Who is our God? Chapter 4

The Logos or Word

There is something arresting, something unexpected, something unusual, about the first chapter of John. We are suddenly introduced to a very unfamiliar subject. Who, or what, is the "Word"? Probably very few readers could give a perspicacious and satisfactory answer. As to the personality of this Word, there is no possible dubiety as we are clearly informed that "the Word becomes flesh, and tabernacles among us" (v. 14). He was God's Son.

John is the only writer who terms the Lord the Word, in this chapter and in Rev. 19:13. Elsewhere he refers to Him as the Christ, the Son, the Son of God, or the Son of Man. It will therefore be evident that subsequent to the first chapter, the conception of the Son of God as the Words recedes, and is no longer mentioned in the remainder of John's Gospel.

It will be our object, then, to discover, if we can, what was in John's mind when he penned the first fourteen verses of his Gospel.

The answer can hardly be found in other Scriptures, where the Greek word logos is merely used with its common meaning, asa spoken or written word. Yet to a certain extent, the usage of the Hebrew language will assist us. There, the word for "word" is dabar, which occurs perhaps over thirteen hundred times. In the A. V. it is rendered by 'word' 770 times, but it must be noted that in 215 cases it becomes "thing," while 52 times it is "act," and 63 times "matter," and 20 times "commandment." Is there any single English term which will embrace all these ideas?

To arrive at a satisfactory doctrine concerning God, we must use extreme verbal accuracy. Every false idea of God springs from careless phraseology. The Creeds are full of inexact expressions, largely due to the shift of meaning caused by translation out of Greek into Latin, or from Latin into English. And let us not forget that each one of us still carries about with him his own beliefs or Creed, whether he is aware of this or not.

Now, in the Hebrew language, just as a name was identified with the person who bore it, so that he was supposed to represent its characteristics, a word was bound up with that which was denoted by it. With the Old Testament writers, therefore, a word seemed to possess almost a concrete existence. The word was closely associated with the action or reality which followed its utterance. Words uttered by God were regarded as being endued with dynamic power, as though they were fiats, (i. e. let it be done). Thus, "By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made" (Psalm 33:6); "He sent His word and healed them" (Psalm 107:20); "So shall My word be . . . it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please" (Isa. 55:11). In Gen. 1 God's words are shown to possess dynamic power.

If, then, dabar signifies both the word and its resulting action, let us examine another form of this triliteral, deber, which means pestilence or plague. Where the divine regulations regarding the clean (tahor) and the contaminated or unclean (tame) were not observed, God spoke by means of physical or moral malady, which expressed itself in plague.

The Lord attached great importance to the words which men use (Matt. 5:22; 12:36, 37). Immense forces may be set loose by means of words. One's words imply his actions. The words of the Lord will not pass away; they will continue to act until fulfilled. To receive His words means not only to accept them, but to enter into them and do them.

The rest of the acts of Josiah, and his kindnesses, and his deeds, first and last, are referred to at 2 Chron. 35:26, 27:1 where the Hebrew says "words." Rotherham reads "story," that is, words which describe acts.

Thus it became very natural for the Israelites, when reading statements such as "He sent His word and healed them," and reading about the glorious theophanies of olden times, to understand that He who had appeared at times to them was God's Word, His Executive. Many actions, therefore, came to be attributed not to Jehovah, but to His Word. In their Targums (paraphrases of explanations) the Jews altered the name Jehovah more than two hundred times to "Word of Jah." These were in the Chaldee language, and the word used was Meymra (from amar, to say). To this Meymra or Word of Jah the Rabbis ascribed the creation of the earth. It was he who appeared to Abraham and to Moses, talking face to face with them. The Jerusalem Targum thus paraphrases Exodus 6:3, "And Jah appeared in His Word to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, in the God of heaven; and the name of the Word of Jah I do not make known to them." In fact, it became a Chaldee idiom to use this term Meymra as a substitute for an emphatic pronoun. In part, this was compensation for the disappearance of the name Jehovah, which the Targumists would not pronounce or write. Yet as the illustrious Walton writes, "The passages are innumerable in which actions and properties are attributed to the Word of God, as a distinct person." The Word, therefore, among the Jews came to signify an Agent of God.

It is said that Plato, the famous Greek philosopher (born 427 B. C.) invented some sort of trinity. At any rate, some of his ideas were very similar to those of the Hebrew Targumists. Of the creation of the world, he says God created through his Word (or Logos), and this invisible Word was the true image of God.

