I decided to watch Goldeneye with my son. He's a freshman in high school, and I decided it was time. And you might think to yourself, nope, that nope, I remember that movie. It is not time. Well, you may have a point. I had to ride that fast forward button a lot harder than I thought I was gonna have to. For those of you who don't remember, Goldeneye is the first Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie. And I think it's a hoot. It was one of the first grown-up movies that I went to as a kid. I didn't remember it being quite as shocking as apparently it is in a few places. But a couple, yeah, there are some things though that we I don't fast forward when I watch it with my son. We watch all of the shootout scenes. Those are a blast. Completely bloodless carnage everywhere. And James Bond never misses. It's a miracle. Probably three or four times already in the movie, and we haven't even finished it yet. Bond grabs like an AK something something from a Russian and he flops to the ground and squints sexily and mashes on the trigger and just wiggles the gun around while bullets come out and there's ricochet sounds and everything. And then you cut to where the bullets are landing, and every single one is hitting some Russian. In that world, if somebody gets hit by a bullet, I guess it just launches them into the air as they go screaming. And we laugh and laugh at that. But the other thing that I never skip, and I because I think this next thing is genuinely important and formative for my son. We never skip the villain's speeches, because all the villains make the exact same mistake. They imagine that they're going to be gods if they can just get their hands on the laser or the weapon or the MacGuffin, or if they can just get enough of the gold. James, with this kind of power we could be gods. They all say the same thing. And of course, it's not going to work. That's their fatal flaw. Pride cometh before the fall. Then I want my son to see these villains exhibiting this hubris that is bad for them and bad for the world. I want him to internalize these myths and these stories about how you don't want to do that. It's a good cautionary tale. But also, my son completely understands that even if the bad guy got the laser, the gold, or whatever, he's not going to be God God, like the maker of all things, like the Bible God. He's going to be lowercase g god. Like, you know, just a more powerful version of a person who has more money and more weapons and stuff and less accountability. Likewise, we've kind of got two notions of what God means on display when we compare ancient Greek philosophy and the Bible, particularly the part of the Bible we're working on, the Gospel of John. That gospel opens like this: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. Okay, well, we're talking about capital G God here, but also we keep using this word word that we've been talking about. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. All right, well, that's logos. And in Greek thought, that term or the concept that went with it would conjure like a lowercase g notion of God. You know, not something that is terribly personal and not something that could make things out of nothing, but still something pretty powerful, like better than people, you know, good-ish. But here in the opening lines of the Gospel of John, John is making it abundantly clear that we're gonna we're gonna disambiguate this. These lower notions of God, Bondvillan notions of God, are not to be confused with capital G God, maker and sustainer of all things, God. Now, this concept of the Lagos apparently goes way, way back, but the concept crystallizes in the golden age of Athenian philosophy. This would be in the late 400s through the mid-300s BC, with big names like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, especially Plato and Aristotle. Socrates didn't write things down. What we know about him, we know from Plato. And Plato had a really interesting writing style. He wrote dialogues. In other words, he would take characters, his favorite character to write with was Socrates, and he would put all of these different characters who represented a different school of thought or philosophy in a room together, a lot of times, just like you know, hanging out in a park. Other times, as is the case with the dialogue I'm about to tell you about, it's at a nice dinner at an Athenian nobleperson's house. It's called Timaeus. T-I-M-A-E-U-S. So this Timaeus is a scene at a dinner that involves Socrates, Timaeus, and some other important characters, I think Critias. The first movement of the story is really fun because one of the guests at the table tells the story from thousands of years earlier of the time when the Athenians squared off against the Atlanteans. It's the beginning of the myth of Atlantis. And in the dialogue, he's like, I'll have to tell you the rest about what happened with Atlantis later. And as a reader, you're like, no, I wanted the Atlantis stuff. Come on, man. And the sequel to Timaeus is presumably lost. So I guess we just don't get to know what happened to