Be Still And Know

John 1:1 'In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.' Can I be honest? I listened to these words for years without really understanding what they meant. They are often used at Christmas carol services and they seemed very mysterious to me. John, who wrote them, would have been deeply saddened by my reaction; for him, and his readers, the meaning was obvious because everyone knew what he meant by ‘the Word’ or, as the original Greek says, logos. This was an expression often used in Greek philosophy and shaped the thinking of his day. He was saying that Jesus was nothing less than God himself and that, when God spoke to the world, he did so in the form of his Son, Jesus, the Word. This majestic verse reminds us of the very beginning of the Bible, where we learn that God created the world. When God spoke, something happened. On day one, he said: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and there was light. That is to say, there isn’t a distinction between the word a