The Divine Communication

Introduction:

The year is A.D. 325, and in the city of Nicea (which is within the modern Turkish city of Iznik), are more than 300 bishops who have gathered, or convened, there at the direction of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. To give you an idea of where we are, geographically, Nicea is approximately 87 miles south east of modern day Instanbul, which is situated along the Mediterranean coast at the location of a straight called the Bosporus, which is the Mediterranean access into the Black Sea. Modern day Instanbul, known in the 4th Century as Constantinople, had only a few years earlier, become the capital of the Roman Empire. The Emperor had convened this assembly, or Council, as it has become known, to settle a question regarding the nature of Jesus Christ. For a number of years disputes had been raging, dividing the church over this central topic regarding our salvation. Many in the council recognized that how we understand the nature of Christ directly impacts whether Jesus actually has the ability to effect salvation for us. The primary debate for which Constantine had assembled this Council revolved around the question of whether Jesus was divine or simply a created being. As we will see, this dispute developed due to differing interpretations of Scripture, including the passage we will be looking at tonight, John 1:1-18

John 1:1–18 CSB

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but he came to testify about the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”) Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.

I. The Word From the Beginning - vs. 1-5.

From the very first words we read, our minds should drift back to the account recorded in the first chapters of Genesis where God is displaying his power during the acts of creation. Of special interest to John, no doubt, is the fact that according to passages such as Genesis 1:3, where we read, “Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light,” it appears that it is through means of God’s verbal communication that the acts of creation are brought into being. Passages like this, and others throughout the first chapter of the Genesis account are significant to John because these texts state that God simply spoke the various aspects of the created order into being. But John does something unique by taking the revelation given by Moses and applying it in a new context to reveal to us something about the nature of Jesus, God’s Word. The nature of Jesus, as we’ve already stated, was at the heart of a controversy in the church within the first few centuries after Jesus’ resurrection.

A Statement of Divinity.

One of the controversies for which Constantine had convened the Council of Nicea centered around the teachings of a popular priest named Arius who hailed from city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Arius had been summoned to the Council to defend his position that Jesus should be understood, properly, as a being separate from God, and therefore, contrary to how traditionally the church up to that time understood the nature of Jesus, he claimed that Jesus must be a created being. The doctrine or teaching that became synonymous with Arius is known as Arianism, and it represented the first great challenge to the church’s’ understanding of the nature of God and of his Christ, yet at the same time it provided an opportunity for the church to provide clarity on this important subject. Arius reasoned, through Platonic philosophy, that God was unknowable; therefore, Jesus could not be God. He interpreted passages such as John 1:18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9, among others, in which Jesus is referred to as the “only begotten” (Greek: monogenes) of the Father as being indicative of Jesus being a creature that was created by God. He believed that since Scripture spoke of Jesus as being “begotten” it only followed that Jesus must have had an origin and, therefore, could not be considered God, at least not in the same sense as the Father. Modern Arians, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others who continue in the same stream of thought as Arius, find passages such as John 1:1 indicative of the fact that Jesus is a created being. Their argument flows from a misunderstanding of the Greek text. If you have ever picked up a New World Translation of the Bible, published by the Watch Tower Society, and you were to turn to John 1:1, you would read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god,” with the final letter “g” in the passage being miniscule, rather than capitalized, to denote they do not consider the Word as being equal with God, the Father. The final Greek phrase in this passage reads, “καὶ (and) Θεὸς (God) ἦν (is) ὁ (the) Λόγος (Word).” Concerning this verse, Greek scholar William Mounce states,

When a predicate nominative [a noun which describes something about the subject of the sentence] is thrown in front of the verb, by virtue of word order it takes on significance. A good illustration of this is John 1:1c. The English versions typically have, “and the word was God.” But in Greek, the word order has been reversed. It reads, ‘καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος (and God was the Word).’ We know that “the Word” is the subject because it has the definite article (ὁ = the), and we translate accordingly: ‘and the Word was God.” Two questions, both of theological import, should come to mind: (1) why was Θεὸς thrown forward? and (2) why does it lack the article? In brief, its emphatic position stresses its essence or quality: “What God was, the Word was” is how one translation brings out its force. Its lack of a definite article keeps us from identifying the person of the Word (Jesus Christ) with the person of “God” (the Father). That is to say, the word order tells us that Jesus Christ has all the divine attributes that the Father has; lack of the article tells us that Jesus Christ is not the Father. John’s wording here is beautifully compact! It is, in fact, one of the most elegantly terse theological statements one could ever find. As Martin Luther said, the lack of an article is against Sabellianism [the idea that God exists in different modes of being, rather than in 3 persons]; the word order is against Arianism.

To state this another way, look at how the different Greek constructions would be rendered:

καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν ὁ Θεὸς “and the Word was the God” (i.e., the Father; Sabellianism)

καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν Θεὸς “and the Word was a god” (Arianism)

καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος “and the Word was God” (Orthodoxy)

Jesus Christ is God and has all the attributes that the Father has. But he is not the first person of the Trinity. All this is concisely affirmed in καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.

John 1:1 became a pivotal text in support of the development of trinitarian thought and expression that came out of the Nicaean Council.

His Relation to the Father and His Work in the Economy of Salvation.

So, why does John refer to Jesus as the Word? This name, Logos or Word, denotes to two different aspects of the Son’s nature: (1) his relation to the Father, and (2) his work on our behalf. Words begin as thoughts within the mind of the person who will eventually speak that which has occupied his mental faculties. Thoughts are intimately part of the one who speaks them. As Gilles Emery says in his book, The Trinity,

The Word reveals and manifests the Father: by nature the word is a manifestation…In naming the Son “Word,”one signifies a twofold aspect in the Son himself. First the Word comes forth from the one who speaks him or pronounces him. A word spoken by someone. The tradition flowing from St. Augustine mediated on the divine Word by considering, by analogy, the “interior word” that a human being forms or conceives by his mind and remains in his mind. This “likeness” allows one to show believers that the Word is characterized by relation of origin to the One who speaks him from all eternity: the Father.

What do we mean by relation of origin? With regard to the Father and the Son we are referring to the way they relate to each other from eternity. This was part of the question that was being addressed in the Council of Nicea. How does the Son, who himself is God, yet separate from the Father, relate to the Father? What does it mean for Jesus to be the Son, not only in terms of the economy of salvation (economy: Gr: oikonomia - literally “household management”), which refers to God’s creation and managment of the world, particularly his plan for salvation how roles are assigned within a family? In other words, what role is the Son assigned as it pertains to his relation to the Father and in his work of salvation?