Friday Faithfuls 2 - John

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

John is one of my favorite books.  It is so deep and so rich and so...intense.  I sat down and, instead of doing the normal 'skim through' for this series, I just read it through as if it were a novel.  Try it sometime...ignore the chapter/verse notations and just read.  You'll catch things that you would otherwise miss if you let the chapters and verses break up the text.  

It's hard for us to remember sometimes that those divisions are just there to make referencing the text easier; there's nothing particularly inspired about them.

But, be that as it may, after reading through the whole book I still ended up back at the beginning for this week's choice.

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....and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us"  -- John 1: 1-3, 14a  NIV84

I was freshly struck by John's statement that everything was made through the Word...and the realization that God spoke things into being.  Using words.

It could be aruged that God did not speak mankind into being but actually fashioned  man from the dirt, but God did declare the intention to 'make man in our image'...and then created Adam from dirt that had been spoken into existence.  So words were still involved.

That gets really abstract, right from the beginning, but I love that it takes God out of the Michaelangelo- inspired concept of a muscular giant with a flowing beard.  God is the Word He spoke...that became flesh and lived among humanity.

While mankind was made in God's image...God is not an image of mankind.  It doesn't go both ways.  A reflection only shows a semblance of the original.