Whereas the Epicureans maintained that all things came into being by chance and without design, the Stoics and Platonists declared that everything was made by the Logos, that is, the divine reason or divine wisdom.

While Plato was making known his philosophy in Athens, the Hebrew Rabbis were writing Targums on their Scriptures. Thus when the Septuagent translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was made into Greek, two ot three hundred years before the Lord came, the Jews of Alexandria in Egypt must have been well aquainted with the general docterine of the Logos or Word.

It has been claimed that the Greek language is the real union of the Japhetic and Semitic modes of thought, and hence arose its peculiar fitness to be the vehicle of a revelation conveyed to Japhetic nations by Hebrew missionaries. Undoubtedly the Most High made no mistake in choosing Greek as the language of inspiriation for the post-crucifixion Scriptures.

About four hundred years after Plato, appeared a very gifted and clever Alexandrian Jew, Philo Judaeus (born about B.C. 20), in whose writings the interchange of Hebrew and Hellenic thought reached its greatest development. By religion a devout upholder of Moses and the Prophets, but in intellectual training a Greek, his endeavour was to harmonize the interpretation of the Hebrew writings with his philosophic views. Each generation has its own modes and schools of thought (all more or less defective), and Philo's aim seems to have been to cast the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures into Platonic moulds. But as one might expect, in this he was not very successful.

Without some aquaintance with Philo's docterines it is impossible for us to understand John's objective in his first chapter. Let us therefore examine some of his ideas. Due to his knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes he sails wonderfully close to the truth. On the other hand, human speculation and philosophy often lead him far astray. His opinions are set forth at some length in one of the finest works on the subject, "The Scripture Testimony to the Messiah," by Dr. John Pye Smith, of Sheffield (born 1774). Unfortunately this splendid compendium of messianology is now very difficult to obtain, like many other old and most useful works, and many of its facts are virtually lost so far as present day believers are concerned.

Unfortunately, Philo is often very vague and confused. He did not seem to know his own mind. Sometimes his Logos or Word seems to be a Person; sometimes only an idea. The former thought was the Hebrew way of thinking; the latter was the Greek. It is very hard to find out exactly what was in his mind. As Liddon well says, Philo 'constantly abandons himself to the currents of Greek thought around him, and then he endeavours to set himself right with the Creed of Sinai, by throwing his Greek ideas into Jewish forms.' Very evidently he wavers between the idea that God was One whom no man could see and continue alive, and a God who was stated in the Scriptures to have appeared in very truth in human form to some of the ancients and to Israelites. Probably he recognized that in later Hebrew history Jehovah became more and more a Deity who hid Himself from His people. At any rate, there is no thought which he reiterates so often as his view that this Deity is incomprehensible and invisible. To substantiate this idea he is ever ready to pervert the meaning of Scripture. He imagined that the true nature of God was just as unintelligible to Moses and the Prophets as it was to himself. Like many people today, he would one thousand times sooner renounce the meaning of the Hebrew text, than admit any visible appearance of Elohim in the early chapters of Genesis.

We must bear in mind that in Philo's day, the allegorical method was as natural and conventional as in our day is the critical or the devotional. Just as some today must allegorize or figurize Daniel and Revelation, so in the first century the art of allegorizing was everywhere rampant. It was still rampant later, in the time of Origen. It was an age of ideas, not of facts and of science. Philo is as devoid of the historical sense as an Indian philosopher. One clear proof of his loose methods of thinking lies in the fact that he constantly forgets what he has written only a page previously.

As one has well said, "The Jew and the Greek met together in Alexandria, and the strangest eclectic philosophy that the world has ever seen, was the result of their union. It was Judaism and Platonism at once; the belief in a personal God assimilated to the doctrine of ideas."
Here we discover a missing link, which will explain much of the terminology encountered in the writings of John and Paul and the writer of the Hebrews Epistle. Once we see the background of these writings, their objective stands out sharp and clear.

That Philo comes very near the truth in some respects cannot be denied. Acquaintance with the Hebrew Scriptures had taught him much. But he had failed to discover that Secret of God, which is revealed in Christ, without which all men must walk in the dark.

