Sunday Devotional: John 1:2

He was in the beginning with God.

This brief sentence is a follow-up to John’s amazing opening statement concerning the nature of the Word, or Logos. In chapter one verse one, John declares three things about the Word:

1. He was already in existence from the beginning of time.
2. He has a face-to-face, personal relationship with God.
3. He is God.

In verse 14, John identifies the Word as Jesus, so here we see an early expression of Trinitarian theology. As John grapples with the revelation he has been given regarding the nature of God and the person of Jesus, he comes to the conclusion that while there is only one God, in some way Jesus shares that divine nature even though he is a separate person from God.

Verse 2 emphasizes the distinction between Jesus and the Father. We shouldn’t ignore this summation and repetition of the first part of the first verse. There’s a reason John calls attention to both Jesus’s eternality and his relationship to the Father. As he begins his Gospel, John establishes from the outset who Jesus is and does so in unmistakable language. It’s important that his readers recognize that Jesus wasn’t just another “holy man” or Messianic figure. He wasn’t an ordinary person specially anointed by God for a task. There were plenty of people running around first-century Palestine claiming to be the Messiah. In his address before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5:33-39, the Pharisee Gamaliel mentioned two, Theudas and Judas the Galilean.

Jesus, however, was more than a good person, more than a prophet, more than a miracle-worker. He was “in the beginning with God.” John uses the same Greek here that he used in verse 1. “In the beginning” or en archē reflects the language of Genesis 1:1. Just as God existed in the beginning, so Jesus also existed in the beginning. This is something that Abraham, Moses, Elijah, or Isaiah could not claim, as revered as they might be. They came into existence at a point in time. They were born out of the union of their parents and had no existence prior to their mothers delivering them in the normal biological way. While Jesus too had an earthly existence when he became incarnate and was born of Mary, John is asserting here that Jesus existed prior to that incarnation. Paul says the same in Philippians 2:7-8 when he talks about Jesus taking on human form. Unlike every other person who has ever been born, Jesus had an existence prior to his physical birth. He existed from all eternity with the Father. When he was born of Mary, he was taking on flesh that he might dwell among us and live the life of sinless perfection we cannot live, and die the spotless sacrificial death we could not die.

In that eternal existence, Jesus was “with God” or pros ton theon. The Greek preposition pros usually indicates motion toward. In this relational context, it refers to being toward, or face-to-face with someone, not merely alongside them, or with them in the same room. That face-to-face-ness describes a relationship between two people who can look each other in the eye. In other words, it is describing the relationship between two distinct entities, two distinct persons. John claims here that Jesus and the Father have that relationship while sharing the same divine nature.

Clearly, John wants his readers to come to terms with the idea that not only is Jesus divine, but he is eternal and in a distinct relationship with the Father. All this while being God. And there’s only one God. This concept is a tough one, especially for the mind raised on unitarian monotheism. John doesn’t try to make sense of it, he simply declares that this is how it is. This is the revelation he has received, and whether or not we can wrap our minds around it doesn’t change the truth.

Because the nature of Jesus and his divine status is a supernatural truth, it is not something we can discern for ourselves naturally. We are natural beings, so we rely upon supernatural revelation to discern supernatural things. And that’s precisely what we have in Scripture: God’s supernatural revelation of Himself to us. It’s not an exhaustive revelation, but it is sufficient for us, and more than we deserve.

In this supernatural revelation, we are told that Jesus wasn’t just a nice guy doing his bit for the good of humanity and hoping it would be good enough to satisfy God. Jesus was God incarnate come to redeem his people. The magnitude of Jesus’s sacrifice becomes exponentially more significant when we understand that this was God himself coming down to live the life we could not live, to die the death we could not die, to receive the righteousness we would never otherwise deserve.

May this reflection on the person of Jesus draw us deeper into worship and thankfulness.