The opening of John’s Gospel is one of the most carefully composed passages in the New Testament. Eighteen verses. Almost a poem, built around recurring words, weaving back through the opening of Genesis with deliberate precision. Christians have been chanting it, copying it, memorising it, praying it for two thousand years.
It rewards every minute you give it.
The opening line
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1, NIV)
Read those words slowly. John has, with startling deliberateness, picked up Genesis 1’s opening phrase, in the beginning, and walked his Gospel out of the same gate. He is telling another creation story, or rather the rest of the same one.
Where Genesis says in the beginning, God created, John says in the beginning was the Word. The shift is enormous. Before anything was made, someone was already there. And John makes three short claims about that someone, in three short clauses, each carrying a doctrine the church spent centuries unpacking.
The Word was. Existence in the deep past, before creation, before time as we experience it.
The Word was with God. Distinction. The Word is in some real sense a person beside God, not identical to God-the-Father. Person standing alongside person.
The Word was God. Identity. The Word is no less than fully God.
The doctrine of the Trinity, in seed form, is already there in the first verse. The church did not invent it; the church spent four centuries trying to articulate what John was clearly already saying.
The Word as the agent of creation
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. (John 1:3–4, NIV)
The same Word through whom God created everything is the source of life and light. Pause on this. The Word is not a divine spokesperson, a heavenly errand-boy, a creature with a special title. He is the medium of creation itself. Everything that exists exists through him.
Paul says the same thing without the metaphor in Colossians 1:16: for in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.
The light shines
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5, NIV)
A short verse. A whole worldview. There is real darkness in the world; John does not pretend otherwise. There is also light, and the light has not been overcome. The verb is present-tense. The light is shining. Now.
This single sentence is a Christian lens for almost everything else that happens in human history. Real darkness. Real light. The light has not been put out, and will not be.
The witness and the word
The next several verses introduce John the Baptist, who is carefully framed not as the light himself but as a witness pointing to the light. Then the prologue says something that, if you sit with it, is one of the saddest verses in the Bible:
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. (John 1:9–11, NIV)
The Word, through whom creation was made, comes into his own creation, and creation does not recognise him. The Maker walked among the made, and the made looked past him.
But it is not the last word.
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. (John 1:12–13, NIV)
Some did receive him. To them was given a privilege John can only describe one way: children of God. Not by biology. Not by an act of will or family choice. By God himself. (The same idea opens up further in chapter 3, in the born again conversation with Nicodemus.)
The verse the prologue has been building toward
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14, NIV)
This is the heart of John’s Gospel. The Word became flesh. Read those four words slowly. The eternal Word, through whom all things were made, became flesh. Skin. Bone. Hunger and thirst. Sleep and tears. The God who is everywhere, somehow now in one body in one Palestinian village in one decade of the first century.
The Greek word translated made his dwelling literally means pitched his tent. John is reaching back to the tabernacle in the Old Testament, the tent where God’s presence rested with Israel in the wilderness. Now, John is saying, God has pitched his tent again. This time the tent is a man.
We have seen his glory. The disciples were not relaying a rumour. They watched him for three years.
The closing
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. (John 1:18, NIV)
The prologue ends where it began. The one and only Son, who is himself God. No human has ever seen God. Jesus has made him known. If you want to know what God is like, look at him.
How to read it
This is a passage for reading aloud, slowly, and reading again. Try a week of it, once a day. The structure begins to surface. The recurring words ring against each other: Word, light, life, glory, grace, truth. The two great claims of the chapter — the Word was God, and the Word became flesh — start to feel as enormous as they actually are, the way a vast object only registers as vast after you stand near it for a while.
If you want one passage that contains, in compressed form, the heart of who Jesus is, read John 1:1–18.
It will take you fifteen minutes. It will repay you for a lifetime.