The Logos, Part 3

THE LOGOS, PART 3

By Dr. Stephen Jones:  Aug 24, 2019

Blog Post Date:  9-25-2019

In John 1:4 and 5, the apostle links life to the light, saying, “the life was the light of men.” The wording makes it appear that life is light, as if they are somehow the same.

Of course, both life and light are explained and unfolded throughout the rest of John’s gospel. We have already commented on the meaning of life, but we also read Jesus words in John 9:5, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

Witnessing Light

John the Baptist’s role is given John 1:6-8,

⁶ There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came for a witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light but came that he might bear witness of the light.

Jesus said later in John 5:33,

³³ You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth.

Here we find that the light is “truth.” As the prophesied forerunner, John bore witness to the truth that Jesus is the Messiah.

Jesus’ claim in John 9:5 that He was the light of the world was made in the context of the sixth miracle-sign, where He healed the eyes of the man born blind (John 9:1). Light does not enlighten anyone who is blind, neither does truth affect positively those who are spiritually blind. The blind man was healed and received light and truth, but the Pharisees refused on the grounds that Jesus had violated the law by working on the Sabbath (John 9:16).

To believe in Jesus—that is, to believe that He is the Messiah, with all that this entails—is to come out of darkness and into the light. Jesus said in John 12:44-46,

⁴⁴ … He who believes in Me does not believe in Me, but in Him who sent Me. ⁴⁵ And he who beholds Me beholds the One who sent Me. ⁴⁶ I have come as light into the world, that everyone who believes in Me may not remain in darkness.

We see, then, a sequence of witnesses. Jesus bore witness of the Father, and John in turn bore witness of Jesus. Consequently, the people themselves were supposed to believe John’s witness and thereby provide the final double witness that established truth to all individually.

The Power of Light

This takes us back to the beginning in John 1:9,

⁹ There was the true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.

Obviously, not every man received the truth during His ministry. Much darkness remained and has continued to the present time. But light is greater than darkness. Darkness, no matter how deep, flees from light, for it neither apprehends it nor extinguishes it. Hence, John 1:5 says,

⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

The Greek word translated “comprehend” is katalambano (kata is “according to”; lambano is “to seize or take to one’s self). Hence, katalambano means “to seize upon, grasp, take possession of, or to understand with the mind.” John uses the term to indicate a double meaning. First, the darkness cannot understand the light; second, the darkness cannot seize the light as if to overpower and extinguish it.

The Pharisees provided the example in John 9 of the inability of darkness to receive or understand the light of truth that Christ was manifesting. Yet at the same time, their unbelief and opposition was destined to fail in the end, because darkness has no power to extinguish the truth. Hence, the light is destined to enlighten every man by the time His Story concludes.

Let There Be Light

The first command at creation was “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). John intended to show how Jesus Christ is that light which came into the world at the beginning of time. The word (Logos) of the one true and living God both begat and birthed the living Light out of Himself, that is, out of His substance (hupostasis). He was “the Firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), because “light” was the first Logos of the Creator.

John 1:1 says: “In the beginning was the Logos.” In that Logos was life, and this life was “the Light of men” (John 1:4). The light burst forth, dispelling all darkness, and enlightening the world and “every man” (John 1:9). That original creation was “very good,” but when sin entered the picture, darkness enveloped all that was under the authority of Adam.

Hence, the history of the world is about the re-creation and renewal of all things. The Light was again begotten by the Father, and the Son was born in Bethlehem. “Let there be light” is again the first Logos of the Father in the restoration of all things. No man can come to the Father except through Jesus Christ, for we read in John 14:6,

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

These three elements provide us with the path from darkness to light and from death to immortal life. These are pictured architecturally in the tabernacle of Moses, where “the way” is the outer gate into the outer court; “the truth” is the veil into the Holy Place, where the lampstand gives the light (truth) to the seven churches; and “the life” is found in the Most Holy Place, when one passes through that final veil into the very presence of the Logos.

This path is also pictured in the three main feasts of the Lord. Passover is about faith in the blood of the Lamb; Pentecost is about hearing God’s voice, receiving revelation of truth by the Holy Spirit, and learning obedience in being led by the Spirit; Tabernacles is about full agreement, where “we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

In other words, Passover is the realm of the outer court; Pentecost is the Holy Place; and Tabernacles is the Most Holy Place, where we behold Him face to face. This is the “Highway of Holiness” (Isaiah 35:8) which every man must travel to be enlightened by the Logos.

