John 1
There is one remark that furnishes a most important key to the Gospel of John, which is illustrated very simply and manifestly in this first chapter.
The object of the Holy Spirit is to assert the personal glory of Jesus; and hence it is that there is not perhaps a single chapter in the New Testament that presents our Lord in so many different aspects, yet all personal, as the opening chapter of this gospel.
His divine glory is carefully guarded. He is said in the most distinguished language to be God as to His nature, but withal a man. He is God no less than the Father is, or the Holy Spirit; but He is the Word in a way in which the Father and the Holy Spirit were not.
It was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who alone was the word of God. He only after a personal sort expressed God. The Father and the Holy Spirit remained in their own unseeable majesty.
The Word had for His place to express God clearly; and this belonged to Him, it is evident, as a distinctive personal glory. It was not merely that He was the Word when He came into the world, but "In the beginning was the Word" when there was no creature.
Before anything came into being that was made, the Word "was in the beginning with God"; not merely in God, as if merged, or lost in God, but He had a distinct personal subsistence before any creature existed. He "was in the beginning with God." This is of immense importance, and with these truths our gospel opens.
Then we find His creation glory stated afterward: "All things were made by Him."
There is nothing which more stamps God to be God than giving existence to that which had none, causing it to exist by His own will and power. Now, all things exist by the Word; and so emphatically true is this that the Spirit has added, "And without Him was not anything made that was made." But there was that which belonged to the Lord Jesus that was not made: "In Him was life." It was not only that He could cause a life to exist that had not existed before, but there was a life that belonged to Him from all eternity. "In Him was life." Not that this life began to be, for it was eternal. All else, all creation, began to be, and it was He that gave them the commencement of their existence. But "in Him was life," a life that was not created, a life that therefore was divine in its nature.
It was the reality and the manifestation of this life which were of prime importance to man. Everything else that had been since the beginning of the world was only a creature;, but "in Him was life." Man was destined to have the display of this life on earth. But it was in Him before He came among men. The life was not called "the light" of angels, but "of men."
Nowhere do we find that eternal life is created. The angels are never said to have life in the Son of God. Theirs is a purely creature life, whereas it is a wonderful fact of revelation that we who believe are possessors of the eternal life that was
in Jesus Christ the Son of God, and are therefore said to be partakers of the divine nature. This is in no way true of an angel.
It is not that we for a moment cease to be creatures, but we have what is above the creature in Christ the Son of God.