the beginning, before anything or anybody was created, before anything existed on or in the earth, the Word was with God. As a freebie, I'll also note that we are told that "the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters." So we have God, the Word and the Spirit of God in the beginning. We should be putting some things together on our own by now, but just to bring it home and make sure that we are getting it, John tells us that "the Word was God".

So now we know that, in the beginning, God is, God is the Word, and God is Spirit, but then we are informed that "He", the Word as the subject of this sentence, is a distinct personality. "He" is a personal pronoun; one does not receive a personal pronoun unless one is a personal  and distinct being. So we have a further clarification that there are at least two distinct personalities in the beginning, when God began the work of creation. We also understand further that there are, in fact, three distinct beings in the beginning, but that is moving away from the subject of this article. We begin to get an idea of the relationship between the first being, God, and the second being, the Word, as we continue to read.

We know from Genesis that God created the world, and that He did so through His word, but here we get the clarification that the creation process was actually accomplished through His Word; capitalized; personal pronoun distinct being. We find this out in verse three where we are told that "All things came into being through Him [the Word], and apart from Him [the Word] nothing came into being that has come into being". This puts a different meaning to the understanding that God spoke the world into being. This puts the creation process squarely in the hands of two distinct beings; God, who spoke, and the Word who undertook the creation process. We also see this in Hebrews 1:2 where we read that God, "in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world." The Word literally was the creative force behind the creative process. I liken it to an architect [God] who possesses the plans to a structure telling the contractor [the Word] what He would like to have done, and the contractor putting His skills and knowledge and power to work to achieve the desires of the architect.

 While this, in itself, is a revelation to man about the persons of God and the creation process, the more wonderful part is yet to come. In verse 14 John tells us that "the Word became flesh"; the creator became the created! This is the person whom we know as Jesus the Christ. God, the Creator, lowered Himself and become as one of His created, in order to be with us and to save us.

In my article How God Chased Us Throughout History, I laid out how the Creator strove to be with His creation; this, right here, is the ultimate effort exerted for the literal Creator to literally be with His creation. And not only did He become flesh to be with His creation, He "dwelt among us". To dwell means to make one's home; to linger, pause, tarry. This is to say that He did not come to be among His people, yet separated as one might expect a god to do, but He lived among His people, working, eating, sleeping as we do. Dealing with everything that comes with life, with dwelling, which includes the pains and sorrows as well as the joys and the celebrations. We know that Jesus went to weddings and religious festivals, and He talked with people as crowds and as individuals as we see with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, and he wept when those He loved died, even Lazarus whom He was going to raise again from the dead. God the creator, who created our very emotions, also knows what it is like to deal with those emotions because He dwelt among us. Those emotions even went to the extreme when He was praying for strength for the coming task in the Garden of Gethsemane where His stress manifested in the literal sweating of blood, which is a real human affliction that comes on with extreme stress; this was not just a literary tool.

This is not yet the end of our study of the Word; there is one more thing to look at. We know that Jesus is coming back again, to defeat those who have chosen to stand against Him. He will destroy His enemies and take His place as the King of this world. We read about His coming in Revelation 19, in which John again reasserts that Jesus' "name is called The Word of God" (v.13). He comes with eyes that are "a flame of fire" and with "many diadems" on His head; a diadem being a crown, so He will be wearing many crowns on His head. One might liken that to a person who 'wears a lot of hats' in a workplace, which means that they are capable of doing and do a lot of different things. Jesus has many names and He is the King of all things, so I imagine that His dominance over all things will be signified by His 'wearing of many hats'.

But what may be the most fearsome descriptor of Jesus is that "From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations". I think this is the way that the Spirit lead John to relate what He was seeing to us, because it aligns so well with previous Scriptures, and I believe that what he was seeing was this; Jesus was cutting down His enemies with the words of His mouth; the Word of God was using The Word of God to defeat and destroy the enemies of the Word of God. From the beginning to the end, we see that Jesus is the Word that creates a perfect world and later will come to destroy a broken world, and as we continue to study in Revelation, we see that He remakes the world in order to make it suitable for God to come and to forever be among us.

If you are reading this and you have not given your life over to Jesus, I want to encourage you to do so right now. He loves you, and I believe that we could be living in the last generation before He returns as is described above. I don't want you to be among those whom He destroys because you are an enemy of the Word of God. If you don't know what to do, leave a comment below and I would love to walk you through it. It is so easy to do, and doing so means that you will never again walk alone.