Seen and Heard

View daily reading plan: 1 John 1.1-2

What John’s readers had learned about the true humanity of Jesus from earliest days had been under assault; John now reaffirms it and asserts fundamental truth about the Lord Jesus.

• He is “the Word of life”, and John combines two ideas from the prologue to his Gospel.
As the Word, the Lord Jesus is the embodiment of every communication from heaven. In Him the Father has conveyed the sum total of all that we need to know about Himself (14.9).
Christ is also the source of all life both physical and spiritual, but in His own being He is the life (14.6), and some translations capitalise the word “life” here in v.2 - “the Life was manifested”.

• “The Word was God” (Jn 1.1), and here John gives evidence of that with the usage of the word “eternal” and the concept of manifestation, implying a previous existence. Here He is said to have been “with the Father”, not “with God” as in John 1.1, although the Father is God.

In referring to His pre-incarnate intimacy with One described as “the Father”, there is an incidental evidence of His eternal Sonship, for how could there be a Father without a Son? In human relationships a father exists before his son, but he is not a father until the birth of his firstborn. In the Godhead, both Father and Son are unoriginated and eternal, thus there was never a point in history when their relationship as Father and Son commenced - it is an eternal fixture. If the Father was the Father in what we call eternity past, the Son was the Son, for He was “with the Father”.

Wednesday, 24 April, 2024