I can’t help but love John for opening his book with those words.  There are people in this world that doubt the existence of God.  There are people in this world who beleive there is a God but no Son.  John is letting us know that Jesus, the Son of God was in existence from the beginning, right along with God.  The two go hand in hand.

The bible is an amazing book.  It is history, poetry, and theology all wrapped up into one book.  All of it is true.  Some people who think that the book teaches good ethics and that’s all miss the point.  God didn’t leave His revelation for us just to teach us good ethics.  There are other ways to do that.  God left us the story of His character – His love, generosity, heart, wrath and most of all His provision for our eternal lives.  Every single person on the planet has a chance to respond to God, whether through nature or direct revelation, and all of us have a chance to accept or reject Him as well.  The choice is yours.

I, if you haven’t figured out, made the choice to accept His Word.  Do I understand it all?  Of course not.  I don’t have any logical experience that tells me that the waters of a sea can be parted, or that a man can exist who is fully God and fully man at the same time, or that a person can die and then three days later – wham! – be alive again.  I don’t think most of us have had experience with that.  But just because I can’t understand how it happend, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.  I don’t understand how all 1 billion cells in my body function, but here I am, typing away, living, breathing and thinking – which means all 1 billion cells in my body are working.

So John opens his gospel account of the life and times of Jesus with these words  – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Word is capitalized here because John is talking about Jesus.  Jesus = Word.   In this one statement, John is clarifying that Jesus existed prior to his walking on Earth, in fact, He existed from the very beginning, and is in fact, God.  Jesus is God the Son.  How beautiful is that?