Below is John 1: 1-4. (If you’re new to learning the Bible, what John 1:1-4 means is that in the New Testament we’re looking at The Book of John [sometimes also called "The Gospel According to John," or, most often, just "John"], chapter one, verses 1-4.)
John 1: 1-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
I think these first four sentences of The Book of John are capturing and expressing the reality of the Trinity. They’re saying that God comes in three modes: Absolute and unchanging (“God”); exuberantly creative (“Word”); and personally and specifically inside of each and every man (“the light of men”).
And there’s the ineffable mystery of the three-in-one God. There, in four (heartbreakingly elegant) sentences, is the basis for the entirety of Christianity.
Jesus, of course, is the Word, the active aspect of God; he is God’s unending potential manifested in real space and time. Jesus is the perfect means by which God’s absolute, undifferentiated power is physically, corporeally expressed.
“Word” perfectly captures that extraordinary dynamic. A thing doesn’t really have an identity, hasn’t ever been definitively differentiated from everything else in the world, until it has been named—until someone has attached a unique word to it that, from then on out, refers exclusively to that thing, and only that thing. Naming something marks the finality of the process by which something gains its own distinct, enduring presence; it is how a thing transforms from unknown to known.
Put in the broadest possible terms, it’s how a thing moves from the world of undivided and absolute God, to the differentiated, relative, human world in which God became Jesus.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
And there it is: by the power of the active, creative force of God—which ultimately personified itself into the Jesus we worship today—all things that ever were or will be were created. Jesus is the Word through which God created us, and our world.
In him was life was life, and that life was the light of men.
That’s just an extremely perfect way of saying that, ultimately, what Jesus brought is the means by which his essence (“the light”) is meant to be fully imparted and awakened in the hearts and minds of all who believe that he was, in fact, exactly who he said he was.
And that is the Holy Spirit.
And there we have the Holy Trinity, laid down before us like a path any of us are free to walk upon.
Other posts of mine about the opening verses of John:
John 1:5: The Archer’s Grief
John 1:6-15: Read It and Weep
John 1:16: It’s All Groovy Like a Movie
John 1:17: Where “Truth” Depends on Your Translation
John 1:18: Bring on the Stupid
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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God has no religion.
@ AC: That’s okay. I do that all the time!
I didn’t realize this was an old post. Just commenting away to ppl from years ago!
OK, but can i still play here even though i go to a UNITARIAN church?
Ha! Good one!
But no.
(Joke. That was a joke.)
i knew it was. doi.
Yeah, YOU knew it was (as I knew you would, of course).
But. Well. You know.
Beautiful John as always.
Absolutely beautiful and simple. Sometimes I think preachers/teachers make it complicated so we stay confused and dependent on them to take us to the next level of understanding. You never do such nonsense. Thank you!
I really appreciated this article as I have an ongoing internal struggle trying to figure out if I’m a trinitarian or not. If I have read this correctly, the trinity you present does not include that wascaly wabbit– the Holy Spirit, a concept I, at 42 years old, still cannot wrap my puny little brain around. I can accept your explanation of the trinity. I want to be clear– I’m not anti-Holy Spirit. It’s just a concept I cannot seem to grasp. Maybe by viewing it as indenendent of the trinity, I can start to get some sort of grasp of it
I wish you had been with me Thursday when I talked to a man with a five foot high photograph of a fetus. Wow, that was a loss for scientific method.
Easiest way to explain it is by thinking of water. Ice is solid, steam is gas and water is liquid. 3 forms of the same thing, same as God.
I’ve also heard it compared to the sun. There is the actual, physical sun, the star in the sky (God). Then there is the sunlight, which comes from the sun, by which you can see everything else (Jesus). And then there is the warmth of the sun’s rays, which you can feel but cannot see (Holy Spirit).
I haven’t heard that, either. I think there’s a fun worship activity in that, somewhere. Thanks!
Gosh more rubbish – and the water thing is good doctrine – Give me a break!
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