Week 1—Sunday John 1:1-3
WHY “THE WORD”?
The phrase “the Word” was not really indigenous to Hebrew thought. It used “the word of the Lord,” “Thy word,” but not “the Word” as a separate entity. But it was indigenous to Greek thought, so the early Christian writers did not hesitate to reach out beyond the Hebrew heritage and take hold of any conception to express that which was beyond expression. For they saw that the gospel was bursting with universal meanings and could not be confined to the Jewish language and culture to express that which was beyond language and culture. A universal faith would require a universal medium for its expression. That universal medium could only be life—the one thing universal to us all. But even that universal “life” would be insufficient—it would have to be “Life,” the Life of God and us, the Life of the God-person. The Word would have to become flesh.
But on the way to reveal the Word become flesh, the writer would use “the Word,” for it is expressive: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Why was Jesus here called “the Word”? Well, one’s words are the expression of the hidden thought. If you should stand before an audience without a word, hoping that the audience would get your thought, intuitively and immediately, it would end in futility. Only as the hidden thought is put into a word is the thought communicated.
Here is the hidden God, like the hidden thought, and we cannot know what God is like unless God communicates through a word. If one says, “I can know God in my heart intuitively and immediately, without the meditation of a word,” then the answer is: “But your ‘heart’ then becomes the medium of communication and knowing the heart as one does with its sin and crosscurrents and cross-conceptions we know it is a very unsafe medium for the revelation of God.” God must be revealed.
O God, my Father, You are the hidden God. How can I, bounded by my senses, know you except as you shall show yourself to me? I cannot read you unless I get a Word from you. But I know that Word cannot be verbal, for you are not verbal, but vital. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If the word is the expression of the hidden thought, I shall be, in some real way, the expression of the hidden God.