And the Word Was

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Try it free for 30 days. Luke 24 John 2. Enrich your faith and grow in spiritual maturity with the incredible Bible study and devotional books listed below. Try it for 30 days FREE. Cancel at any time. You must be logged in to view your newly purchased content.

Please log in below or if you don't have an account, creating one is easy and only takes a few moments. He adds the article to the Logos, but to the name of God he adds it sometimes only. He uses the article, when the name of God refers to the uncreated cause of all things, and omits it when the Logos is named God Either they deny that the Son has a distinct nature of His own besides that of the Father, and make Him whom they call the Son to be God all but the name, or they deny the divinity of the Son, giving Him a separate existence of His own, and making His sphere of essence fall outside that of the Father, so that they are separable from each other.

The true God, then, is The God ho theos. Elsewhere, Origen refers to Christ as a "second God", not in a sense of separate "Ousios" or essence, but a separate "Hypostasis" - if we are to use the later Christian Terminology- and goes on to qualify the term. Translations by James Moffatt , Hugh J. Schonfield and Edgar Goodspeed render part of the verse as " But in normal English usage "God" is a proper noun, referring to the person of the Father or corporately to the three persons of the Godhead.

Moreover, "the Word was God" suggests that "the Word" and "God" are convertible terms, that the proposition is reciprocating. But the Word is neither the Father nor the Trinity … The rendering cannot stand without explanation. This second theos could also be translated 'divine' as the construction indicates "a qualitative sense for theos".

The Word is not God in the sense that he is the same person as the theos mentioned in 1: The point being made is that the Logos is of the same uncreated nature or essence as God the Father , with whom he eternally exists. This verse is echoed in the Nicene Creed: The text of John 1: With the Greek alone, we can create empathic, orthodox, creed-like statements, or we can commit pure and unadulterated heresy.

From the point of view of early church history, heresy develops when a misunderstanding arises concerning Greek articles, the predicate nominative, and grammatical word order. The early church heresy of Sabellianism understood John 1: There are two issues affecting the translating of the verse, theology and proper application of grammatical rules. The commonly held theology that Jesus is God naturally leads one to believe that the proper way to render the verse is the one which is most popular.

The Greek article is often translated the , which is the English definite article, but it can have a range of meanings that can be quite different from those found in English, and require context to interpret. In interpreting this verse, Colwell's rule should be taken into consideration, which says that a definite predicate which is before the verb "to be" usually does not have the definite article.

Ernest Cadman Colwell writes:. The absence of the article does not make the predicate indefinite or qualitative when it precedes the verb, it is indefinite in this position only when the context demands it. The context makes no such demand in the Gospel of John, for this statement cannot be regarded as strange in the prologue of the gospel which reaches its climax in the confession of Thomas [Footnote: The question is whether Colwell's rule helps in interpreting John 1: It has been pointed out that Colwell's rule has been misapplied as its converse, as though it implied definiteness.

Decker has stated, "it has often been misused by well-intentioned defenders of the deity of Christ. Wallace argues that the use of the anarthrous theos the lack of the definite article before the second theos is due to its use as a qualitative noun, describing the nature or essence of the Word, not due to Colwell's rule. The rendering as "a god" is justified by some non-Trinitarians by comparing it with Acts However, it was noted that the Hebrew words El, HaElohim and Yahweh all referring to God were rendered as anarthrous theos in the Septuagint at Nahum 1: Moreover, in the New Testament anarthrous theos was used to refer to God in locations including John 1: Therefore, anarthrous or arthrous constructions by themselves, without context, cannot determine how to render it into a target language.

Let this be known loud and clear that at Bethlehem — indeed, at all true Christian churches — we worship Jesus Christ as God. We fall down with Thomas before Jesus in John When we hear the Jewish leaders say in John This is who he is our Savior, our Lord, our God. Do you see what this means for our series on the Gospel of John?

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It means that we are going to spend week after week getting to know God, as we get to know Jesus. Do you want to know God? Come with us, and invite others, to come and meet God as we meet Jesus. Verse 1, the middle of the verse: Someday I may preach a message just on this doctrine from the rest of John and the other Scriptures.

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But for now simply let this straightforward statement stand in your mind and sink into your heart: He is God, and he has a relationship with God. He is God, and he is the image of God, perfectly reflecting all that God is and standing forth from all eternity as the fullness of deity in a distinct Person. There is one divine essence and three persons. Two of them are mentioned here. The Father and the Son. We learn those names later on in the book.

John 1:1-5 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The Holy Spirit will be introduced later. Since we see in a mirror dimly and we know only in partial ways 1 Corinthians If Jesus Christ is not God, he could not accomplish your salvation Hebrews 2: And his glory would not be sufficient to satisfy your everlasting longing for new discoveries of beauty. If you throw away the deity of Jesus Christ, you throw away your soul and with it all your joy in the age to come. And now we close with his relationship to the world. Remember to retain the mystery of the Trinity from verse 1. But the Word is God.

But in doing it, he was God.

God, the Word, created the world. He was the first of creation. The highest of the high angels. He is not a creature; he created creatures.

So he was created by the Father, but then with the Father created all other things.

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