Logos: Masculine and Feminine

I mentioned previously that the Greek word logos is masculine in gender, and for this reason, the Logos is referred to as “Him” in most translations. The Hebrew equivalent, davar (or dabar), is also a masculine noun. Nonetheless, the manifestation of Christ as the Logos includes revelation of the feminine as well.

This is seen in the law, where all of the sacrifices of various animals and birds typified Jesus Christ in His great Sacrifice for the sin of the world. One kind of sacrifice in the law was to be “a goat, a male with defect” (Leviticus 4:23), and other was to be “a goat, a female without defect” (Leviticus 4:28).

Likewise, the Passover lamb was to be “an unblemished male” (Exodus 12:5), while the “unblemished red heifer in which is no defect” (Numbers 19:2) was obviously female.

Jesus came to fulfill the law, which included both the male and female sacrifices. This may be where Paul apprehended the idea that in the spirit “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), at least not as we know it in the earth today. The fact is that God, being complete and lacking in nothing, possesses all of the spiritual characteristics of male and female that were afterward divided up between males and females on earth.

Christ the Logos, being an exact representation of the Father (i.e., His Image), was both male and female in spirit, though He was male in the flesh. As such, He could fulfill the entire word (davar) that prophesied of Him. For this reason, one could make the point that the translators’ use of “Him” to describe the Logos in John 1:3 was not fully accurate. No doubt they were thinking only of personifying the Logos, so their use of “He” and “Him” were intended to identify the Logos with Jesus Christ. Yet by doing so, they focused upon His human nature, rather than His spiritual or heavenly nature as the Logos.

Deborah and Barak

There was a Judge and prophetess in Israel named Deborah, who, united with Judge Barak, set the Israelites free from their Canaanite captivity (Judges 4:4, 8, 23). Deborah’s name is the feminine form of davar, or dabar. Her name literally means “a bee,” implying divine order that comes from the word of God. Note that in Genesis 1:2 there was chaos, and that the word of God then brought creation into divine order.

Bees make honey. Honey is a biblical type of truth that enlightens one’s eyes. Israel was led to “a land flowing with milk and honey”—the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 11:9). While many have focused upon the physical land itself, which was merely a prophetic type, the real promise of God is for his people to become the living word. We are what we eat, and when we consume the milk of the word and the honey of the word, we then fulfill what God intended from the beginning.

There is also an enlightening prophetic story, where Jonathan, son of King Saul, ate some honey, “and his eyes brightened” (1 Samuel 14:27 NASB). The KJV says, “his eyes were enlightened.” The problem was that his father, the king, had commanded that no one in the army should eat anything until he had subdued the Philistines (1 Samuel 14:24). Jonathan had been absent and did not hear about this ban on food. So we read in 1 Samuel 14:29,

²⁹ Then Jonathan said, “My father has troubled the land. See now, how my eyes have brightened, because I tasted a little of this honey.”

The people prevented Saul from executing his own son, but it shows how the religious spirit was already operating in the king. He should have admitted that he had made a rash vow, asked forgiveness for his foolishness, and moved on in humility. However, it seems that he interpreted the law in Numbers 30:2 as being exclusive to his gender, making it unlawful for a man to break a foolish vow.

The law says that a father may veto his daughter’s “rash statement” (Numbers 30:8, 12). Love is the overriding foundation of the law. Whenever the law is applied apart from love, it is a sin. If Saul had consumed a bit of spiritual honey, he would have been able to attribute his rash vow to his soul (feminine), and his inner spiritual man would have been able to issue a veto.

But Saul was a carnally minded king and a type of the church under Pentecost in its lawless condition.

The point is that Deborah was a manifestation of the word (davar, or logos). She was united with Barak, “lightning,” representing the sons of God, for lightning is pictured as God’s arrows hitting the earth (Psalm 18:14). Arrows are also “sons” in Psalm 127:4. Hence, God’s arrows are the sons of God. Deborah and Barak were united in their purpose, and this teaches us that when the sons of God become the davar or logos (being in Christ, the Logos), the power of the Canaanites will be broken.

