Jesus in 1 John
June 16, 2025
In the Beginning Was the Word
The introduction to the book of 1 John ushers us from this earth out into eternity.
Go back as far as you can think, beyond creation, back billions and trillions of years, and out of eternity comes the Lord Jesus Christ. Way back there He is already past tense; He is the Ancient of Days. “In the beginning was [not is] the Word.” In other words, this is a beginning that doesn’t even have a beginning because He had no beginning.
Our minds can’t begin to comprehend it until we come to John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” This takes us back to Bethlehem, Galilee, Jerusalem where we meet Jesus—fully God, fully man.
John and his brother, James, met Jesus in Jerusalem when Jesus was 30 years old. Later they were with their father, mending nets, when Jesus came by and called them to follow Him. When John says, “I want to tell you about Him,” he witnesses to Jesus’ reality. “We saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears and felt with our own hands. We gazed on Him. We touched Him with our own hands. For three years we experienced, ‘witnessed,’ eternal life in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 1-3). As one of the remaining people who actually walked with Jesus, John had credibility to testify Jesus was indeed fully man, contrary to what the Christians were hearing from the Gnostics who said Jesus wasn’t a man.
John isn’t talking about a theory. He’s talking about Someone he heard, he saw, and he handled. God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, was brought out into the open where people could see Him. This is the One who is the Word of Life—the One we can have fellowship with today.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. -John 1:1-2