Is it not extraordinary that Philo should have considered his Word to be a Mediator, a Chief Priest, an Intercessor, a Firstborn? He even calls him the Paraclete, which means, one who can be called alongside, to render help or give strength and comfort.

His Word is even termed "the second God," but it may be that he uses this word (deuteros) as signifying duplicate or repeated, rather than a numerical second.

Man had so completely removed and bowed God out of the world that there seemed to be no God. In any case, what could a God have to do with a world or with evil? Somehow or other, God must be altogether separated from the world. Any visible appearance of God in Philo's time would have been very strange and discordant, very unconventional and disturbing, just as it would be in our day. It has been stated that in the Greek Septuagint, in eight out of twelve passages which describe theophanies, the text has been altered by the translators, so as to obscure the fact of a theophany.

Philo's Logos or Word was the answer to the seeming phenomenon of a lost God.

In part he had accepted the Stoic doctrine of the Logos or Divine reason, which was imminent in all things. He arrived at the theory that within the being of God there was a second Divine principle, which was God's Agent in the creation and government of the world. As ineffably holy, whose eyes are too clean to see evil, and who is not able to look on oppression (Hab. 1:13), God could not Himself be in any direct relation to the world, and had to act through an intermediary, who was the Logos.

Strange to say, unless Philo intends to represent his Logos as the coming Messiah, he does not mention the Messiah anywhere in his writings. He could not have been looking for the Messiah, because the Jews were awaiting a human deliverer only.

Now Philo ascribes to the Logos a vast range of activities. He is next to the Self-existent. He presides over all things. He is superior to the whole universe. He is the eldest of all objects that the mind can perceive.

He writes of God placing over the heavenly bodies "His own upright Word, His firstborn Son." Though no one may as yet be deemed worthy to be styled a son of God, let men be diligent to copy the excellencies of "His first-begotten Word, the eldest angel, who exists as a many-titled archangel." "For indeed, he is styled the Beginning, and God's Name, and Word, and the Man by way of image."

Again, he says, "Now God's shadow is His Word, which he uses as an instrument in making human society." In one place he writes of "God, the fountain of the eldest Word." Again, "This eldest Word of the Existing One clothes himself with the world as with a garment, for this Word of the Existing One is the bond of the universe, which contains and clasps together all its component parts."

One of Philo's arguments is that nothing mortal could be imaged after Him who is the Highest and Father of the whole, but only after "the second God, who is that One's Word." He says this "unperceived Word of God eonian is the very firm support of the universe." The Father who begets him is making him the unbreakable bond of all things. This "archangel and eldest Word" occupies the position of a mediator between the creature and the Creator, being at once "the suppliant on behalf of the disquieted mortal to the incorruptible one, and the ambassador of the Governor to His subjects." He is neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as man.

Philo's God must have been like the God of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who encountered Paul at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17). Paul astounded these scholars by telling them that God all along was existing not far from each one of us. But the God of Philo was so far distant from the world of mankind that He could not come into touch with them. So Philo interposes a succession of "Powers" (dunameis) between God and His creation, so that the impassable gulf between a world of light and purity, happiness and immortality, and a world of darkness and sin, misery and death, may be bridged. Philosophers had invented a succession of emanations from the Divine essence, to account for a purely spiritual Being having originated a material world full of imperfections. In this way they explained the origin of evil, and the destructive powers of nature.

The Gnostics reckoned Christ to be one of the higher intelligences who came to teach men how to find the way back to the bosom of the Pleroma or Fulness. They also taught a corruption of the primitive truth regarding the eons, making these to be angels which proceeded out from God at intervals of time. Cerinthus claimed that Christ was one of the glorious eons.

If Philo and his school had been very vague and confused regarding their Logos, John is exactly the opposite. Philo wrote reams about his Logos and got nowhere. John writes a few brief verses and tells us all we need to know. Like the other writers of the New Testament, he does not waste one word. All their statements are examples of precision and exactitude. They are very sure of their ground. And so are we. They do not state who their opponents are. These may have been many. Nor do they quote their theories. There is no baffling ambiguity or long winded verbosity. A few terse and vigorous verses, that is all. Facts for faith to grasp must ever be set forth in the simplest of terms. God's truth is only for the simple and the unsophisticated. That is one of the chief glories of all the Divine writings.

Here let it be clearly understood that the inspired writers are in no wise indebted to Philo or the Gnostics or the Stoics, from whom they copy nothing. Whenever John has dealt with the widely spread doctrine concerning the Logos, he drops the subject.