This is the spiritual honey that God has promised us. When we partake of the word of God and truly assimilate it, we become living epistles, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:2, 3,

² You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; ³ being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts.

To become a logos of God, the law must be written on one’s heart in accordance with the New Covenant (Hebrews 8:10). In this way the light that broke through the darkness at the beginning of time is enlightening our own eyes with the truth and is transforming us “into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

When the light of the Logos finally enlightens every man (John 1:9), then all darkness will cease. There will be “no night there” (Revelation 21:25), and there will be no further need for the sun and moon to give their light, because “the glory of God has illumined it” (Revelation 21:23).

God’s New Covenant promise will be fulfilled when Christ has manifested the glory of God fully in the earth and the earth has become the double witness of His glory. Habakkuk 2:14 says,

¹⁴ For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

The Logos, Part 2

THE LOGOS, PART 2

By Dr. Stephen Jones: Aug 23, 2019

Blog Post Date:  9-9-2019

John 1:1 tells us,

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word is logos, a Greek word that had long been used in a philosophical context, but which John adopted to describe the Hebrew concept of davar. The Greek concept separated logos from matter, because their idea was that spirit (and logos) was good but matter was evil. They said also that spirit was uncreated, having no beginning, whereas matter was created by a lesser god called the demiurge. By the first century, this demiurge had become known as an evil god.

The Greek view said that the fall of man occurred when spirit and matter came together, and that the solution was to separate them. The Hebrew view said that a good God created matter and breathed His Spirit into it and that the result was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

When a Greek or Gnostic began reading John’s gospel, he would have been interested in the Logos, and he would have agreed that the Logos was God. By the time he got to verse 3, he would have begun to see that John was teaching something different, something new to him, because John claimed that this Logos—and not the demiurge—was the Creator.

This meant that matter was created by a good God by the orderly and reasonable principle of the Logos. By the time he reached verse 14, where he read, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” he would have realized that this book was heretical and radically different from Greek culture and religion.

Logos as Divine Order and Reason

The word of God is intelligible and reasonable, because God is both intelligent and reasonable. He may be an “unknown God,” but He is not unknowable. We may never know Him completely, but the word of God was given to us for the purpose of revealing who God is, not by human reasoning of the soul but by the revelation of the Holy Spirit indwelling the human spirit. So we read in 1 John 5:20,

²⁰ And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, in order that we might know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

The Greeks sought human wisdom; the Jews looked for signs; we seek the word, which is spiritual revelation.  Most people seek truth through the soul, because they cannot distinguish between soul and spirit.  Therefore, what they perceive as being spiritual is actually soulish.  The soul has tremendous power in itself, simply because it is God-created, and some men, through discipline, are able to harness its powers in seemingly supernatural ways. But in the end, it is not the spirit, and therefore it falls short of the glory of God.

Paul speaks of “the logos of the cross” in 1 Corinthians 1:18, contrasting it with soulish reasoning. The logos of the cross contains a higher logic that the unenlightened soul cannot comprehend until it submits to the teaching of one’s spirit, which knows all things. Examples include Moses’ instruction to cast a tree into the bitter waters of Marah to make the waters sweet (Exodus 15:25), and Elisha’s instruction to cast a tree branch into the Jordan River to recover the axe head that had been lost (2 Kings 6:6). Such instructions were nonsense to the soulish mind, but these were very logical to the spiritual mind, which understood that the tree, by the principle of identification, was the cross of Christ, which transforms the bitter heart and recovers the people of the iron kingdom to the Kingdom of God.

Such is the logical word of the cross. It is not unknowable, but one must find the truth through the inner spiritual man that discerns all things (1 Corinthians 2:15). Logos is speech using words that are orderly, logical, and sensible.

Logos is with God and is God

A Greek reader would have found John’s statement to be quite odd, for how could the Logos be both God and with God? There are many different views about this, each according to one’s view of the relationship between the Creator God and Jesus Christ. Those who do not believe that Christ pre-existed and participated in the creation of the world will say that the logos was simply the spoken word of the Creator. To such, the word of God was not a Him but an it.

The Greek language has masculine and feminine nouns, and in this case logos was masculine. Hence, they dispute with translators such as the NASB, which render John 1:2, 3,

² He [the Logos] was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being by [dia, “through”] Him [the Logos], and apart from Him [the Logos] nothing came into being that has come into being.

