By Justin Rossow
Quick: if I say the phrase, “The Word of God,” what do you think of first? I suspect most people in our current church culture, and maybe even most people outside of the Church, would probably associate the Word of God, first and foremost, with the Bible. And that knee-jerk reaction is … well, not wrong, exactly … but at least incomplete.
Jesus, the Word Made Flesh
John starts his Gospel at the very beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). And what does this eternal “Word” refer to? John tells us:
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
You guessed it: Jesus is God’s Word, made flesh, and all other ways of talking about God’s Word are grounded in this reality. As the Word made flesh, Jesus sets up his tent and, like the Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle in the Old Testament, wherever Jesus goes, the very presence of the Almighty God is present for people in him.
In his life among us, Jesus reads God’s Word, and depends on God’s Word, and teaches God’s Word. But more than that, Jesus is what God has been wanting to say to us all along.
Jesus is the way God loves and communicates with a precious but fallen creation. If we want to talk about the Word of God we have to start here: Jesus is who God is, and what God intends to say to us.
The Word Communicated
But Jesus isn’t available to us in the same way he was available to his first disciples. You can’t sit down and talk to Jesus face to face like Peter, James, and John. But then again, neither could they after Jesus ascended to heaven, and yet they believed his final pre-Ascension promise: “Look, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
Those first followers came to understand that wherever Jesus was talked about, the eternal Word of God was somehow also present in the midst of that conversation. So Peter could later write:
You have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. . . And this is the word that was preached to you.
1 Peter 1:23–25
The word that is preached is actually the living Word of God that causes people to be born into a new kind of pre-resurrection resurrection life. The word about Jesus counts as the Word of God, because it points to and talks about Jesus, who is the Word. And where Jesus is preached, Jesus is present.
The Word about Jesus communicated to people by other people in a particular time, language, and culture is still the eternal Word that does eternal things, like call to faith, forgive sins, and deliver salvation. And that goes not only for Sunday sermons grounded in God’s Word, but for the ongoing work of God’s Word in the rest of your week.
When the conversation turns to Jesus—when you read a book or a blog, listen to a praise song or a podcast, or even talk to a family member or friend—and those words are informed by the Word about Jesus, then Jesus is present for you, doing what only Jesus can do.
The advanced degree of the messenger is not the point. The power is in the message. And the message is delivered to ordinary, everyday people by everyday, ordinary people.
Of course, you still want your pastor, who spent years training for this, and spent hours listening to God’s Word for you, to speak God’s Word to you in the sermon. And you want to listen to the sermon as if Jesus were speaking to you through these words, because he is.
Growing up with Lutheran theology, I was taught that the Word in the sermon is still God’s Word, even though it comes through the human words of a human preacher. (Since I could see my Grandpa in the pulpit, I could tell: Grandpa was speaking to all of us on behalf of Jesus. But he was still my Grandpa.)
But the working of the Word is not limited to professional clergy. “Luther believed that God had entrusted the Word to all believers for their use in their own lives and the lives of fellow Christians, starting with their family circle,” write two of my Seminary professors. They go on: “The Word in the mouth of the called Servant of the Word, the pastor, is the same Word that the Holy Spirit places in the mouth of all believers. In their mouths it has the same power as it does in preaching and formal absolution. It forgives sins, defies evil, and bestows life and salvation.”[1]
Jesus is the Word made flesh. But the “Word of God” is also the Word communicated, by people and to people. In fact, the most common and most dynamic form of the Word may be this person-to-person communication.
Think about it: although you may have come to faith by hearing a sermon or reading the Bible on your own, it is far more likely that you first got to know Jesus because someone you know talked to you about him. Maybe it was a parent or grandparent. Maybe it was a neighbor or a friend. And while your faith may well have been nurtured by Sunday worship or Bible study during the week, your faith is certainly not limited to those “official” channels. You learn to trust Jesus through conversation with other people. That, too, is God’s Word at work.
God’s Word, the Bible
Which is not to downplay the importance of the Bible. In the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testament together, we have the authoritative witness to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for us. Like other human communication, it comes embedded in human language, culture, and personality.
We don’t have a magic book that fell from the sky: we have divine words that come through human words. Just as Jesus, the Word made flesh, is both human and divine, the record of his life, teaching, death, and resurrection is completely human and still thoroughly God’s Word.
As the Apostle Paul writes to Timothy:
From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness …
(2 Tim 3:15–16)
The whole Bible counts as God’s Word. And wherever God’s Word is, Jesus is present and active.
It’s in this sense that Martin Luther can call the Bible “the swaddling clothes and manger in which the Christ child lays.” The point is not to denigrate the Scriptures (by saying the rags and hay aren’t very important). Rather, Luther wants to elevate the Bible: The angels point the shepherds to the manger, because that is where you come to meet Jesus! These human words deliver the very Word of God!
So when we talk about God’s Word at work in our lives, we are talking about Jesus, because Jesus remains the eternal Word of God.
Since the divine Word comes through human means, will also look for Jesus speaking in the words of a friend or a devotional book, in a hymn or a Sunday sermon.
And because the ultimate record of Jesus and his words and work is contained in the Bible, we’ll not only read the Bible outside of Sunday morning, we’ll talk about it and try to understand it better with friends. We’ll check what we hear and read from other people with what the Bible says. And we’ll hold onto the words of Scripture in accordance with the purpose for which they were written:
Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
(John 20:30–31)
- Jesus;
- Our mutual conversation about Jesus; and
- The authoritative witness to Jesus that is the Bible.
All of these count as God’s Word for us. But the second two both depend on the first: when it comes to the Word of God, it’s all about Jesus.
[1] Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 185, 188.