I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on John 1-3.

The beginning of John’s Gospel contains a very complex understanding of God and His will for us. He refers to Jesus as the Word of God. In a way John refers to the Word as God (that is not quite right, but it is not completely wrong). When John uses “Word” here he uses the Greek word which is the root for the English word “logic”. I am going to try and unpack what I see John as meaning here. First, Jesus is the logic of God, the logic which was fundamental to the creation of the world. In his opening John both shows us that Gnosticism contains some truth and that it gets it wrong. Gnosticism gets it right when it declares that perfection is only found in the spiritual realm, but it gets it wrong by declaring that the material world is inherently flawed (this is a less than perfect explanation of this). John compares Jesus, the Word of God, the Logic of God to light. The Logic of God shines out and forces those who want to hide in ignorance to erect barriers to block It, just as those who wish to hide in the dark must erect barriers to block light. Or to put it another way, just as darkness is not a thing, is merely the absence of light, so sin is not a thing, merely the absence of doing good. When you do good, you do not sin. More importantly, when you do not do good, you are sinning.

When Jesus tells Nicodemus that we must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of God there are many aspects to what He is saying. One aspect is related to what He meant when He told His disciples at other times that they must be like little children. We must return to the innocence and trust of childhood. But Jesus is also saying that we must start over. That we must give up what we have learned and learn how to live all over again. We must allow God to transform us into a new being, free from all of the sins which we had allowed to corrupt us.