Atlantis, but it's kind of a fun tease. But then the further you get into the story, the more you realize that Socrates here is playing more of the role of the listener than the questioner. And he pulls Timaeus' string and he's like, hey, explain to me how existence came to exist. Paraphrase is mine. So most of this dialogue is just a big long speech from Timaeus. Now, because Plato is telling this story through the voice of Timaeus, we can't say for sure whether this is Plato's opinion of how the world happened and what that concept of Logos means, or if this is Plato giving a fair treatment, steel manning the argument of another school of thought who had this creation mythology. So here's the gist of this work that I think is one of the earliest origin stories of what would go on to become the concept of Logos that John is tapping into here at the beginning of John. Okay, thing number one from the Timaeus. Thing number one: the cosmos is organized and ordered by a rational but not personal, not human craftsman. And this divine craftsman is also known as, I'm gonna try to say this so it sounds cool, the demiurge. All one word, D-E-M-I-U-R-G-E. The demiurge cannot make stuff out of nothing. Rather, and this is kind of point two of Timaeus' account of how the things happened, rather, this craftsman, the demiurge, can take the blueprints of reality from this distant realm of true conceptualization, the idea realm, and he can grab those perfect blueprints and he can take them down. And using raw materials that are just sort of floating around in the ether, he can organize those raw materials and knit them together into physical things that are imperfect, but still physical representations of those perfect blueprints, those perfect ideas that are out there. Timaeus goes on to say all of the universe follows these really tight mathematical structures, and that each of the four elements, like the four elements from all of your silly role-playing games and stuff, fire, air, water, and earth, that each of those elements has a different shape. Like fire is a tetrahedron, and earth is a cube, and air maybe has eight sides, and I don't remember what shape water is, but all the different elements are made of different shapes, and then you put them together in different combinations, and that's how you get matter. All of it is undergirded by math. So it's kind of like the matrix or a computer program. And then humanity, Timaeus, Plato, Socrates, you, me, we reflect that mathematical structure. We're sort of made in the image of the cosmos. Well, look, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that if you've been around the Bible for a while, you go, Oh, well, that sounds almost a little bit Bible-y here and there. You can kind of see it in Platonic thought, where there's this rational ordering force that eventually is referred to as the logos. Now you get an impersonal creator who's structuring the universe out of from just raw, not personal intelligence. Well, in John, the creator is a person, and the creator also has intelligence. The creator has a will, the creator has creativity. The capital L logos, the capital G God creation character in John is maxed out on reason, is maxed out on being rational, but it's also maxed out on a personal creative expression of the values and the characters of that creator. That is different than the impersonal lowercase El Logos, the impersonal organizer and recombiner of things that Timaeus imagines, that Plato imagines, that later Greek thinkers imagine. And what they have in common is both lowercase El Lagos and uppercase El Lagos are a rejection of the idea that things just happened on accident, the universe is chaos, it's a rejection of nihilism. No, the whole thing is rooted in reason. It's just capital G God as personhood and being and character, and creation is an organizing and an expression of that character. Lowercase L Logos, lowercase G God. Not so much. With the lowercase L Logos, lowercase G God from Timaeus, the world is an imitation of a truer, realer thing that is beyond. In John and creation theology throughout the entire Bible, the world is a reflection of the creativity of God, and it is good. It is exactly what God wanted to accomplish. It isn't like God was hamstrung because there's a world of really great stuff over here, but he can't really realize that or achieve it. No, in biblical thought, God does exactly what he wanted to do. He made it the way he wanted to make it. He shines his light upon it, he is light, he is life, and he calls the whole thing good. Lowercase L Lagos, lowercase G platonic thought lends itself to the idea that the forms is where it's at. Like that's where the good stuff is, way out there in that invisible, unseen realms of blueprints I was mentioning. You can't go there, you can't see it. And unfortunately, the shadowy, corrupted version of it that we get down here in Junkville, that's still pretty good, but there's this big difference between the very good ethereal realm and the very corrupt physical realm. But in biblical thought, in the physical is good. It's dying because