In the Beginning Was the Word
When you read the first words in the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1), you can place a massive mental wedge between those two words “God” and “created.” On the left side, you have the Creator: God. On the right, you have creation: everything else, all that is not God. This, as we noted previously, implies our doctrine of divine aseity. Nothing on the right side of this Creator/creature divide can in any way define what is on the left side. One of the ways we identify who’s who in this scheme is to ask the questions, Which one doesn’t need the other, and which is defined by its need of the other? We cannot come to imagine the Creator and the creature in a mutually defining way without either making God out to be a creature, on the one hand, or making creation out to be God, on the other. So the first verse of the Bible tells us about divine aseity indirectly, by pure negation. At least part of what it means for God to be God is for him to not be creation, which means that unlike creation, God is independent. But does the New Testament add any texture to this understanding of divine aseity? Yes. Quite a bit actually.
Imagine, as a thought experiment, sitting down with the apostle John, the beloved disciple, after he’s written the first draft of his Gospel. Let’s say you’re invited to hear him recite it aloud and to offer your feedback. Let’s also pretend that you are a well-read, first-century Jew who knows little of Jesus but who knows the Jewish Scriptures well, having been steeped in them from your youth. Also, since (as was the case for first-century Jews) you have grown up within the context of the Roman Empire and have been enculturated in a thoroughly Greek environment, you have some working knowledge of Greek philosophy and its technical terminology. So there you are, sitting in a room with John who holds an open scroll before you. He clears his throat and begins to read: “In the beginning.” He pauses for effect, long enough to allow you to complete the phrase in your mind: God created the heavens and the earth. And you wonder, I thought John was reading something he wrote. Why is he quoting Moses’s words? No sooner do you ask yourself this, however, than John utterly surprises you by changing the words: “. . . was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Just as the opening salvo of Genesis contains galaxies of theological implications, so too do the opening words of John’s Gospel, which intentionally converses with Genesis 1:1.
This slight shift of the Genesis account would remind you—a Jew who knows the Jewish Scriptures—of all the ways Yahweh’s word is talked about and personified in the Old Testament. You would think about Psalm 33:6:
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host.
You would also recall Yahweh’s promise through Isaiah that his word would go out and accomplish his purposes (Isa. 55:10–11). These thoughts would be reinforced as John continues to read: “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:2–3). At this point, your mind would probably rummage through the Proverbs and rest on the description of wisdom in Proverbs 8—personified as a preexistent agent alongside Yahweh, establishing Yahweh’s creation (see Prov. 8:22–31).
And as a Jew whose entire culture had been, since before you were born, thoroughly Hellenized (that is, influenced by the Greek culture of the Roman Empire that governed your people), you would also find it striking that John uses the Greek word logos (“Word”). It would conjure up all sorts of connotations about reason as the underlying structure of the universe—the most fundamental organizing principle that governs all things and the integrating point that ultimately connects any one part of the cosmos to any other. According to some from the Greek philosophical tradition, at the very foundation of the cosmos is eternal, transcendent reason. And this, too, would seem to make sense of what John’s Gospel is saying.
And the most striking detail—the one undeniable feature that would shock you like a bucket of cold water emptied on your unsuspecting head—is that this Word is clearly not being portrayed as an attribute of God, nor a product of God’s creative ingenuity, nor merely a power or ability that God possess. Rather, in your ears, John describes this Word as somehow personally distinct from God while also truly being God himself. This would be utterly stunning to you, as a first-time hearer of this Gospel, especially in light of your Jewish upbringing. Despite the fact that the Jewish people had assimilated to Roman culture in many ways and lived in a Hellenized Palestine, you are proud that your people could never abide Rome’s pantheon of gods. No matter how Hellenized you may have become, your people would never accept the polytheism of your overlords. To be a Jew was to believe in one God alone—to be a monotheist. What you would find so surprising about John’s Gospel is that John was in no way walking back his Jewish roots in this respect. The inclusion of this personal Word within the Godhead (and, as you would eventually discover while John continued to read his Gospel aloud, the inclusion of another person—the Spirit) was not expressed as a departure from the Scriptures of your ancestors. John was portraying Yahweh in a manner totally consistent with the monotheistic portrait of Jewish Scripture, even while bringing something truly new to one’s understanding of God.
I have taken you through this thought experiment to highlight the shocking but crucial truth of God’s New Testament self-revelation in the coming of Christ and the Spirit: The timelessly eternal and a se God of the Old Testament is triune. God did not become triune with the coming of the Son at Advent and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. If Exodus 3:14 tells us that the God of Christian Scripture is, the New Testament tells us that this same God who is, is the God who is Trinity.
Consider again that mental wedge we placed between “God” and “created” in Genesis 1:1. This wedge—this Creator-creature distinction—was a necessary principle in John’s thinking as well, and it becomes very instructive for us as we try to parse out his language. John agrees that there is one being alone who exists on the left side of this wedge: Yahweh, the Creator God of Scripture. And yet, John places a person who is both distinct from Israel’s God (“the Word was withGod”) and is the “I Am” of the Old Testament (“and the word was God”) over on the God side of this divide. Genesis 1 teaches that God alone creates what is not God, and John 1 teaches that God never creates what is not God without his Word. This precludes us from putting the Word on the right side of this wedge. If all that is not God is made by the Word, then the Word cannot exist on the “not God” side of the Creator-creature divide (John 1:3).
“He was in the beginning with God,” John tells us (John 1:2), which means that he exists in the timeless eternity of God’s self-existence. So when we read, “In the beginning, God” John is telling us that the Word was there with him.
This principle comes home even more significantly as we continue to read: “In him was life” (John 1:4). Unlike creation, the Word did not derive his life from God. In him—while he was “in the beginning” with God—was life. Rather than making the Word the finite recipient of life from the underived life of God, John makes him out to be the giver of all life and light to the world: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4).
The miracle of the incarnation is that this divine life—this light of men, this Word of God—came into the world as man (John 1:9–11). “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” says John, “and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). In other words, John has something new to teach us because this God who created the cosmos out of nothing and revealed himself to Moses as “I Am” has revealed himself in a new and surprising way at the incarnation. The Word of God came as man to be the Word of God to man—he came to exegete, to reveal, to disclose the divine nature more fully. And this act of revelation—this self-disclosure of triune preexistence—was intrinsically saving. “I Am” saves as he reveals, and he reveals as he saves. “From his fullness,” John says, “we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16). In other words, from the plentitude of independent life—from he who has life in and of himself—we receive life. And this reception is grace upon grace: grace in giving us life as creatures (John 1:3), grace in giving us the instruction of the law through Moses (John 1:17), and the grace of everlasting life in being incorporated into the family of God (John 1:12–13).
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). Jesus, in saving us, reveals God to us. He makes known the unknowable God as the image of the invisible (Col. 1:15). He is the light of God (Heb. 1:1–3), who reveals him who dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16). Jesus can do these things because—and only because—he, as the Word, is preexistent Being: the “I Am.”
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We could go on reflecting on the Son’s divinity—the fact that he belongs on the Creator side of the Creator-creature divide— but my point is not merely to make the case that the doctrine of the Trinity is biblical. Rather, I mean to draw your attention to the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity—particularly as it is revealed in the prologue of John’s Gospel—enriches our understanding of the doctrine of aseity. It is not merely that “the God who is” happens to be Trinity but, rather, that God’s aseity—God’s being of himself—is a triune aseity. Given this, it remains to be shown how the endlessly blazing fire of divine aseity burns as Father, Son, and Spirit.
Content taken from The Fountain of Life by Samuel G. Parkison, ©2026. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.