Today’s Scripture:
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14 (ESV)
Reflection
The Gospel of John is unlike the other Gospels because instead of being like a story, it is very lesson based and theologically rich. The perspective of John is that Jesus is the divine Son of God, who came to save the world.
There are sooooo many things that I can talk about that will take up like hours of time to write, so I’ll cover them shortly.
Today’s passage is the very famous John 1. where we first meet Jesus in the context of the word, flesh, and John the Baptist. The Greek translation is often very helpful in decomposing various Biblical texts, and in this passage, the most important part is the word Logos (that’s an Elder Sam word!), which means reason, truth, and the word of God. This Logos is used to describe Jesus, who is the embodiment of the Word of God.
John 1 relates a lot to Genesis 1 in how it starts. They both start with “In the beginning…” and this is very important because what John 1 is saying is that Jesus was there with God in the beginning. Jesus is eternally the second person of the triune God, and He was there in creation, and all things were made through Jesus, who is the Word, and God made all things with His Words. That’s a crazy connection. Related to this, Jesus existed in the beginning, but He did not take on human flesh until around 0 AD (kinda). When Jesus became a human, he was still fully God, but He was also fully man, and He shared in our suffering and way of life, but without sinning. There is so much significance in the Word becoming flesh.
To summarize: God is unified with Jesus, and they are the same being; Jesus is the light of grace to a dark world; John the baptist was not the light, but he was a prophet to testify about the light, who was Jesus; there is a distinction between the response to Jesus from the believers and the non-believers (not receiving Him vs born again in God). The middle verse is verse 12, where it says that all who have believed have been given the right to become children of God. To whoever’s reading this, WE are children of God!
I love texts that are so rich in theology when I have lots of time to write about them, like today. Through this passage, I have come to really appreciate more of the meticulous complexity of God’s creation, and the truth in Jesus. I am so happy and thankful that I am a child of God, and that I am surrounded by other children of God.