The Word and Light
God is a God of Revelation
The Word
The Greeks had used the term logos in their philosophical explanations regarding the functioning of the world. The logos was for them an impersonal ordering force, that which gave harmony to the universe. The logos was not personal in their philosophy, but it was very important.
Throughout the prologue of the Gospel of John, the author balances between two verbs. When speaking of the Logos as He existed in eternity past, John uses the Greek word ἦν, en (a form of eimi). The tense1 of the word expresses continuous action in the past. Compare this with the verb he chooses to use when speaking of everything else—found, for example, in verse 3: “All things came into being through Him,” ἐγένετο, egeneto. This verb2 contains the very element missing from the other: a point of origin. The term, when used in contexts of creation and origin, speaks of a time when something came into existence. The first verb, en, does not.