John 1:3-4

John 1:3. All things came into being through him, and apart from him not even one thing came into being. Such a combination of two clauses, the first positive, the second negative (see note on John 1:20), is characteristic of John's style. The two together assert the truth contained in them with a universality and force not otherwise attainable. This truth is, that ‘all things' not all as a whole, but all things in the individuality which precedes their combination into a whole came into being through this Word, who is God. The preposition ‘through' is that by which the relation of the Second Person of the Trinity to creation is usually expressed (1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2); as, indeed, this is the conception which belongs to the doctrine of the Logos, the Divine Word. Occasionally, however, the same language is used of the Father: see Hebrews 1:10, and comp. Romans 11:36.

John 1:3-4. That which hath come into being was life in him. We are led by various considerations to take this view of the passage rather than that which is presented in the Authorised Version. The Greek admits of either punctuation (and rendering), but the absence of the article before the word ‘life' suggests that it is here a predicate, not the subject of the sentence. By almost all (if not all) the Greek Fathers of the first three centuries the words were thus understood; and we may reasonably, in such a case as this, attach great importance to the conclusions attained by that linguistic tact which is often most sure where it is least able to assign distinct reasons for its verdict. Further, this division of the words corresponds best with the rhythmical mode in which the earlier sentences of the Prologue are connected with one another. It is characteristic of them to make the voice dwell mainly, in each line of the rhythm, upon a word taken from the preceding line; and this characteristic is not preserved in the case before us unless we adhere to the ancient construction. We have seen what the Word is in Himself; we are now to see Him in His relation to His creatures.

Created being was ‘life in Him.' He was life, life absolutely, and therefore the life that can communicate itself, the infinitely productive life, from whom alone came to every creature, as He called it into being, the measure of life that it possesses. In Him was the fountain of all life; and every form of life, known or unknown, was only a drop of water from the stream which, gathered up in Him before, flowed forth at His creative word to people the universe of being with the endlessly multiplied and diversified existences that play their part in it. It is not of the life of man only that John speaks, still less is it only of that spiritual and eternal life which constitutes man's true being. If the word ‘life' is often used in this more limited sense in the Gospel, it is because other kinds and developments of life pass out of view in the presence of that life on which the writer especially loves to dwell. The word itself has no such limitation of meaning, and when used, as here, without anything to suggest limitation, it must be taken in its most comprehensive sense. It was in the Word, then, that all things that have life lived; the very physical world, if we can say of its movements that they are life, the vegetable world, the world of the lower animals, the world of men and angels, up to the highest angel that is before the throne. Ere yet they came into being, their life was in the Word who, as God, was life, and from the Word they received it when their actual being began. The lesson is the same as that of Colossians 1:16-17, ‘In Him were all things created,' and ‘in Him all things subsist;' or, still more, of Revelation 4:11, ‘Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy pleasure they were ' (not ‘are,' as in the Authorised Version), ‘and they were created.'

And the life was the light of men. From the wide thought of all created existences, the Evangelist passes in these words to the last and greatest of the works of God, man, whose creation is recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. All creatures had ‘life' in the Word; but this life was to man something more than it could be to others, because he had been created after a fashion, and placed in a sphere, peculiar to himself amidst the different orders of animated being. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' (Genesis 1:26). Man was thus capable of receiving God, and of knowing that he had received Him; he had a sphere and a capacity belonging to none of the lower creatures spoken of in the great record of creation; his nature was fitted to be the conscious abode, not of the human only, but of the divine. Hence the Word could be in him as in no other creature. But the Word is God (John 1:1), and ‘God is light' (1 John 1:5). Thus the Word is ‘light' (comp. John 1:7); and as man was essentially fitted to receive the Word, that Word giving life to all found in him a fitness for the highest and fullest life, for ‘light,' therefore, in its highest and fullest sense; and ‘the life was the light of men.'

The idea of human nature thus set forth in these words is peculiarly remarkable, and worthy of our observation, not only as a complete answer to those who bring a charge of Manichæan dualism against the Fourth Gospel, but also to enable us to comprehend its teaching as to human responsibility in the presence of Jesus. ‘The life, it is said,' was the light of men not of a class, not of some, but of all the members of the human family as such. Man's true nature, it is said, is divine; divine in this respect also, as distinguished from the divine in all creation, that man is capable of recognising, acknowledging, seeing the divine in himself. The ‘life' becomes ‘light' in him, and it does not become so in lower creatures. Man's true life is the life of the Word; it was so originally, and he knew it to be so. If, therefore, he listens to the tempter and yields to sin (whose existence is admitted simply as a fact, no attempt being made to account for it), man corrupts his true nature, and is responsible for doing so. But his fall cannot destroy his nature, which still testifies to what his first condition was, to what his normal condition is, to what he ought to be. Man, therefore, only fulfils his original nature by again receiving that Word who is to offer Himself to him as the ‘Word become flesh.' But if man's receiving of the Word be thus the fulfilling of his nature, it is his duty to receive Him; and this duty is impressed upon him by his nature, not by mere external authority. Hence the constant appeal of Jesus in this Gospel, not to external evidence only, but to that remaining life of the Word within us, which ought to receive the Word completely, and to hasten to the Light (comp. John 1:9).