"The same was in the beginning with God.

"All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that
was made" (John i. 1-3).

The "Word" is one of the names of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a beautiful
and wonderful name. Suppose you have been playing with something that has
made your hands very dirty, and mother says, "Come to me, dear, and I will
make them clean." Through mother's words you know what is in her heart; you
know that she loves you, and wants you to be with her, and fit to be with
her. So it is through the Word, the One who was with God in the beginning,
the One by whom everything was made, that God has spoken to us so that we
may know His thoughts about sin, which made us unfit to be with Him, and
His feelings towards the men and women in the world, who are His creatures,
and yet have tried to find happiness away from Him. But it was because the
chapter, which my elder scholars were learning, speaks of the Lord Jesus by
another wonderful and beautiful name that I wished them to learn it. He is
called "Wisdom" not only in the Old Testament, where we are told in other
verses of the same chapter (Prov. viii.) that He was "from the beginning"
with God (vv. 22-31), but also in a letter which the apostle Paul wrote to
some clever people who lived in Greece long ago he speaks of Him as "the
power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. i. 24).

I can remember that we had a good deal of talk after we had read the verse,
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"--those few words,
so quickly read, in which God has told us what the wisest man of all the
wise men who ever lived could not have found out for us; for God alone can
speak about what He did so very long ago, before the sun shone, or the
grass and the trees grew, or the birds sang in the branches, or lambs