The preexistent Jesus in the Gospel of John.

by R. Herbert

In the opening passages of his Gospel, the apostle John gives us the most detailed description of the nature of God’s Son in the whole New Testament. As most Bible readers know, John frequently organizes his key points into groups of seven. In a mere twenty-three verses in his prologue, he uses seven distinct and important titles of Jesus that affirm His divine nature: Word, God, Light, Son of God, Savior, Messiah, and Lord.

While all seven titles can be found in the Old Testament (even Word — see sidebar), the apostle gives them new significance in stressing the divine nature and preexistence of Jesus.

Son of God

For example, in the Old Testament the title Son of God was plural (sons) for Israel and for some other groups (Genesis 6:2; Job 1:6, etc.). It was singular for both David and Solomon (2 Samuel 7:13-16, etc.).

But nowhere in the Old Testament do we find the spiritual implication that John invests in the title, that Jesus was, in the fullest sense, the literal and only Son of God. We see this, for example, in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

So when John writes in his prologue of “the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14), he is making far more than a simple comment. John is tying Jesus to a part of the Scriptures that every first century Jew recognized: Exodus 33-34, where God identifies Himself to Moses: “The Lord . . . abounding in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6, NKJV, emphasis added).

Note that the Hebrew word translated “goodness” here can be equally translated “grace,” so the parallel with “grace and truth” is direct. John stresses this connection again a few verses later in his Gospel in saying that “the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17, NKJV).

Parallels

We can see a number of these parallels between God’s interaction with Moses and Israel (Exodus 33-34) and the interaction of Jesus with His disciples and the people of Israel, stressed in John’s prologue:

God dwelt in the tabernacle among His people (Exodus 33:10).
The Word “tabernacled” (the literal Greek) among people (John 1:14).
Moses beheld God’s glory (Exodus 33:18-23).
The disciples beheld Jesus’ glory (John 1:14).
The glory was full of goodness and truth (Exodus 34:6, NKJV).
The glory was full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
No one could see all of God’s glory (Exodus 33:20).
No one has ever seen God (John 1:18).
God’s glory was partially revealed to Moses (Exodus 33:23).
God’s glory was partially revealed by Jesus (John 1:18).

John continues in his Gospel to emphasize the connection between the Old Testament Son of God and Jesus of the New Testament by showing us how Jesus lived: He continually exhibited grace. He welcomed and ate with sinners and tax collectors, but He also continually exhibited truth. We see Him condemning many of the outwardly religious of that day for their hypocrisy.

So in the expression “full of grace and truth,” John gives a preview of the word portrait of Jesus he would be painting. He also shows us, by implication, that the life of Jesus teaches us that we must have grace and truth in our own lives. It is not “either/or” but a unity of behavior and belief that is essential in the nature of the Son of God and of every true child of God (John 3:21, etc.).

Personal need

In addition to the importance of John’s picture of Jesus that we’re called to imitate (John 13:34; 1 John 2:6, etc.), the apostle stresses our need for the grace and truth that come from the Son of God. He writes, “Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given” (John 1:16).  And John quotes Jesus describing the Holy Spirit as “the Advocate . . . whom I will send to you from the Father — the Spirit of truth . . .” (15:26).

This is only one example of how John unpacks the concepts inherent in seven of the descriptive titles of God in the Old Testament and how they apply to Jesus as the Son of God. The prologue of the fourth Gospel is a rich mine from which we can, in our own personal study, extract many more understandings of the nature of the preexistent Son of God.

The Word Before the New Testament

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). In the New Testament, only John calls Jesus the Word, and when he does, he uses the Greek term logos. It does mean “word” but also has much deeper implications. The first century Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo taught that the logos was the instrument through which God made the world. But while ancient thinkers like Philo saw the logos in the abstract as an invisible, unknowable “principle,” John introduces us to the Logos as a person: the preincarnate Jesus. In doing so, he links the Greek idea of logos with the opening of the Hebrew Scriptures: “In the beginning . . . God said . . .” (Genesis 1:1, 3, emphasis added here and below) and the affirmation of the psalmist that “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). John also assures us that the true Logos is not unknowable, but that He “became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14).