Day 1: Jesus Is the Word

Prayer:  Our Father in heaven, Jesus told His disciples the night before He died that Your Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth, that the Spirit would take of Christ and reveal Him to us.  We pray for this gift of revelation and guidance by Your Spirit, that Jesus might be magnified in our understanding and in our lives.  Amen.

Day 1:  Jesus is the Word

Primary Scripture: John 1:1:  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The book of John begins with an echo of the opening verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1:  “In the beginning, God…” It takes us back before the dawn of time, before anything had been created, before the Spirit brooded over the darkness and the empty void. “In the beginning was the Word” reveals that Christ was with God before everything else, before there was anything tangible. At the opening of his Gospel, John sets in place this great truth as a foundation stone: Jesus Christ is eternal. He is the eternal God. 

But “In the beginning was the Word” tells us much more than that. Jesus is not only eternal; He is also the expression of the heart and mind of God. Words put our thoughts and feelings outside of ourselves where others can hear and know, comprehend and grasp. Words are the expression of our personalities. Words enable others to know us.  When we use words, we are opening ourselves up to others and inviting them into a relationship with us. Jesus Christ put the thoughts and feelings of God before us in a way we could understand and embrace. He enables us to know who God is and how God thinks and feels. God the Father sent Jesus to invite us into relationship with Himself.

“And the Word became flesh.” He is the tangible expression of the intangible Eternal. Although words give expression to intangible thoughts, ideas, and feelings, words themselves are still intangible. So God, wanting to be known and to make Himself known, wrapped His Word, the expression of Who He is, in very tangible baby flesh.  God opened Himself up to us in the person of Jesus in a way we can understand and relate to. There is something about a baby that draws our hearts. We are unafraid even though He is the exact expression of God's image and person, and the representation of the brilliant radiance of God (Hebrews 1:3). The great and awesome God, magnificent in glory, perfect in holiness, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen nor can see (I Timothy 6:16) invites us to come to Him, to know Him, through His Son who came in baby form.

As He grew to manhood and lived out His relationship with God His Father, fulfilling His destiny, He unveiled more of God's heart toward us. John 1:14 goes on to say, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is one of the most poignant verses in the whole Bible. God came to dwell with us, to live among us, in the form of Christ Jesus. From the creation of the first man and woman to the final restoration of all things, God’s desire has always been to dwell with us in close relationship, to know us and to be known by us. The night before Jesus died, He told His disciples, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23). This is the reason the Father sent His Son: that God might dwell with us.

John 1:14 concludes with these words: “and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." Jesus revealed both the truth and the grace of God—the fullness of who God is. Those two qualities, which often seem to us like they could be mutually exclusive, the one cancelling out the other, are never separated from one another in the character of God. God is able to speak penetrating truth into our lives with never a hint of condemnation: Convicting, gut-wrenching, heart-exposing truth wrapped in grace, His undeserved, unearned favor, forgiveness, and eternal love.

In his first letter, John calls Jesus "the Word of Life, . . . which was with the Father and was manifested to us." You can feel the awe in John's heart as he penned the words, we have seen Him, we have looked upon Him, our hands—my own hands—have touched Him!  I am declaring this Word to you so that you also can know the heart of God through Him (I John 1:1-3).

Jesus Himself used the idea of "The Word" when He said, "I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Revelation 1:8, 11 and 22:13). These are the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet. All words are made up of various arrangements of letters. Jesus is not only the Word of God, but He is also the letters that make up the words that God has spoken and that He will ever speak from the beginning to the end. Hebrews 1 says that God spoke at various times and in various ways in the past by the prophets, but now He has spoken to us by His Son.

In essence Jesus is saying, “I am the expression of all things, the summation of all things.”  The Apostle Paul stated it well in both Ephesians and Colossians: Christ is before all things; in Him all things hold together. In all things Christ will have the pre-eminence. It pleased the Father that in Christ all the fullness should dwell, and by Christ to reconcile all things to Himself—by Christ—whether things on earth or things in heaven (Colossians 1:17-20). In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form, and He is the head of all principalities and powers (Colossians 2:9-10). The full consummation of God’s plan is to sum up all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). For Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11)  The Eternal Word was before all things and will be the conclusion of all things.

This baby is the full incarnate expression of the image of God. He is the full communication of God to us. He is the invitation to relationship with God. Do you want to know how God expresses Himself, what He would say, how He would respond, how He thinks—about you? Look at Jesus. Study Jesus. Let the words and actions of Jesus soak into your soul.

Family Worship:

Discuss the relationship between Jesus, the Word of God, and the Bible, the Word of God. II Timothy 1:16-17 and II Peter 1:21 clearly state that the Bible is the “breath” of God, the expression of God given to us by the Holy Spirit. Matthew 1:20 and Luke 1:35 tell us that Jesus also was birthed by the Holy Spirit as the expression of God.  In John 5:38-40 and Luke 24:27, 44, Jesus says that all of Scripture points to Himself.  If we read and know the Bible but miss Christ, we have missed the whole point. 

What does God becoming flesh tell us about the kind of God He is? The way and the place in which He came speak volumes about the character and heart of God.  How does the life of Jesus, speak to us the Word of God? What does it mean to us that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end of all things and the summation of all things?

Conclude your family time with prayer, with each person thanking God for some aspect of Jesus as the Word of God.

Jesus Christ, The Word:  Eternal God, the complete and full expression of God, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End, the summation and consummation of all things. 

Other Related Scriptures: 

Hebrews 1:1-3:  God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, …who [is] the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person…

I John 1:1-4: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life—the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us—that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.