By Bill Kierce
When I reflect upon God’s timing, I marvel at its perfection. Tracking the GPS of my life’s journey, its intersections, and its detours, I am amazed at the evidence of God’s mapping. With the Psalmist, I can exclaim, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is too great for me to understand” (Ps. 139:6 NLT). It is even more incomprehensible when considering God’s activity in human history. “He controls the course of human events. He removes and sets up kings,” we are reminded in Daniel 2:21 (NLT). Why would we question God’s activity in human affairs? History is, after all, HIS story. From the moment Adam inhaled the breath of God in Genesis 2, God had a plan. Not even Adam and Eve’s fall from perfection in the Garden of Eden disrupted God’s desire for a loving relationship with creatures made in his image. Jesus was not Plan B. The Son offered his life even while the storyboard of humanity’s biography was being conceived, “before the creation of the world,” according to the apostle Paul (Eph. 1:4 NIV). From his promise of blessing to Abraham’s seed in Genesis 12, to his deliverance of Abraham’s descendants from bondage in Egypt, to his initiation of a system of law and sacrifice, to prophets’ promises of a coming Messiah, God was setting the stage for his personal intervention in human history. “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law” (Gal. 4:4–6 NIV).
One of the most compelling articles of evidence supporting God’s creativity in preparing for his Son’s entrance into the world is found in John 1:1 (NIV): “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That revelation alone is fantastic. But without understanding the origin of the word logos, which is central to John’s statement, one misses the marvelousness of Jesus’ introduction in the New Testament. Originally a geographer, Herodotus lived nearly 500 years before Jesus’ birth, a subject of the Persian Empire. He is best known for his authorship of Histories, which chronicled the events of the Greco-Persian wars of the 5th century BC. His work was considered the first systematic investigation into historical events, thus he was called “The Father of Modern History.” In describing the causal connections between events, Herodotus coined a term previously unknown in human vocabulary: the word logos. It is Herodotus’ unique descriptor for the specific pieces of relevant information relayed to him by informants. In the years after Herodotus’ death, logos simply came to be known as “the word.” Greek philosophers before Jesus took the word and applied it to broader concepts related to the unknown forces operating in the universe, that which connects historical events. Logos was thus understood as “divine reason” or “the rational principle” that holds all things together.
When the apostle John took up pen and papyrus to write his gospel account of Jesus, the Christ, he searched for a way to move beyond the traditional Jewish understanding of Messiah. He wanted to introduce Jesus to the world. So, he took a word that for five hundred years had permeated the culture of Greco-Roman philosophy: “In the beginning was the logos.” The rational principle that holds history together, the divine mover that had no name, is none other than Jesus Christ. In one statement, John the fisherman follower of Jesus has become the world’s most profound philosopher. But John goes further. Jesus Christ is not only the Unseen Force behind human history; he has entered history in human form: “The Word (logos) became flesh and made his dwelling among us… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 NIV). Elaborating upon this concept of the logos, Paul declares of Jesus in Colossians 1:16–17 (NIV): “In him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
This is the amazing story of human history, that God, through patriarchs and prophets, was preparing a chosen nation for the revelation of its Messiah. Simultaneously, God was preparing a waiting world, through the Father of History and his single word created to describe a Creator not yet known, for the coming of its Savior, the Logos, Jesus Christ, God with us. In history, God has been working to connect every event, every tribe, and every nation to him. It is HIS-story.