By Lawrence O. Richards
THE TEACHER’S COMMENTARYTHE DEITY OF JESUSThe Gospel of John speaks more clearly than any other of the deity of Christ. There can be no doubt: the Bible does teach that Jesus of Nazareth was fully God as well as truly man.
This teaching does not, of course, rest only on what we find in John’s Gospel. There are many other passages that affirm Jesus’ deity. Among the most powerful are:
Colossians 1:15-20. Jesus who expresses the invisible God was Himself the Creator of all things, and has priority over all.
Hebrews 1:1-13. Jesus is the “exact representation” of God’s being, and sustains all things by His own powerful word. He is, as God, above all created beings, including the angels who are so superior to mortal man.
Philippians 2:5-11. Jesus, though “in very nature God” voluntarily surrendered the prerogatives of Deity to become a true human being. Now that He has been resurrected He has been exalted again, and in the future every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
It is this Jesus, God from before the beginning, whom John wants to show us in his Gospel. And from this Gospel John wants to teach us how to respond, from the heart, to Him as Saviour and Lord.
GRACE.
“Grace” reveals both God and man. It shows human beings as helpless, trapped in sin. And it shows God willing and able to meet our deepest needs.
Eternity Unveiled: John 1:1-5
With the first words of the Gospel of John we see that John’s task is to unveil. The other Gospels begin with the birth of Jesus or with an account of His human ancestry. Matthew and Luke emphasized that a man, a human being, was actually born in the normal way to a young woman named Mary in the ancient land of Judea at the time Herod the Great was living out his last days. John, on the other hand, tells us immediately the Child born then was the eternal God! His origin was not at His physical conception, but, as Micah said, his “origins are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2 ). And Isaiah called Him “Mighty God, Everlasting Father” (Isa. 9:6 ).
John’s way of taking us back to eternity was to identify Jesus as “the Word” who was “in the beginning.” Moreover, this Word “was with God, and the Word was God.” Finally John said plainly that “the Word became flesh and lived for a while among us” (John 1:14 ).
The Word. The Bible gives many titles or names to Jesus. When He is called “the Word,” we are reminded of His role in the Godhead from the very beginning. Human speech has the capacity to unveil thoughts, feelings, and emotions; to reveal the person behind the words. Jesus is God expressing Himself through Jesus.
When Philip asked Jesus to show the disciples the Father, Christ answered in gentle rebuke. “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (14:9). Another time Jesus explained to His disciples, “No one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him” (Luke 10:22 ).
This title, “the Word,” teaches that Jesus is now, and always has been, the One through whom God expresses Himself. But how did God express Himself in history past, even before the Incarnation? Obviously God was known before Jesus’ birth.
In Creation (John 1:3). Paul wrote that “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the Creation of the world God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen” (Rom. 1:19-20 ). The material universe itself speaks of a Maker, loudly shouting His handiwork:
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
Psalm 19:2-4
This Word of Creation is the word of Jesus before the Incarnation. “Through Him all things were made,” John said. “Without Him nothing was made that has been made.” From the very beginning Jesus has expressed God to humankind.
In life (John 1:4). But it was not just in the creation of inanimate matter that Jesus communicated God. On the spinning sphere hung in the emptiness of space, the Creator placed living creatures. These living creatures are different from dead matter; they moved, ate, responded to stimuli, and reproduced themselves. The creation of life was a voice testifying to God.
Only One who was a living Being Himself could be the source of other life. Dead matter does not generate life now, nor has it ever.
And then, among all the living things, the Creator planted another kind of life that was made “in Our image, in Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26 ). Not just life, but self-conscious life, came into being. This life that came from Jesus the Creator remains deeply rooted in Him. Our very awareness that we are different from all other living creatures is another wordless testimony to the existence of the God whose likeness we bear. Jesus gave us life itself, and by that life He expressed God to us.
In light (John 1:5). This final term introduces one other way in which God has expressed Himself through the preincarnate work of Jesus. In John’s writings the terms light and darkness are often moral terms. Light represents moral purity, holiness, righteousness, good. In contrast, darkness as a moral term represents evil, all those warped and twisted ways in which sin had perverted the good in man, and brought pain to individuals and society. “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood [or, extinguished] it.”
The moral light is one of the most powerful and pervasive evidences of God’s existence. Paul described pagans who have never known God’s Old Testament revelation of morality, yet they “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them” (Rom. 2:15 ). There is a moral awareness planted deep in the personality of every person. Different societies may develop different rules to govern, for instance, sexual behavior. These rules may be glaringly different from the pattern set in Scripture. Still, in every culture, there is the awareness that sexual behavior is a moral issue, and that no individual can simply have any other person he or she wants, at any time or in any way.
The deep-seated conviction that there is a moral order to things is present in every human society. But society is in darkness; even though some sense of moral order and rightness exists, people in every society choose to do what they themselves believe is wrong. So conscience struggles, and individuals accuse themselves (or perhaps try to excuse as “adult” behavior they know is wrong).
Moral awareness in a world running madly after darkness is another testimony to us that light comes from the preexistent Word. Light, like creation and life itself, shouts out the presence of God behind the world we see.
Then, finally, the Word took unique expression in space and time. “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 ).
