We begin a new series in our daily meditations today. For the next three weeks, I will address the question, who is Jesus Christ? We live in a time when the god of this world, Satan, seeks to undermine fundamental Bible teachings about Jesus as portrayed in the Scriptures. Let's start with the Gospel of John and his opening testimony:
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-3).
Jesus was "in the beginning." He is eternal, for He existed before all creation, and was God becoming incarnate (Isaiah 9:6). This thought also tells us that Jesus was not "in" God; He was and is with God (v. 2), meaning that He has a separate personality. The one God has three distinct personalities, yet the Word was God. Jesus came as God revealed.
Why is He referred to as “the Word?” In another place, Christ is called the Alpha and Omega (Revelation 22:13), the alphabet's beginning and end in the Greek language. God's chosen form of communication is the person of Jesus. The Scriptures clearly show that Jesus is God and fully self-existent with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Christ was the agent of the creation of all things: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). Writing to the Colossian church, inspired by the Spirit, the Apostle Paul expressed a similar thought, taking the idea further:
16For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. 17He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17, emphasis added).
Christ created all things (v. 16), and every quark, atom, and molecule in the entire created universe is held together by His power. Commentator R. Kent Hughes writes about this:
There are about 100 billion stars in the average galaxy and at least one hundred million galaxies in known space. Einstein believed that we have scanned only one billionth of theoretical space with our largest telescopes, and he made this observation over six decades ago. This means that there is probably something like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in space (ten octillion). How many is that? 1,000 thousands = a million; 1,000 million = a billion; 1,000 billions = a trillion; 1,000 trillions= a quadrillion; 1,000 quadrillions = a quintillion; 1,000 quintillions = a sextillion; 1,000 sextillions = a septillion; 1,000 septillions = an octillion. So ten octillions are a ten with twenty-seven zeros behind them. And Jesus created them all! He is the Creator of the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm in the inner universe of the atom. The text in Colossians explains that He holds the atom and its inner and outer universe together (“in Him all things hold together”).[1]
The eternal Creator spoke the worlds into being through the Word of God—the Lord Jesus. Eight times in the Book of Genesis, chapter one, we encounter the phrase, "And God said." On each day of creation, God spoke, and the result was that His creation came into existence. The idea that Jesus was at the beginning of creation and that through Him all things were made appears in two other passages apart from the earlier references. Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, “God…created all things through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 3:9). Furthermore, in the Book of Hebrews, the writer states that God “has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2). Jesus is God in the flesh. Keith Thomas
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[1]R. Kent Hughes, Preaching the Word Series. John: That You May Believe. Published by Crossway, 1999. Page 17.
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