Cutting Room Floor Ep 21 - Back At It?
Sermon Text: John 1:1-5; 20:30-31
Watch the message
Chapters
The purpose of this podcast (0:00)
What Chad is using for sermon prep on John (3:43)
How do you break up a text? (5:17)
On the Genesis 1 connection (8:19)
On the light and dark theme (9:23)
On the Mormon/Jehovah’s Witnesses Objection to John 1:1 (19:32)
On the references to the Trinity outside of this passage (39:15)
A little Fair Oaks history with the Gospel of John (42:32)
Show Notes
D.A. Carson on John 1:1 (from The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary):
More, the Word was God. That is the translation demanded by the Greek structure, theos ēn ho logos. A long string of writers has argued that because theos, ‘God’, here has no article, John is not referring to God as a specific being, but to mere qualities of ‘God-ness’. The Word, they say, was not God, but divine. This will not do. There is a perfectly serviceable word in Greek for ‘divine’ (namely theios). More importantly, there are many places in the New Testament where the predicate noun has no article, and yet is specific. Even in this chapter, ‘you are the King of Israel’ (1:49) has no article before ‘King’ in the original (cf. also Jn. 8:39; 17:17; Rom. 14:17; Gal. 4:25; Rev. 1:20). It has been shown that it is common for a definite predicate noun in this construction, placed before the verb, to be anarthrous (that is, to have no article). Indeed, the effect of ordering the words this way is to emphasize ‘God’, as if John were saying, ‘and the word was God!’ In fact, if John had included the article, he would have been saying something quite untrue. He would have been so identifying the Word with God that no divine being could exist apart from the Word. In that case, it would be nonsense to say (in the words of the second clause of this verse) that the Word was with God. The ‘Word does not by Himself make up the entire Godhead; nevertheless the divinity that belongs to the rest of the Godhead belongs also to Him’ (Tasker, p. 45). ‘The Word was with God, God’s eternal Fellow; the Word was God, God’s own Self.’