Daily Bible Challenge: Post #4

I broke the rules and took a day off, but it was for my son’s first birthday so I thought that could be forgiven. Here is my post for today.

John 1:1

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This my fourth entry of the Daily Bible challenge.

Entry one is here (1 Cor 15:58): http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2015/03/daily-bible-challenge-post-1.html

Entry two is here (1 Tim 4:12): http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2015/03/daily-bible-challenge-post-2.html

Entry three is here (2 Kings 2:23-24) http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2015/03/daily-bible-challenge-post-3.html

I think that no Bible verse has consumed more of my thought than this verse. Seems pretty simple on the surface, but it wasn’t until I started studying Greek that this verse really came alive for me.

The English word “Word” in this verse is the Greek word Logos, something that many people would know. Word is a perfectly acceptable translation, but I fear that reading it in English does not fully capture the depth of what is being said here and what it could potentially mean.

Logos was a term that got some play in ancient Greek philosophy. It was certainly not explored by every philosopher and it was only briefly touched on by the biggest names such as Plato and Aristotle, but it is a concept that is certainly worth exploring. There is no perfect way to translate the concept, but the best I could do is to think of it as a presence or a force within the universe that would represent what is good and right, perhaps along the line of “virtue” that is common in so common in later philosophers, especially during the Enlightenment era.

To bring it back to the Bible, I also think that Logos could be a good substitute for “Wisdom” when it is cited in the Proverbs (and other places) as having human characteristics.

So, to summarize this brief thought, John is referring to Jesus as the Logos, a concept that had roots in Greek philosophy and would potentially be the same as the Hebrew/Jewish concept of Wisdom. There is much going on here and potentially even more to the understanding of the true nature of Christ from the very beginning of creation.

One of my goals in life is to take an extremely deep dive into the concept of Logos and how it relates to the Greek philosophical term as well as how it is connected to the concept of Wisdom. But before I can do that, Jesus as Logos will remain as mysterious and tantalizing as when I first came to this potential understanding.