“You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable
seed, through the living and enduring word of God.”
1 Peter 1: 23, NRSV
“Anyone wishing to save humanity today must first of all save the word.”
Jacque Ellul
At the beginning of time the debar Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, brought the universe crashing into existence. God said, “Let there be light,” and the Big Bang occurred. This ever-living, ever-speaking, ever-creating Word of God is “quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thought and intents of the heart.” As Dallas Willard has put it, God is “our communicating Cosmos.”
Yahweh is the Word of God spoken.
There is more: Jesus is the eternal Logos of God. “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” Jesus Christ is alive and active among us today. Teaching. Guiding. Correcting. Encouraging. Comforting. Here. Now. His voice is not hard to hear. His vocabulary is not difficult to understand.
Jesus is the Word of God Living.
There is more still: we are people of the Book, the Bible, hay biblos. God not only originated the Bible through human authorship; God remains with it always. It is God’s book. No one owns it but God. And God has so superintended the writing of the Bible that it serves as a most reliable guide for our own spiritual formation. In it we discover the character of God, the purposes of God, and the ways of God with human beings.
The Bible is the Word of God written.
Therefore, of all people, we who seek to walk in “the Jesus Way” value the Word. The Word spoken… the Word living… the Word written. The Word is precious to us beyond all telling.
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