what God is like.
So, right at the beginning of his gospel, John lays it down that in Jesus, and in him alone, there is perfectly revealed all that God always was and always will be, and all that he feels towards and desires for men and women.
THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS
John 1:3
He was the agent through whom all things were made; and there is not a single thing which exists in this world which came into being without him.
IT may seem strange to us that John so stresses the way in which the world was created; and it may seem strange that he so definitely connects Jesus with the work of creation. But he had to do this because of a certain tendency in the thought of his day.
In the time of John, there was a kind of heresy called Gnosticism. Its characteristic was that it was an intellectual and philosophical approach to Christianity. To the Gnostics, the simple beliefs of the ordinary Christian were not enough. They tried to construct a philosophic system out of Christianity. They were troubled about the existence of sin and evil and sorrow and suffering in this world, so they worked out a theory to explain it. The theory was this.
In the beginning, two things existed – the one was God and the other was matter. Matter was always there and was the raw material out of which the world was made. The Gnostics held that this original matter was flawed and imperfect. We might put it that the world got off to a bad start. It was made of material which had the seeds of corruption in it.
The Gnostics went further. God, they said, is pure spirit, and pure spirit can never touch matter at all, still less matter which is imperfect. Therefore it was not possible for God to carry out the work of creation himself. So he put out from himself a series of emanations. Each emanation was further and further away from God; and, as the emanations got further and further away from him, they knew less and less about him. About half-way down the series, there was an emanation which knew nothing at all about God. Beyond that stage, the emanations began to be not only ignorant of but actually hostile to God. Finally in the series, there was an emanation which was so distant from God that it was totally ignorant of him and totally hostile to him – and that emanation was the power which created the world, because it was so distant from God that it was possible for it to touch this flawed and evil matter. The creator god was utterly divorced from and utterly at enmity with the real God.
The Gnostics took one step further. They identified the creator god with the God of the Old Testament; and they held that the God of the Old Testament was quite different from, quite ignorant of and quite hostile to the God and Father of Jesus Christ.
In the time of John, this kind of belief was widespread. It was believed that the world was evil and that an evil God had created it. It is to combat this teaching that John here lays down two basic Christian truths. In point of fact, the connection of Jesus with creation is repeatedly laid down in the New Testament, just because of this background of thought which divorced God from the world in which we live. In Colossians 1:16, Paul writes: ‘For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him.’ In 1 Corinthians 8:6, he writes of the Lord Jesus Christ ‘through whom are all things’. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of the one who was the Son, ‘through whom he also created the worlds’ (Hebrews 1:2). John and the other New Testament writers who spoke like this were stressing two great truths.
(1) Christianity has always believed in what is called creation out of nothing. We do not believe that in his creation of the world God had to work with alien and evil matter. We do not believe that the world began with an essential flaw in it. We do not believe that the world began with God and something else. It is our belief that behind everything there is God and God alone.
(2) Christianity has always believed that this is God’s world. So far from being so detached from the world that he could have nothing to do with it, God is intimately involved in it. The Gnostics tried to put the blame for the evil of the world on the shoulders of its creator. Christianity believes that what is wrong with the world is due to human sin. But even though sin has injured the world and kept it from being what it might have been, we can never despise the world, because it is essentially God’s. If we believe this, it gives us a new sense of the value of the world and a new sense of responsibility to it.
There is a story of a child from the back streets of a great city who was taken for a day in the country. When she saw the bluebells in the woods, she asked: ‘Do you think God would mind if I picked some of his flowers?’ This is God’s world; because of that, nothing is out of his control; and because of that, we must use all things in the awareness that they belong to God. Christians do not belittle the world by thinking that it was created by an ignorant and hostile god; they glorify it by remembering that everywhere God is behind it and in it. They believe that the Christ who re-creates the world was the co-worker of God when the world was first created, and that, in the act of redemption, God is seeking to win back that which was always his own.
LIFE AND LIGHT
John 1:4
In him was life and the life was the light of men.
IN a great piece of music, the composer often begins by stating the themes which he or she is going to elaborate in the course of the work. That is what John does here. Life and light are two of the great basic words on which the Fourth Gospel is built up. They are two of the main themes which it is the aim of the gospel to develop and to expound. Let us look at them in detail.
The Fourth Gospel begins and ends with life. At the very beginning, we read that in Jesus was life; and at the very end we read that John’s aim in writing the gospel was that everyone might ‘believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). The word is continually on the lips of Jesus. It is his wistful regret that people will not come to him that they might have life (5:40). It is his claim that he came that men and women might have life and that they might have it abundantly (10:10). He claims that he gives people life and that they will never perish because no one will snatch them out of his hand (10:28). He claims that he is the way, the truth and the life (14:6). In this gospel, the word life (zōē) occurs more than thirty-five times and the verb to live or to have life (zēn) more than fifteen times. What then does John mean by life?
(1) Quite simply, he means that life is the opposite of destruction, condemnation and death. God sent his Son that everyone who believes should not perish but have eternal life (3:16). Anyone who hears and believes has eternal life and will not come into judgment (5:24). There is a contrast between the resurrection to life and the resurrection to judgment (5:29). Those to whom Jesus gives life will never perish (10:28). There is in Jesus that which gives security in this life and in the life to come. Until we accept Jesus and take him as our Saviour and enthrone him as our King, we cannot be said to live at all. Those who live Christless lives exist, but they do not know what life is. Jesus is the one person who can make life worth living, and in whose company death is only the prelude to fuller life.
(2) But John is quite sure that, although Jesus is the bringer of this life, the giver of life is God. Again and again, John uses the phrase the living God, as indeed the whole Bible does. It is the will of the Father who sent Jesus that everyone who sees him and believes in him should have life (6:40). Jesus is the giver of life because the Father has set his own seal of approval upon him (6:27). He gives life to as many as God has given him (17:2). At the back of it all, there is God. It is as if God was saying: ‘I created human beings that they
