[How Firm a Foundation] CreationSample

The Logos

The biblical teaching on the Trinity includes the understanding that the world and everything in it would never have existed apart from the creative work of the Father through Jesus, His Son, who is the eternal and incarnate Word of God. In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is called the “Logos.”

The apostle John may have chosen this word to connect with Gentile readers. First-century Greco-Romans would have known this was used by Stoic philosophers to describe reason, thought to be an impersonal principle governing the universe. Logos was later deified in Greek philosophical thought and placed on the same level as the chief god of the Greek pantheon, Zeus. But for John, and for us as well, the Logos is not an impersonal reason. He’s the second person of the Triune God, the Word.

John, who was of Jewish descent, wanted to reach his Jewish readers as well as his Gentile audience. Those readers would have identified the “Logos” with the Word of God mentioned by the prophet Isaiah. John presented the Logos as Jesus, an actual person, and the eternal preexistent Son. Jesus Himself, when He was on Earth, told His disciples that all the Jewish Scriptures, from Moses to the Prophets, reveal who He is.

The entire cosmos owes its existence to the divine Son, who was there in the beginning. It would cease to exist if it weren’t upheld every moment by Jesus Christ Himself. He became one of us in order to accomplish His work of redemption. God has not only given us words about Himself to read on a page. In Jesus, God became human, like us. As John put it: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Jesus, thank You for coming to save us. Help me to know You and know your glory, grace, and truth.