The Word

I've been thinking about words, especially one. The Gospel of John, in the New Testament of the Bible, begins with this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (John 1:1-2)

The rest of John's Gospel goes on to explain that the Word is Jesus Christ, God himself in human flesh. It's all bound up with the creation story. In the next part, John writes:

Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:3)

It's about speaking, about language, about saying and accomplishing. God speaks, and the world comes into being. Through Jesus, God speaks to the whole world about his nature and purposes. God's speaking is at the core of all that he does, and the minds he gave us when he created us in his image are receptors for his speaking, because our minds, in some dim way, correspond to his. Thus he can speak, and a world is made or his son is delivered into our world. He can speak and we can know his will.

If we are going to understand the human condition, we will never grasp it by sharing our collective ignorance with one another. Understanding comes from someone with much greater understanding who speaks to us from outside of our experience, who tells us what is real. That is why God speaking is so essential. God has explained himself in the pages of a sacred book, the Bible.

Because of this, even we who are limited in knowing what is real, can have understanding.