They insist that it should be rendered:

² It was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through it, and apart from it nothing came into being that has come into being.

Unfortunately, in John’s day the Greek language was written without upper and lower case letters, so the letters themselves give us no clue how to understand the logos.

One’s prior viewpoint determines whether we should personify the Logos as “Him” or limit the logos as a simple word (“it”) that was spoken by the Creator.

I, of course, see the Logos as a blend of both. I see a pre-existent Christ declaring “Amen” to the word of the Father. Because Christ is the perfect Image of God, and because He is always “the faithful and true Witness, the beginning of the creation of God” (Revelation 3:14), the Logos is both with the Creator and is the Creator. In other words, the Father is the Logos, but so is the Son, for Hebrews 1:1, 2 says,

¹ God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways; ² in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.

To speak is to use reasonable words (logos). Those words from the Father created the world, but these were repeated as a double witness by “His Son… through whom also He made the world.” The Son, then, was pre-existent, and one cannot separate the Son from the creative process. Furthermore, the fact that God now speaks “in His Son” shows that “to us” the Son is the Logos personified.

Whatever God speaks must immediately come into being, because God is not a liar. If God affirms by His logos that something exists, when, in fact, it does not exist, then it is compelled to come into existence, simply because God’s word is truth. This is the foundation of the law of imputation, where God calls into being that which does not exist. That is spiritual logic, based upon truthful premises:

God is sovereign.

God spoke.

Christ bore witness.

Therefore: it is.

The only One not “made” by the double witness was Christ Himself, for He was taken out of the bosom of the Father and was thus “the only begotten God” (John 1:18). The divine Double Witness had to be begotten first in order to provide a double witness for the creation as a whole.

The Logos is Alive

John 1:4, 5 says,

⁴ In Him [the Logos] was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Whether we believe in the Logos or the logos, we must affirm that the Logos was and is alive.  If it were a dead word, it would have been powerless to create anything meaningful. We today are so used to dead words that we have difficulty comprehending a living, creative word. We have lived in the darkness for too long. Our eyes are used to the darkness, and light tends to blind us. We have difficulty comprehending light. We squint and cannot focus our eyes, and so truth appears as a strange and incomprehensible thing.

The Jewish view that a man like Moses was the embodiment of the living word, a man who was so full of the word that he would be the very image of God, was not far from the truth. They even believed that the Messiah would be like Moses in this way—and perhaps even greater, if some might conceive of Moses as being imperfect without disrespecting him. Their problem was that even as their forefathers had often wanted to stone Moses, so also did they actually stone Jesus on the cross.

Such was the usual manner of judgment, even meted out upon those being crucified. The people passing by on the road were expected to throw stones, trying to hit the face of the convicted criminal. For this reason, Isaiah 52:14 KJV says, “His visage was so marred more than any man.” When His light shined in the darkness, the darkness could not comprehend it.

The living word in John 1:4 is merely an introduction to the rest of John’s gospel, where Christ is presented to us as the Source of life. In John 4:10 Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well that He was the source of “living water” and that if she would drink this water, it would make her “a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Such is the quality of life. Life begets life. She too could become a source of life for others. This was a revelation that an angel gave to Hagar at the well that she named Beer-lahai-roi (Genesis 16:14). It means “the well of living after seeing (God).” To “see” is to drink of the living water.

In John 5:25 Jesus said that those who hear the voice of the Son of God—i.e., those who hear the logos/word—will live. The creative, living word of the Father, spoken through the Son, causes men to live.

In John 6:48 Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In verse 51 He says, “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven.” Anyone who eats of this living bread will receive immortal life in the same manner that drinking His water will impart immortal life. To drink is to see; to eat is to hear the voice/word of the Son of God.

Either way, John presents us with Christ’s teachings which show that He is the Logos, the source of (immortal) life. John’s introduction is a mere statement, which, if taken alone, can be disputed by theologians with differing opinions. But when we see how the truth unfolds throughout the rest of John’s gospel, the meaning becomes clear. The pre-existent Logos was alive, became flesh, and was seen in the Person of Jesus. Those who eat and drink from Him, those who see and hear the Father’s words through the Son’s voice, are given immortal life as well.