John does not encourage us in the view that Christ, as the pre-existent Word of John 1:1 was so non-existent that David's pen had to speak for him. The expression "in beginning" does not tell us when that beginning was, but it evidently goes backward into the past as far as mankind can imagine. This must have been before Creation, according to verse 3.

In that beginning the Word WAS, which cannot mean anything else than that He existed. And He existed face to face with God. At 1 John 1:2 Farrar renders by "face to face with the Father," and such a rendering for the Greek word pros is quite legitimate. Alford suggests the French expression chez as a good equivalent, as though the Word was "at home with God." Certainly the references he gives support this rendering of pros, which strictly cannot be rendered by 'with.' (See Matt. 13:56; 26:55; Mark 6:3; 9:19; Luke 9:41; 1 Cor. 16:6,7; Gal. 1:18; 4:18).
While living in the city of London some time ago, I had to pass every evening a church which displayed a placard which read as follows: "Unitarianism is Christianity in its simplest, profoundest, and most common sense form."

Unitarianism has solved nothing and satisfied nobody. Instead of simplifying the truth, it has made the Scriptures very difficult to many souls, and closed them to faith. Unitarianism has no God to proclaim, because it has not the Christ of reality and fact; it lives entirely upon ideas, as Philo did.

We are not captivated by the notion that the expression "And God was the Word" refers specially to the God seen in ancient times. The whole of John's first verse ought logically to have reference to the beginning mentioned. What John makes clear is that the Word was not the result of a long concatenation of Powers or Emanations or Eons evolved from God, but was Himself, in a sense, God, and was at home with God.

If John had intended us to understand that the God seen in Old Testament times was the Logos, he would surely have stated this logically and clearly. The fact is true, but John is writing here about the Logos as He was "in beginning." What John does tell us is that the Word was no less than GOD; the Word was no angel, or eldest angel. Some of the Jews maintained that Christ was the highest of the eons. The writer to the Hebrews curtly destroys such silly ideas by stating that the eons were made through the Son ( ch. 1:2 ). He then goes on to shew how much the messengers are inferior to the Son, and how all of them had to worship God's Firstborn.
Surely there is but One of Whom it may be said that He was "at home with God," that He couldn't go "into (eis) the bosom of the Father," and Who is "God only begotten" (John 1:18).
Could any statement in Scripture be more explicit than Heb. 1:8, which is, literally, "The throne of Thee, (Thou) who (art) God—for the eon"? In verse 10 the same Divine One is shewn to be the founder of the earth and the heavens. Paul tells us in Col. 1 that in the Son were created all things in heaven and on earth, which are also through Him and for Him. John states very clearly and bluntly that "everything through Him (the Word) came into being" (ch. 1:3).

When Philo stated that the Creation came into being through God's "eldest angel" or Word, he most certainly did not mean that it was created in view of a future Prince, who was still to come. Philo's Logos performed the "dirty work" of creation so as to keep the hands of God unsullied by coming into contact with evil and matter.

Some have sought to "prove," when it suited them, that the Greek preposition DIA, when followed by a genitive case, may mean "on account of," or "because of," as it does signify when followed by an accusative case. In the former case it must mean, and always means, "through," or "by means of." The Emphatic Diaglott deliberately corrupts the sense at Heb. 1:2 by reading "on account of whom also he constituted the Ages." Because everything was created for the Son, some have carelessly assumed that the Son was only the pattern of Creation, not the Agent and Executive who carried it through.

Among the evil things which, to the Gnostic mind, God could not come into contact with, being Spirit, was gross material flesh. To the Gnostic it was sheer heresy that a Divine One had appeared of old on earth in an assumed body of flesh and blood. But John does not trouble to argue the point. "The Word becomes flesh," evidently permanently, and this fleshly One can possess a vast glory, and the fulness of grace and truth. Peace is made through His blood, and reconciliation is in His body of flesh (Col. 1:20,21).

So far was God from being unspeakably distant from mankind, or unconnected with physical matter, that He sends His own Son to mankind in likeness of sin's flesh, as One coming to be in humanity's likeness, or outwardly resembling humanity (Rom. 8:3; Phil. 2:7).

It has been shewn that even Philo's Word had very close relationships with God. Philo evidently looks on him as Divine, and says he was begotten of the Father. Now John, who gently corrects a few misconceptions in Philo, goes further than Philo, shewing that the Word was even closer to the Father than Philo taught.

