In his sermon on the first five verses of John 17, John MacArthur explains why the Gospel writer referred to Jesus Christ as the Word.

Excerpts from his 2015 sermon, ‘The Lord’s Greatest Prayer, Part 2’, follow, emphases mine.

As a point of reference, here are the first five verses of John 1 and verse 14:

The Word became flesh

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome^[a]it.

¹⁴ 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.

Here are the first five verses of John 17, our Lord’s prayer — the only one we have — in the Garden of Gethsemane for Himself, for His disciples and for believers to come. These verses comprise the prayer for Himself:

Jesus prays to be glorified

17 After Jesus said this, he looked towards heaven and prayed:

‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him Authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

MacArthur addresses John’s Gospel, the objective of which is to show our Lord’s deity:

He is the head over all things. The Father literally gave to the Son all authority.

John has told us in chapter 5 that He has authority to judge. He has authority to judge, and He has authority to condemn, and He has authority to exalt. He will catapult the ungodly into eternal punishment, and He will exalt those who belong to Him into the heaven of heavens, and He will provide by His power resurrection bodies for both. He is the One who gives life …

Now we know that that authority that belonged to Him – that sovereign authority over all things, over the entire universe, and particularly over living things, including even spirit beings – that authority was set aside in His incarnation. And He literally came down; humbled Himself as a man, as a servant; became like a slave. He was basically mistreated by the contemporary Jewish authorities of His time. He was executed by the Roman authorities of His time. And He is the One who has authority over all creation, over all humanity, over all that exists, over all that lives. Authority belongs to Him. Authority belongs to Him for a very important reason, and that reason is stated for us back in John 1. Let’s go back to John 1.

That authority belongs to Him because of a statement in verse 4: “In Him was life.” “In Him was life.” That is the foundational identification of God. This is the foundational truth of Christianity. God, the eternal God, is the One who has given life to everything that exists. He didn’t receive life; in Him was life.

Before going into MacArthur’s discussion of Christ as the Word, a relevant passage in Acts 17 — Paul’s brief trip to Athens — tells us that the Greeks worshipped an unknown god, thought to have been the god of creation. As creation is an enduring mystery, this god had no physical attributes but was the greatest of them all:

²² Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

²⁴ ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. ²⁵ And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. ²⁶ From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ “For in him we live and move and have our being.”^[b]As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.”^[c]

²⁹ ‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. ³⁰ In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹ For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.’

³² When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ ³³ At that, Paul left the Council. ³⁴ Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

MacArthur tells us more about the ‘Word’ and the Greek ‘logos’, which means ‘word, reason or plan’:

“The Word,” meaning Christ, “was with God” in the beginning – “was God,” as evidenced by the fact that He has made everything that exists. Again, I say this is the definitive reality of Christianity.

“The Word” – Why isn’t He called the Lord Jesus Christ? Why does John use “the Word”? Because, among the Greeks there was this very obvious idea that there was an intelligent designer. There was a power; there was a cosmic force. There was massive energy somewhere in the universe, and it was highly intelligent because of the complexity of what it made. It was highly personal because there is personality among human beings. The Greeks were way ahead of the contemporary movement called “intelligent design,” which is a kind of contemporary answer to the foibles and follies of evolution …

Well, you would be one of the Greeks who would say there’s a cosmic force, and energy, and power, and intellect out there that is massive and way beyond us; and they actually called it logos, logos. And to the Jews, logos was the Word of God, the Old Testament; and God revealed Himself through His Word. So John just borrows that term from the Greeks and the Jews and said that “the cosmic force that you talk about, the intelligent designer that you recognize out there, that is the Word, the Word.”

And the Old Testament was God speaking, and now God has spoken through the Word. And then in [John 1] verse 14, he pulls that together by saying, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” The abstract, intelligent mind, power, force that created the entire universe became a man – the Word of God, the Word of God spoken in the Old Testament. Hebrews 1, “God spoke in the past, but has in these last days spoken through His Son.” “The Word became flesh.” That’s Christianity.

Now, the word “became” is very important in verse 14: “The Word became flesh,” ginomai. What does that mean? It means that the Word was now something that it never was before – it “became.” God is immutable. God is pure, eternal being. God is not becoming anything. God does not change. He does not develop. He does not progress. He is eternal, pure being.