of sin. There is darkness that makes a mess of things here, but the light shines into it. And again, God called what he made good. And just a couple pages over here from John in the book of Romans, Paul opens the thing up by saying that what God made points to his character, so it must be good. And the other huge difference between the lowercase L Logos, lowercase G God, and Capital L Lagos and Capital G God of the Bible in the book of John is that lowercase L Logos just organized stuff that was already there. Didn't think of the blueprints, didn't make the raw materials, just pulled it all together, kind of like you or I do if we make something, but just a better version of my art or your art. We don't make raw materials. Everything we do is imitative at some level, and that's great. That's awesome that we can do that. Well, the demiurge then is just a really good version of us, a really powerful version of us. But the capital G God of the Bible, the capital L Lagos of John chapter one, he made everything. He made the blueprints, he made the raw materials, he called all of these concepts and ideas out of complete nothingness. He is bigger than stuff. He predates stuff as we think of stuff. He predates existence as we think of existence. And I cannot possibly overstate how huge a deal that distinction is. One of the permeating themes, not just of John, but of the whole Bible, is that God isn't just a local regional ethnic God. God isn't just a local creation myth. God is the God, the actual God, the actual maker of everything. If you go cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, all the way back to the beginning, and you just keep pulling on that thread until you get to the first cause. That is I am. That is the God of the Bible. So he's not just an exaggerated version of us who's got some character flaws like you or me. No, that's how the Greeks thought of their gods. But I am the God of all creation, the God of Abraham, the capital L Logos, the Capital G God is uncompromised by all of that stuff. Good and right in everything he does, knows all the things, never had to learn anything because he always knew all the things. Nothing is dictated to him. He is bound by nothing other than his own character, which is perfect, and he's limitless in power. This is fundamentally different than how John's audience would have thought of the concept of Lagos when they heard it. They would have thought of something limited, but cool, better than them, but still limited. John is throwing down the gauntlet in John chapter one by saying, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a far more robust, far more complete capital L, capital G understanding of this concept that is the very best version of such a concept of an all-powerful, all-creating God that can possibly be imagined. The reason I've taken so long on all of this word Lagos stuff is because one, I think it's a pretty important key to being able to decipher the rest of the book of John. And if we don't take a minute on it here on the front end, John's not going to be as rich an experience as it could be otherwise. Second reason, though, is what we've really focused on today. The original audience would have had a vastly diminished notion of God and Logos that had leaked down to them from Plato through Stoic philosophers, through a philosopher we'll talk about a little bit more tomorrow called Philo. And it made their way down to them, whether they were Jewish or Gentile or Greek, they had a diminished notion of creation and of God, and therefore a diminished notion of who Jesus would be, even if John was like, and Jesus is that creative God. Oh, so Jesus is like an impersonal force that organized the raw materials of things to give some physicality to the great blueprints uh that are out there in, like, you know, the galaxy or the ether or whatever. No, John says, You're thinking of Lagos and of God way too small. We are talking about something much grander here that demands your attention, that demands that you reflect on these claims. And John is praying that what he gives you here in the book of John will be enough for you to believe in Jesus and by believing to have life in his name. He is shooting down a flawed notion of Lagos and lowercase g God. And he is propping up a grand notion of capital L Lagos and Capital G God. All at the same time, he's saying that being that seems so impersonal and distant to most of you, my audience, he was just here and he lives on and he reigns at the right hand of the Father. He's alive, and you can know this being that until I just told you otherwise you thought was impersonal and distant and untouchable. Uh-uh. You can know him, you can be a part of his family, you can have life with him, and you can experience him forever. This is a huge, gigantic, bold claim. And I knew that we were just gonna have a couple of long episodes where we got deep into it to try to make the thing make sense. We're moving toward new territory and fresh verses in John tomorrow with this concept in our hip pocket. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.