geekery.of.all.sorts

So I'm struggling to find a quiet spot - my house is full of folks for Christmas, I'm not slowing down often enough or long enough...the external activity isn't any worse than my own internal activity.  Part of slowing down is my own choice to work against the momentum of how fast I'm moving.  So.  Now I am choosing to be slow. As I said in my last post, I'm meditating on 1st John.  Jesus is described as the Word of Life. So, borrowing from a bunch of stuff that I've read, here are my thoughts about the Jesus as the Word of God. There's a whole study of Jesus as the Logos, which goes back and looks at the pagan and jewish philosophers to understand John's reference to Jesus as the word.  That's all good stuff, and worth knowing, but I don't believe that we are required to know the history of the use of that Greek idea to get what the Spirit is saying through John.  The brain he equipped us with is sufficient, when inspired by the Holy Spi

I was working on reading the Bible with my oldest daughter, age 9.  A couple of days ago, I had her read a little of 1st John, and we talked about it before bedtime. As I talked with her, the Holy Spirit connected something up for me about John's writings.  He starts the book by explaining that he is writing from his own personal experience with Jesus, the Word of life.  It hadn't occurred to me before this, but the picture of Jesus as the Word of God shows up at the beginning of 1st John, just as it does in John's Gospel. Jesus is displayed as the Word of God as a primary identifier at the beginning of both books. Like most deep things, it feels like that's a very simple thing to comment on.  But think about it - John thought so much on this idea of God talking to us through His Son, he pondered it so much, that John wrote about it all over the place.  Not only that, in the Gospel of John he writes that 'in Him was light, and that light was the life of me