The Word

“The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I’ve heard that verse many times, and never fully understood what it meant. The part that always really confused me was why Jesus was labeled “the Word”. I had a slight comprehension of how Jesus was with God and how they had the same qualities, but I just couldn’t grasp why He was referred to as “the Word.”

However, the more I read the scriptures, the more this is beginning to make sense. I’ve been in the word more in the past five months than I ever have in my life, and it has taught me a lot. Granted a lot of my time has been spent reading the Law of Moses in the beginning of the Old Testament, so it’s been a little bit of a struggle. But even as I read those books of the Bible, the qualities of God are made so clear to me. God had great love for the people of Israel, and He dearly wanted them to follow Him. He provided for them, He protected them, He was their judge and their leader.

God was all of these qualities, but He didn’t act them out physically. He didn’t physically live as a human among the people; rather He worked through His messengers and resided in pillars of cloud and smoke. He showed His great qualities through His words and His actions towards the Israelite people, but not in physical movements. He was still with the Israelites, but not exactly on their level. That is where Jesus comes in.

Jesus came to earth as a man. Not as a pillar or through a messenger, but as a human. He embodied all of those qualities that God described and showed to the Israelites, but He performed them first hand. Rather than teaching the Israelites about Himself through words, Jesus showed them. He became the living example of all the things God spoke about in the Old Testament. All of the great, mighty traits God shows from a distance in the Old Testament, Jesus showed them through His actions on earth. He took the qualities of God and performed them as a human on an individual scale.

This is kind of hard to wrap your mind around, and I’m even struggling with this as I write about it. Jesus and God are the same, each equally part of the trinity. However, Jesus showed the people around Him those qualities of God. The people didn’t just have to read about them in the Old Testament to learn from them, they simply had to witness Jesus’ actions.

This encourages me even more to read the Bible, and it creates even more of a link between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Rather than God simply being the father and Jesus being His Son, Jesus is the fulfillment of all of the qualities of God mentioned in the Old Testament. Not to say that God didn’t fulfill them Himself, Jesus was simply an individual human (just like you and I) who possessed all of those wonderful and glorious traits of God. Jesus is our example of Godly perfection, and we need to strive to be like Him.