Tuesday, March 23, 2021
“In the beginning was the Word…” John 1.1 NKJV
Jesus is not God’s reaction to our sin.
Jesus is not some kind of plan B.
Jesus is the Word of God.
Imagine the power of a word spoken and what it can do to build up or tear down.
Now imagine the perfect God speaking a word to make Himself known to all that He would make. Imagine His desire to make known the immaculate magnificence of His love—which is not a thing He uses but a thing that He is—and how that desire reveals itself in a plan that includes the fall, on purpose, because He wants to reveal how longsuffering His love is for us. Creation was subjected to futility in the hope that it might be saved. It was subjected so that hope could be added to it, and hope doesn’t disappoint. And all of it gives context to love.
A great deal has been made about how God requires a blood sacrifice for sin, how unequivocal that is, and how intolerant that is. First, tolerance is not love, it’s enablement, especially when rendered interpersonally between we fallen human beings. But would you still dare to challenge the love of the living God if you knew that He Himself is the blood sacrifice that He Himself requires? The blood sacrifice was both required by and provided in Christ before He said, “Let there be light.”
We’re meant to recall Genesis 1.1 as we read John 1.1. The callback, the echo, is intentional. Jesus is the eternal and ultimate expression of God. That is what it means to understand Him as the Word of God. And He was not only there “in the beginning,” He was living and active, just as strong to save as He ever was and would be. The Word of God makes clear His commandment to us, it makes clear the way we are to walk. The Word is both the foretelling and the fulfillment of all prophecy. The Word is where justice and mercy kiss, and where all humble and patient deferment meet their satisfaction.
And He was. In the beginning.
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