Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And here's a question to get things started this week. You ever drive a real old, cool looking car, like a classic car from way back in the day that you normally would just see at a show and gawk at because they're beautiful and nostalgic and all that. But have you ever actually driven one of those? I had the chance to do that a while back. My buddy growing up, his dad had this classic, maybe 1940 Ford, that sounds right. And the I mean it was beautiful. We weren't even allowed to touch it. It was perfect. And I couldn't imagine ever driving it. But you know, time passed and my buddy inherited the car. And a while back I was at his house and he had it out in the driveway. He's like, Do you want to drive this thing? I thought, huh? Yeah, I do. And I don't know why I was expecting it to be awesome, but it was not awesome. It was hard to steer and uncomfortable, and all the sight lines were bad. I think we probably we drove for maybe a mile and we probably burned four gallons of gas doing it. It was not efficient. It was a pretty clunky ride. Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, I'm hanging out with a friend of mine in Texas, and he has a Tesla, like a brand new Tesla. And I've never been in one of those. I was like, here, well, I'll just drive you to the thing we're going to. Cool. So I get in, and the first thing that happens is I sit down and there's a fart noise that comes out of my seat because he said it has a whoopee cushion, like a built-in virtual electronic whoopee cushion from a speaker. I'm not even kidding. That's a real thing. And it got better even after the whoopee cushion part. He's like, check this out. Okay, I'm just gonna tell it where we're going and we need to get a little charge on the way, and boom, and he pushes a button, he pulls back from the wheel. And that sucker, that just the vehicle itself navigated incredibly dense downtown traffic and then interstate traffic perfectly. I was never even scared. It was awesome. And then it found a place to charge up, drove us in there, picked the right charger that was in the best shape and not being used. My buddy hopped out, plugged it in for a few minutes, popped it back out. Couldn't believe how fast that went, by the way. I'm like, do we have to pay or anything? He's like, no, no, no, it's all on the card. It's all there's a system, we're good. And then the thing just drove us away to our destination. It was perfect. It blew my mind. Maybe you're not into that kind of stuff, but to me, I I am just stunned at how much distance there is between these two quote unquote cars. But my buddy's 194 is such a lesser expression of car compared to my other buddy's brand new Tesla. Same word, same concept, same principle, but one is a much fuller realization of that principle than the other. Likewise, the same is true with the concept of Lagos at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Lagos is translated word in this passage right here on the front end of John that we've been looking at. In the beginning was the word Lagos, and the word Lagos was with God, and the word Lagos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Okay, well, we can tell, as we've discussed, that these are very big claims. Clearly, the word word really matters here. This idea of Lagos is a big important thing. But what does it mean? Well, like Carr, it can have different levels of meaning. But basically, Lagos means the ordering force that makes stuff happen, that makes existence and matter as we encounter it. So that's what Lagos is. It's like this perfect reason or knowledge or power that can put everything together and make it all work. That is what the Greek concept amounted to. And the idea of Lagos in this regard is very, very old, but it starts to take shape in the golden age of Athenian philosophy, about 375, 400 years before the time of Jesus. Of course, the big rock star philosophers of that era are Socrates and his student Plato and Plato's student Aristotle. Without a doubt, the first place that the brains of the original audience went, especially the non-Jewish original audience, when they picked up John and read it for the first time in the first century, as soon as they saw the word Lagos repeated here at the beginning, they immediately thought of this concept of the Lagos, some sort of ordering force that is an almost divine reason that makes everything work. They would have thought Lagos, ah, well, that idea is connected to creation, the making of all the things as we understand things. And the Jewish audience as well, I'm sure, would have thought of that when they saw the word Logos. But the Jews, who were familiar with their Old Testament as well as the philosophy of Philo, who we'll talk about more another day, would have also thought of the concept of word from the Old Testament, and they would have had the capacity, maybe with a little bit of prompting, to imagine more of the Tesla version of Logos of Word. But I say again, in the same way that my buddy's dad's very old Ford is still amazing, a modern Marvel. It's incredible that that even exists. That is to say, it is very, very, very good. And in the same way, it is still very, very, very impressive. So the Greek idea of Lagos as this ordering force, this rational force that makes existence as we encounter it happen, it's still really good and really impressive. It's just that the Bible version of Logos, the Bible version of the concept of the Word or the Word of God, is so much more than the Greek notion of Logos. In the Old Testament, the concept of the word or the word of the Lord is one that comes with a power greater than the Greeks ever imagined. I mean, think about it. How did creation happen? Look at this passage. In the beginning, well, that is meant to take you right back to creation in Genesis 1. It's meant to trigger that part of the audience's brain that thinks about the beginning of things and all the stories that go along with how all the things began. And in the Old Testament account, how does everything begin? Well, with the word of the Lord. He speaks it into existence. The word of the Lord does not take a bunch of pre-existing things in Genesis that predated him and had just been floating around. And then God came along and was like, Oh, I'm going to use some of this really old stuff that's you know kind of new to me, and I'm going to rearrange it into a really nice world. Uh-uh. Genesis clearly tells the story of God by the power of his word and his strength making everything out of nothing. He doesn't need pre-existing raw materials to create. By his word, he can summon existence out of non-existence. That should melt our brains. That is different than anything else. Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. Now, if we were just talking about the Greek concept of Lagos here, it would say through him all things were organized. Without him, nothing was organized that has been organized. Because the Greek concept of Lagos is organizational. The Lagos is a very powerful, rational, impersonal force that takes existing things from the realm of the invisible, from the thought realm, the abstract realm. And then the Greek Lagos grabs parts and pieces and everything and almost follows the blueprints from the abstract world to make physical things. This is the thinking of Plato, at least. His student Aristotle and this later group of thinkers called the Stoics would nuance all of this stuff a little bit differently. But that's the gist. And so, in the same way that the word car can really trigger a lot of different things in our brains, but if we stop and think about it for a minute, we would be like, well, I mean, they're primitive cars. And then there's the most robust expressions of the concept of cars that humans to date have ever created. In the same way that you and I can take that simple word and extrapolate it out into a pretty good version of that and an amazing expression of that. So the original audience here, somewhat the Gentile Greekish audience, and much more so the Jewish audience, could hear the concept of Lagos word and think, yeah, I can picture a pretty good expression of that. Like, it's like this ordering force, it's impersonal, it can't make stuff out of nothing, but it's pretty good at following plans. And you know, some people say that's where the world and all the things we see and physically interact with came from. They could imagine that version, but especially that Jewish and Greek-minded part of John's audience could imagine a much more impressive concept of the word for them. It would conjure the Greek stuff, but it would also conjure in their brain the idea of the word of the Lord that brought about creation, the word of the Lord that swept into the camp and healed people of their infirmities, the word of the Lord that spoke into the situation in Egypt and miraculously broke the laws of time and space to free God's chosen people from bondage there, the word of the Lord who came to the prophet Isaiah, the word of the Lord that came to all of the minor prophets, and through that word of the Lord, the prophets were able to speak the truth of God to the people, and through the power of the word of the Lord, they were even able to see into future things that God had in store by his providence. See, that's the Tesla version of the concept of word. The still very good but not as impressive version of the concept of word or logos would be the Greek version. Now we need to unpack what that Greek version looks like more tomorrow, because I think John is doing two things by invoking the word Lagos in a book that he intended to distribute to at least half people who would be Greek-minded, non-Jewish readers. And I think pretty clearly what John is doing is he's saying all the different notions of Lagos that have come down to you through the Greek philosophy and mythology, it's all pointing in the right direction. It's all a good start. But John is unsatisfied to leave his audience there. He wants to draw them into the fullness of what that flawed and incomplete old Greek idea points to in Christ and in the work of God. So this week is going to be a little bit philosophy-e, but we're going to make it fun. We're going to make sense of it, and then we're going to get to the payoff here and start moving forward toward the actual story stuff in the book of John, which just gets so juicy and is really all there to kind of prove what John is philosophically and theologically claiming with all of this heady talk here at the beginning of his gospel. And a final human thought for all of us here. If you are thinking to yourself, what have I got myself into? This is really heady. Like ancient philosophy, this is not my cup of tea. This isn't what I do. I'm not trained for this. This is going to be over my head. No, it's not. You're smart, you're going to get it. You're good at having conversations. You're good at understanding what other people mean when they're being a little bit sneaky. You're good at telling when an advertiser is lying to you or not. You're good at cutting through the bull crap with politicians. You're good at understanding what a TV show or a book is trying to communicate on the overt levels and the subtle levels. You need to stop it. You're good at this stuff, and this is going to make sense. And we'll move it at a pace. It's going to make it make sense for everybody. And if we put in this little bit of work here on the front end with John, the payoff of the book is going to be so much greater. So if this is your cup of tea, hey, you're really going to like the next few days. If it's not, I still think you're really going to like the next few days, and you're going to get this stuff quickly in your hip pocket in a way that is going to make sense. All right. More on all of this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.