But all creatures are becoming. They’re in the process of becoming, changing. Even the incarnate Christ was in the womb, and then out of the womb an infant, and then a toddler, and then a child, and then a young adult, and then a full adult – “maturing in wisdom, and stature, and favor with God and man.” At that point, the second member of the Trinity, the Son of God, became something He never had been. He became something He never had been – He took on the fullness of humanity. He was always God, but He became man ... Charles Wesley’s wonderful words: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus, our Immanuel [God with us].”

Eternally, God the Son – always God – became something He was not. He became a man “and dwelt among us.” He dwelt among us – not a vision; not an apparition; not some kind of esoteric, dream-like experience. He became a man. “He was made in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2). He partook of flesh and blood. He lived here for thirty-three years on earth, fully man. That Word, pure being, became a man. The rest of the gospel of John is to tell the story of His life through the lens particularly of His divinity.

… This is why He says, “Glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the world began. Because of who I am, I am worthy to be restored to that glory.”

First of all, He speaks of His preexistence. Verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word.” Verse 2 says the same thing: “He was in the beginning with God.” What is “the beginning”? “The beginning” is “the beginning.” “The beginning” is Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

When “the beginning” began, He already was. Do you see it? “In the beginning was the Word.” Was already existing, “the Word” – not became the Word. He wasn’t part of the creation. He already existed when the creation was made – already in existence. He’s not a created being; He existed from all eternity …

Let me make it simple for you. Something must be eternal – something; and not something, but someone. Someone with massive power, someone with massive complex intelligence must be eternal. I know it’s hard to think about things that are eternal. That’s really an impossibility for our feeble minds to grasp. But reason would tell you, to say nothing of divine revelation. Something has to always be there, because whatever wasn’t always there was made by something that was always there, and that something is none other than God. If you want to literally chop the bottom out of Christianity, just deny Genesis, just deny creation, just deny God as the Creator. That is not a small issue.

Since time began at creation, you go before creation. You’re beyond time. You’re into eternity where only God exists. So “in the beginning [time] the Word already was” – eimi, the verb eimi, “being.” Had John used gínomai, then we would have to struggle with the fact that he seemed to be saying Jesus came into existence, which would make Him a created being. But John doesn’t tamper with his verbs.

And, of course, Jesus said things like this: “‘Before Abraham was, I Am.’” And He refers to Himself as the “I Am,” over and over in the gospel of John. The apostle Paul in Colossians says that “He is before all things. He was in the beginning with God.” When “the beginning” began, He was already there. This emphasizes preexistence. He didn’t become God in time. He’s not some emanation from God, some creation by God. He preexisted everything that exists. That puts Him into eternity. That puts Him into the Godhead. Only God is eternal.

Not only was He preexistent, but coexistent. Go back to verse 1. He was not only “with God,” but He “was God” – not only was “with God” at the creation, but He “was God.” He is preexistent; that is before anything else existed. When nothing existed, He existed. And He not only was there “with God,” He “was God.” This is a powerful, powerful statement.

The Greek expression means “face-to-face with God on an equal basis,” “face-to-face with God on an equal basis.” Literally, the Greek says Thes n ho Lgos, “God was the Word,” “God was the Word,” full deity, verse 14. His glory was the glory as of the prttokos from the Father, “full of grace and truth.” He had all the attributes of God because He “was God.”

So who is Jesus? He is God, preexisting all that exists, coexisting eternally with God as God. And then this remarkable third element of His nature: He is not only preexistent and coexistent with God, but He is self-existent, self-existent. Verse 3: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life.” Really a defining, defining statement.

“All things that came into being, all things,” positive. Negative: “Nothing came into being that hasn’t come into being through Him.” Why? He was the possessor of life. Life came from Him. It wasn’t given to Him, it came from Him. He is the Creator. He is the Creator. Genesis, God is the Creator. Genesis, the Spirit is the Creator.

In John, the Son of God is equally the Creator. The triune God is the Creator, and nothing exists in the entire universe that God did not make: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated. Right? The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated, and only the eternal God is uncreated, so Jesus is the eternal God. He is preexistent, He is coexistent, and He is self-existent.

Theologians call this the aseity of God, a-s-e-i-t-y, the aseity of God. Nothing gives Him life; nothing takes life from Him. He is life itself. That’s why when God gave His name, He said, “‘I Am that I Am.’” No past, no present – “‘I Am that I Am.’”

Now you know who Christ is. The proof is that in Him is life – a massive statement. Not bíos life, not biological life; z, spiritual life. He has the life in Himself.

I found that a remarkable explanation of Christ’s deity, and I hope you do, too.