John 1 rocks my face off. Here's my loose paraphrase.

Before Western Society, before Semitic tribes, before all cultures and people, the Revealer lived with God and was in very essence God. They were together (the Revealer and God) before anything was made. When God decided to make stuff, he did it through the Revealer so that all the stuff He made would point back to Him. The Revealer carried within Himself the very essence of life. That life was the Guiding Light that that showed people who God was. This Revealer has always been pointing people to God from the very first day. That’s His job.

A long time ago, God sent a guy named John to teach people about the Light-that-shows-God so that people would recognize it when it arrived in their midst. John was special but he knew he wasn’t The Light. He was kind of like a Revealer-revealer because the Light was about to break into the world in a new way.

Ironically, even though God made everything through the Revealer, by the time he showed up in the flesh, none of His stuff recognized Him anymore. He came to His own creation, but everyone shut their doors in His face. But a few people recognized Him and welcomed Him for who He was. Those folks would find themselves adopted into a brand new family with God Himself as their Papa.

The Revealer who had been pointing people to God from the beginning did something incredible in those days: He put on a human body with all its frailties and limitations and pitched his tent in our camp. He set up shop in our neighborhood as an ordinary guy. He moved in with humanity and became a human in every possible way. Well that was unexpected!

We were there. We saw it and I’m telling you it was amazing! It was clear as day to us: This was the One and Only, the Light emanating from God. This was the One everybody had been talking about. We knew without a shad of a doubt that this God-man came straight from God the Father and was the very embodiment of mercy on truth.

When John first saw him, he just about blew a fuse! He kept shouting, “Here he is! The one I’ve been telling you about! I told you he would come and far outdo me. He was around long before I ever existed so of course he’s greater than me!”

Hindsight is 20/20 and we see it all so clearly now! The Revealer was overflowing with mercy for people who didn’t deserve it. And out of that overflow, we’ve received one good thing after another. At one time a great man named Moses gave rules and regulations that were supposed to help people experience God and the good life. But at the end of the day, they were just words on a page. But when the Word of God leapt from the page and put on human skin, what we had was so much more than words! We had Grace and Truth living as a person among us. The Revealer did through a human existence what He could never do through dead words: He revealed God the Father not as a concept to be grasped but as a relationship to be enjoyed.