The Word Of Life Series

10 26 14: John 1:4 The Word of Life: “In Him, Life was…”

John, the Jewish evangelist writes in John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (Clearly in every way, this verse describes Jesus Christ’s Eternality, His Deity, and His eternal existence in relationship with the Father.)

2 “He was in the beginning with God.” (This Word, this Jesus, co-existed with the Father as God.)

3 “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” (Jesus as Eternal Creator of ALL THINGS. He is Creator over all the created.)

4 “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”

ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων

en autos zoe eimi kai ha zoe eimi to phos anthropon

In Him Life was and the life was the light of men.

“In Him Life Was”

“In Him was Life:” The statement again supports the fact that the WORD, Jesus, is deity: He is God. The construction of the sentence tells us this: IN HIM LIFE WAS. The same verb and tense is used here, the imperfect active indicative tense, denotes continuous action in the past, and so the PRE-EXISTENT WORD is also the SELF-EXISTENT LIFE. John 5:26 says: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” Jesus existed in time past, in fact, BEFORE time, having life in HIMSELF: IN HIM LIFE continuously existed. “In Him Life Was and THE Life was the Light of men.” In Him life was, and that which has been made is LIFE IN HIM. (John will continue to build upon this truth throughout His Gospel, using the word “life”(zoe: zō-ā') 47 times, and the word “light” (phōs) 23 times!)

This verse reinforces what John already has stated in the first three verses, and then adds to it: Jesus has Life in Himself. The word used for life is “zoe” and means much more than physical existence; “zoe” is life in its fullest sense. THE WORD, the LOGOS, is the very LIFE OF THE WORLD. In the same way that “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being,” there is NO LIFE in the universe apart from Him. Life does not exist in its own right: In the same way that Created matter could not exist on its own but points to a power greater than itself, a Creator, in the same way that a leaf does not dance down the street on its own but needs a power behind it to do so, in the same way that the wind does not exist on ITS own, but there has to be a power greater than itself.

So LIFE DOES NOT EXIST by its own will, but there must be a power greater than life, a LIFE-GIVER…AND JESUS IS THE GIVER OF ALL LIFE. JESUS IS THE LIFE-GIVER. There is none other who creates LIFE. The WORD is more than SELF-EXISTANT LIFE to Himself: Jesus, the WORD, SHARES His life by giving LIFE.

Jesus, the Giver of Physical Life

“In Him LIFE WAS, and the life was the Light of men.” Jesus is the GIVER of Physical Life. We looked at the mountain of evidence around us visibly and scripturally last week to support Jesus as the Creator Word, but Jesus is also the LIFE-GIVER, not only creator of the created. When God works in human history he uses the VERY common and the VERY ordinary so that the glory is always to HIS NAME and not to man’s. When man was made, he was made, not from valuable or extraordinarily strong metals, such as gold, silver, iron or titanium, but Man was composed of DUST: We are just DIRT people. Man only came to life when God (Gen 2:7) “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

What is God’s “breath”? It is His Spirit, the Holy Spirit which goes forth out of his mouth (“ruwach” which we mentioned last week, too. “Ruwach” has a breathy sound.) In Hebrew, “ruwach” is also associated with “spoken words”; God first SPOKE all the created into existence through His Word. (We studied Gen. 1 references.)

When God spoke forth life into man, John identifies the Lord Jesus Christ as THE WORD of LIFE and God does it in such a way that the Spirit of Life, who is His Holy Spirit, passes into man and causes him to breath and to share attributes of God, which are unique only to man, such as reason: We can know that we are beings Created by God for God’s Glory! So again we see the illustration of the role of the TRIUNE God in CREATION. Our physical LIFE comes from the WORD through the BREATH of God, by way of the Holy Spirit, but this is only the beginning of knowing Jesus as the Life-Giver.