But when we maintain that John terms the Word "God," someone brings forward an objection from 1. Cor. 8:6. It is claimed that here we have two distinct "Persons." The argument is, that One of these two is God, while the other is something else. Sometimes this verse is understood as some kind of definition of the Deity, although the chapter is concerning idols and idol sacrifices.
"Nevertheless, to us—one God, the Father, out of whom the all things, and we for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom the all things, and we through Him."

Shallow reasoning will say, that because the latter "Person" is only called "Lord," therefore He cannot be God. But Lt. Col. Turton pointed out in his very methodical and useful book, "The Truth of Christianity," that if this distinction were pressed, it would imply that the Father was not Lord, which surely Paul did not mean, and no one would assert.

Philo, however, claimed for his Word one office which the Scriptures endorse. He writes that the Logos was given the preeminent gift of standing as a Mediator as though on the boundary lines between the creature and his Maker, to determine matters between the two parties. "I have been standing between the Lord and you, being neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but in the middle of the extremes being a pledge for both."

"For there is one God," says Paul (1 Tim. 2:5), "and one Mediator of God and human beings, a human being, Christ Jesus." How is He a Mediator (mesitEs)? Because He is suited to negotiate between God and man, and can act on both sides. What does this Greek word mean? It is explained as a "middle being" "one who is in the middle," "a go-between." In Modern Greek it has also come to mean a "broker". Now a broker is a middle-man merely.

Standing between God and man there is a middle-being, one who necessarily must partake of both God and man. Can this be the Unitarian christ? By no means. The unitarian christ is far too insignificant to fulfill this glorious office. Not only insignificant, but grossly impertinent. If his respect for the Father was such that he could say in public, "I and the Father are one," then assuredly his manners rule him out completely as an aspirant for the office of Messiah. He is a figment of the imagination, whom not even the Unitarians properly respect. Only one who was Divine could have uttered such a remark, without being guilty of a glaring breach of etiquette and manners.

Nor could it ever be said of the Unitarian Christ that he: was "Jesus Christ—yesterday and today the same, and for the eons" (Heb. 13:8). That is surely the language of God, not of men. If these eons lie in the future, the evident implication is that the "yesterday" speaks of past eons. If the Lord Jesus Christ had no "pre-existence" in any form in ancient times, in what sense was He "the same" in the past yesterday as He is in the present, and will be in the future? "For a thousand years in Thine eyes are as a day of yesterday that is passing" (Psalm 90:4). Compare also 2 Peter 3:8. Truly if the New Testament glitters with the appellation "Father," it also glitters with proofs that Jesus Christ was Divine. To close our chapter, we present one more.
H. G. Meecham in his excellent book, "Light from Ancient Letters" (1923), dealing with ancient Greek Papyri, shows that the expression "Son of God" was ascribed regularly to the Caesars. This explains why the centurion and those with him at the crucifixion exclaimed "Truly, God's Son was this!" They were witnessing the death of One far mightier than any Caesar. In the first century, also, Meecham points out the title Kurios (Lord) was quickly taking its place as the designation of the deified Emperor. Paul, however, invested the term with a deeper and more spiritual meaning, while abhorring its application to earthly emperors. This will explain Phil. 2:11, "acclaiming that Jesus Christ is LORD. . ." With the New Testament writers there could be only one Lord. See Jude 4, "disowning our only Owner and Lord, Jesus Christ." To the saints it was anathema to ascribe this title to the deified Roman rulers. Far from the use of the word "Lord" in 1 Cor. 8:6 demonstrating that Jesus Christ could not be God, because the Father is called God, it is one of the finest proofs that, in the language of the times, the Lord Jesus was God. Cobern, also, in his "New Archaeological Discoveries," shows that the application of the word Kurios to Jesus Christ seems to have been a distinct ascription of deity to Him, "since the title Kurios could be used only after the Caesar had been acknowledged as God."

Let us add that this word Kurios regularly stands in the Septuagint as the equivalent of the Name Jehovah, while in the New Testament, in quotations from the Old Testament it always stands for Jehovah.

And what other man in all the universe ever revealed Jehovah, or displayed His characteristics as being pre-eminently the God who manifests Himself?

End Chapter 4 (Alexander Thomson)