In the Beginning Was the Word: The Light and Life of All Creation

I want to begin by reading John 1:1–5 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message:

“The Word was first, the Word present to God,God present to the Word.The Word was God,in readiness for God from day one.Everything was created through him; nothing not one thing came into being without him.What came into existence was life, and the life was light to live by.The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.”

That’s good, isn’t it?

Now I want to read the same passage from the Williams Translation—one of my favorites:

“In the beginning the Word existed, and the Word was face to face with God—yes, the Word was God himself.He is the one who was face to face with God in the beginning.It was through him that everything came into existence, and apart from him not a single thing came into existence.It was by him that life began to exist, and that life was the light of mankind.So the light continues to shine in the darkness, for the darkness has never overpowered it.”

John’s Long Reflection

It’s my understanding that when John wrote his gospel, he was well up in years—perhaps in his 80s or 90s. He had followed Jesus as a very young man, maybe not even twenty when he first walked with Him. So, decades had passed—decades to marinate, or as Don Keithley says, to “crockpot” the life and ministry of Jesus.

John had lived a long time to ponder, pray, and grow in his own relationship with the Lord. His gospel comes from that deep, reflective place. Some say his disciples encouraged him to finally write down what he had been telling them all those years: “John, you’re getting old—why don’t you write this down?”

However it happened, the point is that John had a lifetime to soak in the reality of who Jesus is.

And how does he begin?

“In the beginning…”

Immediately, John takes us back to Genesis:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. God spoke: ‘Light!’ And light appeared.”

John deliberately echoes those first words of Scripture because he wants us to see something: the same Word who spoke creation into being has now come into that creation to redeem and recreate it.

The eternal Son, through whom all things were made, has entered His own world—the very cosmos He created—to make it new. As John says later, “He came into the world that was made through him, but the world did not know him.”

John is showing us that the One who began creation is now bringing it to fulfillment.

The Word Face to Face

Let’s hear it again from the Williams Translation:

“In the beginning the Word existed, and the Word was face to face with God—yes, the Word was God himself.”

There’s something powerful in that phrase face to face. It speaks of relationship—Father, Son, and Spirit in eternal communion. From the very beginning, creation itself flowed out of this relationship of love.

“It was through him that everything came into existence; apart from him not a single thing came into existence.”

Nothing lives apart from Him. You and I can’t even draw breath without Him. As John says, “In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”

This means all life—humanity, creation, everything that exists—is sustained in Him. Our very being is bound up in the life of the Son.

The Union of All Things

Baxter Kruger says it beautifully in The Mediation of Jesus Christ:

“To speak of this Jesus is to speak definitively about the being of God, but also about all creation and the human race and about their relationship to each other. In this incarnate Son, the life of the Triune God and of creation and of all humanity are not separated but bound together in relationship—indeed, in union. Jesus is himself the one in whom these relationships originate and are sustained.”

That’s what John is declaring. Everything that exists was created through Him and in Him. The creation and all humanity are not separate from this relationship but are held together in Him—the eternal Son, face to face with the Father, in the fellowship of the Spirit.

As Kruger writes, behind this stunning truth stand two realities:

1. Jesus Christ is the eternal, beloved Son of the Father, who shares all things with Him in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

2. All creation exists in and through this Son—the Word who became flesh, bringing the light and life of God into the world.

That’s the heart of John’s opening words. The Light has come, and the darkness has never been able to put it out.

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”And it still is.