Imagine if you were famous even before you were born. Possible? Did it happen to anyone other than Jesus? Some great extremely famous king or celebrity with no children who marries an extremely famous woman then announces he is going to give his first child the world’s biggest diamond mine as a first birthday gift, then half the world’s kings each promise half their wealth to whoever is born first to this king or celebrity. It might all be enough to make the firstborn famous and talked about and hyped up in all the gossip press long before they are even born. Maybe. Maybe something like this once happened, perhaps to someone like firstborn of Mansa Musa or Genghis Khan or Emperor Zhao Xu or Mir Osman Ali Khan. But it did happen with Jesus Christ. He said it happened not just before his own birth but in Abraham’s time and even before Abraham was born. Even then it was as if Jesus existed and existed ever since then even before birth and now and forever, such that he can say “I am” without any tense limiting it. But it is likely to mean more than this. The teachings about Logos holding the universe in balance and being agent of God in all creation, all was prevalent in the time leading up to Jesus and Philo wrote about it but Stoics and Heraclitus and Plato wrote similarly long before. John wording his gospel prolog like he did implies it is as if the very fame of Jesus held things together, such is the power of his name, and today if you hear the Holy Spirit you might him tell of this. “Consider the trees, they put forth buds and leaves. They do so by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The very assurance promised by the giving of God’s word on it that a true Christ, Jesus, would come into the world and save the people of God, saving them from their sins, was enough to prevent all-out angel revolt before the Flood and keep Nature together. The name, the famous reputation this Christ had even way back then in the mists of time, is what has kept it all together.
