The Word was with God
Jesus has always been. He has no beginning. His role as Son began the moment He received the scroll of the Father’s Eternal Purposes – a prophetic and visionary picture of an eternal condition presented through John in the Revelation of Jesus Christ that helps us picture a spiritual reality. No one in Heaven or Earth could get Father what He wants, so Jesus accepted responsibility to create, redeem, and restore what Father wants.
Jesus was with God and became His Son to produce Father’s purposes. This reality by no means alters the Divinity of Jesus, and John makes it clear that Incarnation – God becoming both God and Man, or God with us, Immanuel – does not and cannot diminish Jesus in His Divinity.
Jesus is preexistent with the Father. No one else is preexistent with Father, Holy Spirit, and Jesus. No one or nothing. An eternal condition in which only God existed is the Source of All that is not God, and Jesus created all that is not God because Father wants it.
John writes this in the Revelation as well, reporting on the visionary exposures he experiences in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. It is essential to read both the Gospel and the Revelation with the same perspective.
“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things; by Your will they exist, and came to be” (Revelation 4:11).
This verse was divided from Chapter 5 at the expense of its contribution to the Throne scene and the Scroll of God’s Eternal Purposes. We should include Revelation 4:11 in this picture because the Throne scene continues what John describes, for the revelation narrative explains how All was created by and for God by Jesus.
Jesus is Preexistent with God and accepts responsibility to create all, uphold all, and hold all things together. This acceptance includes Jesus bringing All to proper restoration and perfection. Then, He will present All back to the Father. Through and in Christ, Father gets what He wants. Father sums up All in Christ to guarantee that God gets what He wants and nothing that He does not wish to in the restoration of the eternal condition from which Jesus accepts that responsibility.
This acceptance is the sense and the only sense in which He is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Not that He actually died prehistory – that is nonsensical since Creation includes time and history. John is writing about the reality of Incarnation. God was but God became. So, Jesus was not crucified in preexistence as God. He was crucified in Incarnation as God and Man. He was not God and Man before the Incarnation. The spurious argument that God is not bound by time cannot be hammered into the reality that Jesus dies as God and Man, not as preexistent God.
Jesus is the only preexistent one. All human beings begin with the creative activity of Jesus that continues in inception. Utilizing physical components and DNA, He is involved in creative activities that start the lives of human beings. No one is a mere product of physical processes void of Divine involvement.
Psalm 139 makes this abundantly clear.
Any teaching – and there are some errors in this area, teachings of human preexistence – that presupposes preexistence of human beings is wrong. The reality that God knows is not the reality of preexistence. God knows something that God decides. The fact that this
Human beings have a beginning in the womb of a woman at which time and place Jesus creates a person Father wants, a destiny
Jesus was with God.
The Word was
Jesus was with God all along. “Beginning” denotes the reality of preexistent Divinity. Jesus did not become God through a process. Jesus became Man begotten of the Father, a clarification of Reality, that Jesus has always been God but not always been Man and God.
The beginning presupposes an Eternal Condition in which only God exists. Jesus is there in that Eternal Condition. He does not change. Incarnation does not change Jesus. Incarnation involves Jesus in Creation as Man. He is all God. He is all Man. He is what Father intends all men to be.
We will never be God. We will be like Him because He is Man in his ultimate condition: the finished Christ produces the finished work of Christ.
We shall be like Him. We will never be Him.
He was with God in the beginning but entered into limitation, hiding the Glory He had from the beginning to receive it again through the finished work of Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension, so He operates now in Restoration Intercession as ultimate Man, glorified and immortal. He alone has immortality.
The Word was God
Jesus was, is, and ever shall be God. We are not. We will never be God. We will reach ultimate in our glorification, and we will be the ultimate of what Father wanted us to be. We will achieve our ultimate when the restoration of All produces a condition of fulfillment in which the Eternal Purposes of God represented in the vision recorded in Revelation 5. All that He creates and redeems reaches ultimate restoration in Christ.
Christ is not making us someone else. Christ is not recreating All. Christ is restoring All. Christ did not start a new kingdom. Christ is the seed of David, son of David, sitting upon the throne of David, holding the key of David, and making the kingdom David started an eternal kingdom.
He was God. He is God. Logos means “all the word ‘God’ and all the word ‘Man’ means. God and Man receive proper revelation in Jesus Christ. Father is not the revelation of the ultimate Man. Holy Spirit is not the revelation of the ultimate Man. They are not Man at all. They were not incarnate. Holy Spirit dwelling is not making human beings into “logos.” We have not realized ultimate, but those that obey Him will reach
The Image of God in Creation anticipates the Incarnation as the Incarnation anticipates the restoration of the ultimate man.
“Though He was a Son, He still learned obedience by submitting to a process of pathos that produced His ultimate, and then He became the Fountainhead Source of Eternal salvation for all who obey Him” (Hebrews 5:8-9).
The Word is God
When John gazed upon Jesus, He saw God Incarnate. “The Logos became flesh and tabernacled” – pitched His tent of a human body – “among us We have seen His Glory, the Glory of an only begotten of the Father” -the one and only – “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Being Man did not diminish God. The Incarnation was designed to fit God into Man by limiting Jesus, by emptying Jesus of Divine capacities, or by fitting God as Man into the body- and soul-defined conditions of Man without sinful limitations. The sinfulness of Man did not limit Jesus. Jesus was limited by being Man.
He emptied Himself of Divine characteristics, pressing Divine Glory into a body and hiding behind that veil of flesh. What was in Him was revealed like the noonday sun blazing in Mammoth Cave when He transfigured before His inner circle of leaders. The moment Jesus described as “The Son of Man coming in the Glory of His kingdom.” They saw His Glory then, and John was one of the apostles who witnessed that revelation.
John recognized the same Jesus in the Glory of His kingdom in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. We continue to carry the perspective of John’s Gospel in tandem with John’s Revelation if we are to understand both and each one. Consider the Revelation of Jesus Christ without reference to future events since the future and the past and John’s present were all interwoven in that Revelation. Like the Gospel he wrote, John writes to reveal Jesus more than to order up a prognosis of the future.
It is certain that the Revelation includes what is to come, but we do err to assume its present seven verses for what was and a couple of chapters of what is before turning into a treatment of what is to come. God does not reveal things out of context, and God reveals things with a what was, is, and is coming context.
John does the same thing in the opening verses of his Gospel. He reveals the God Who was, is, and is to come.
Jesus prays, “Father, restore to Me the Glory I had with You before the world was.”
