Starting at the Beginning

“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”
John 1:1

The gospel of John describes what Jesus of Nazareth did and said during his ministry on earth. John’s purpose in telling these things it to make a point: Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Son, and we must believe on Him (John 20:31).
All records of Jesus Christ have to start somewhere. Mark’s gospel starts with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, when He was baptized by John the Baptist (Mark 1:9). Matthew goes back to the birth of Jesus (Matt 1:18). Luke goes back even further, to the events preceding the birth of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist (Luke 1:5). But as John begins his gospel, he starts at the very beginning. “In the beginning,” he says, and he means before the birth of John, before David, Moses, Abraham, Noah, or even Adam. In fact, he is talking about before the beginning of time and the creation of the universe. Before anything else existed, the Word was.
John calls Jesus “the Word,” a name which highlights the fact that Jesus reveals God to us. Just like the words on this page are (hopefully!) communicating thoughts from my mind to yours, so Jesus Christ, the Word, communicated and revealed God the Father to mankind.
And there, before the dawn of the universe, the Word, Jesus Christ, existed. He was with God and always had been. And in fact, Jesus Christ is God. He was not a lesser being created earlier by God, nor was he a “secondary god.” He was equal with God. Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, who has always existed with God and as God. This is where John starts: the very beginning.