In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
My church has just started a series on the Gospel of John and the preacher of the first sermon was reminding us of the centrality of the Trinity in how we need to understand God and his character. He naturally focused on how the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, but I was intrigued by the nature of ‘words’.
The Greek word for word is logos/λόγος and that is the word John uses in John 1 when he is talking about Jesus. “In the beginning was the logos…”
We think of the logos/λόγος concept (logos can mean word, but it has a much broader meaning) as a bit Greek, because the New Testament was written in Greek and the word has come into English from Greek as an ending denoting the study of something: biology (the study of life), zoology (the study of animals), cardiology (the study of the heart), and so on. Not to mention the word logic is derived from logos. Hence we in the modern west (or maybe it’s just me) think that John’s use of the logos concept as a way of thinking about God was quite new for his time and that while yes it was divinely inspired that those who came before him never thought of it.
There is a related Hebrew word, though, dabar, and it is also related closely to God. It was mostly used in terms of writers using it for when God spoke or as a word for a command or law of God, but it is used throughout the Old Testament. Not only that, but there are interesting ways the Hebrews used the word, e.g. the familiar name Deborah means bee in Hebrew, but it also comes directly from dabar. Hence the words of the Lord are sweet like honey and I’m sure poets could find far more interesting imagery there about how bees relate to God.
I digress, but for reasons I’ll come back to.
What struck me about the concept of words is that there are three things going on when a person speaks:
1. Words in the mind
2. Spoken words – words alter their hearers
3. Words transmitted
Words in the mind makes me think of God the Father. A mind considers what to say.
Words spoken makes me think I of the incarnation, the Son, God who took on flesh. When someone speaks their words are heard and they impact the listener. In effect the words take on flesh. However, when it comes to commands we can obey or disobey, which is how we relate God. We can either obey and give his words life in us, or disobey and kill his words, like Christ was killed on the cross in human rebellion
Words transmitted makes me think of the Holy Spirit. When we speak our words must be transmitted some way, either by speech or by writing.
Back to my digression. Perhaps the Hebrews only had a vague notion of the dabar concept, but I am convinced that John the Apostle, a Jew who lived with Jesus did not concoct his Greek logos concept as something novel but rather the Hebrew dabar concept suddenly clicked with him and he merely translated it into Greek.
