Logos: The Word

John opens his Gospel with a deliberate echo of Genesis: “In the beginning.” But where Genesis says God spoke, John names the speech itself. The Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh. Everything John wants you to know about Jesus starts inside this one term.

noun, masculine.

Logos is Greek for word, speech, or reason. John uses it as a name for Jesus: God’s full self-expression, present at creation and made flesh at Bethlehem.

Logos was a word both Greeks and Jews already cared about. Greek thinkers used it for the reason or ordering principle behind the world. Jewish readers heard the word of the Lord that created, called prophets, and never returned void. John writes one sentence that lands in both worlds: the Logos is not a principle or a message but a person, and He has moved into the neighborhood.

To call Jesus the Word is to say that God is not silent and not hiding. Whatever can be said of God, Jesus says it, in a human life. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

Scripture also calls its own message the word of God, and describes it as living: quick, powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword. The living Word and the written word belong together; you meet the first through the second. That is the quiet logic behind reading the Bible prayerfully rather than merely finishing chapters.