Jesus Was God In Flesh (J1)

In the beginning was unending void,
Inhabited by God, completely unawed;
Yet, of Himself, three equals He employed;
The Word was with God, and the Word was God!
Nothing was made that was made but through Him;
The Word released it all, in One Big Bang;
In it was energy, mass, all of them—
The sun, moon, stars, planets—the rest that hang!
In the Word was the life and light for men;
His light shone in the darkness of the earth;
So very few that see it comprehend,
Though He brought and taught it Himself by birth!
Before Time was, was Spirit, Word, and God;
The Word was Jesus, and with us He trod!

John the apostle’s gospel begins with the Bible’s strongest affirmation that the man known as Jesus of Nazareth was God Himself who spent more than 33 years in the flesh of a man, and the rest of forever running the world.

“ ‘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 life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.’ “ (John 1:1-5)

The Word (logos in Greek) is universally understood as the Son of God, a deity equal with God, and as Jesus, “God with us”. John writes that He was with God in the beginning—that is, before the creation of the universe, before the beginning of time—and that He was God. Here we brush up to the mystery of the Trinity; the word “three” is therefore used in the poem. The use of the word “employed” merely signifies that in carrying out the various divine tasks necessary to God’s master plan, He has the power to make use of three equal divinities, yet is but One God.

The author of the fourth gospel in the New Testament is John, the youngest of the original 12 apostles of our Lord Jesus. He never uses his name “John”, employing only the phrase, “the one whom Jesus loved”. He was the one who “leaned on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper on Thursday before His crucifiction on Friday. He was the only apostle at the crucifiction; Jesus turned His morther, the virgin Mary, over to John to care for, and from that hour he did so.

He wrote his gospel in about 90 A.D., and it was the last straw for Judaism with respect to Christianity. There had been much conflict between the Old Testament religion of the Jews and several of the various sects that to one degree or another had followed Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised “Moshiach” or Messiah, but it was not until John’s gospel was published that Judaism cut its last tie to Christianity, officially rejecting Jesus as Moshiach and outlawing any group that said He was. Their anger was kindled finally and forever by John’s book, because unlike the first three synoptic gospels that were more biographical, John emphasized the deity of Jesus, by his selection of miracles or “signs” (which pointed to miracles or healing possible only to God); by his emphasis upon spiritual interpretation, for which Jews were too dull to present counter arguments that carried credibility, etc. Every paragraph of the Gospel of John cut Judaism to the quick and left them defenseless to discredit. John emphasized the impossibility of salvation for any other than belief in Jesus, which not only obliterated Judaism’s chances for eternal life, but in the modern world destroys the diversity that postmodernism has popularized in today’s culture. Every proposition of truth in John’s gospel allows of no watered-down alternative so popular in the world of celebrity today. John 14:6 allows for the acceptance of no religion except fundamental Christianity. Heaven’s populace is going to worship Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, and absolutely none other, no matter how few in number!

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)