The Eternal Word (John 1:1)

John begins this wonderful gospel with an argument stating that before the beginning of everything, there was "the Word". Not only did the apostle John testified about Christ's Eternal Being, other writers as well attest to this fact:

(Col 1:17 [ESV])

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

(Heb 7:3 [ESV])

He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever.

(Rev 1:8 [ESV])

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

In order to fully understand why John used the words: “In the beginning was the Word”, John Macarthur in detail explained as to the author’s use of words. In his commentary on the book of John, he stated that:

The imperfect tense of the verb eimi (was) describing continuing action in the past, further reinforces the eternal preexistence of the Word. It indicates that He was continuously in existence before the beginning. But even more significant is the use of eimi instead of ginomai (became). The latter term refers to things that come to existence. Had John used ginomai, he would have implied that the Word came to existence at the beginning along with the rest of creation. But eimi stresses that the Word always existed; there was never a point where it came into being.

The eternity of God, as well as with His other attributes are hard to grasp for someone with limited human knowledge. However, A.W. Tozer beautifully explained about God’s Eternal Being in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy. In that book, he wrote:

Time marks the beginning of created existence, and because God never began to exist, it can have no application to Him. “Began” is a time-word, and can have no personal meaning for the high and lofty One that inhabited eternity.

Because God lives in an everlasting now, He has no past and no future. When time-words occur in the Scriptures they refer to our time, not to His. When the four living creatures before the throne city cry day and night, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come,” they are identifying God with the flow of creature-life with its familiar three tenses; and this is right and good, for God has sovereignly willed so to identify Himself. But since God is uncreated, He is not Himself affected by that succession of consecutive changes we call time.