There is some underlying context to what John is talking about in the prologue to his Gospel that is useful to unpack.
In the Hellenistic world the concept of the logos has roots in various philosophical schools of thought about the universe. Different schools of philosophy had different ideas about the logos, but a somewhat common theme is that there is a unifying cosmic reason that binds the cosmos (the order of the universe/world) together in some capacity.
The logos is the reason or internal logic of all reality, nothing exists apart from it, nothing acts independently from it. All action, all things that happen, all things that exist exist because there is a universal something, a reason, a logic, that holds it all together and makes sense of everything.
For the Stoics the logos was the closest thing they had to the concept of "God", but in a somewhat pantheistic sense, for the logos was the reason within and behind ordered reality and was, in a sense, nature itself.
When the Hellenistic world came crashing down upon the Jews with Alexander the Great's conquest, Jewish thinkers responded both in the harsh rejection of Hellenism, and also borrowing from it. Jewish thinkers, like Philo of Alexandria, attempted to synthesize ideas from the Greek world with Jewish ideas. Philo spoke about the logos in his works, Philo was a Jewish Platonist, and for Philo the logos was the mediating force between God and the universe, that God created the universe through His logos. The Aramaic word memra ("speech") is used in a number of the Targums (Aramaic translations/paraphrases of Jewish Scriptures).
So in the Greek world we have the idea of logos as the binding, uniting, universal reason that gives meaning to everything; the universal logic by which everything exists and continues to exist and without which nothing would exist or make sense.
And in the Jewish world we have the idea of logos as God's memra, God's intermediating speech, God's creative power, personified and as expression of God Himself acting, creating, working. God acts through His logos, God creates through His logos, etc.
So when we get to the Gospel of John, we have now a Christian view of the Logos, wherein the Logos is that which was in the beginning with God and is God; the Logos is God with God (somehow); and that this Logos is the creative power behind everything--all things were made by the Logos and nothing that was made can exist apart from the Logos.
The radical declaration of John is that this Logos became a human being, Jesus Christ. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us". The Logos made His habitation in our midst as one of us.
John is pulling threads and bringing them together into a uniquely Christian view of the Logos, that it is actually Jesus who is the reason behind and for everything. Jesus is the Logos, the creative power of God, somehow God Himself but also with God, that unites, sustains, and brings about the existence of everything. Jesus is God's own Self-Expression made human, God's way of talking about Himself. So, "No one has at any time seen God, the only-begotten Son* who is in the bosom of the Father, has made Him known"
*Other manuscripts read "God" rather than "Son".
This theme is kept throughout the entirety of the Gospel of John. So when Jesus says, "If you have known Me, you have known My Father as well" or "If you have seen Me you have seen the Father also" "No one comes to the Father except by Me"
Jesus is God's Image, God's Self-Expression, God's Self-Revelation. The Father makes Himself known by His Logos, His Son, in human flesh--Jesus Christ.
We can't know God, or find God, or experience God through some other means or way. I can't climb up a mountain, or take a rocket out into space, or spend decades learning the right meditative techniques to encounter God out there or in here.
The only way I can know God is Jesus, the Logos made flesh. The Father, apart from His Son, is unknowable. God, apart from His Logos, is unknowable.
And so God can only be encountered in grace, in God-come-down. In God meeting us in lowliness, as the humble carpenter's son from Nazareth, born of a Virgin.
The Eternal Reason that binds all reality together, well He's the same who got an earful from His mom at the wedding party at Cana and turned water into wine. The Logos became flesh, God became man; the Almighty was crucified on a cross. And that's how we meet God and know God. The Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. The Victim of Golgatha's cross. And who then rose again.
The true logos is identical with the One about whom the Gospel Story is about. This Jesus of Nazareth is, in fact, the center of everything that has ever happened and will ever happen, and of everything that was, is, or will be. So that the whole universe is, in fact, oriented Christ-ward. As St. Paul will also say in his letters, that all things "were made by Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16) and that all things, in heaven and on earth, shall be united and summed up together in Him (Ephesians 1:10).
-CryptoLutheran
