John continues to build on the idea of the Supremacy of the Word in John 1:3 saying, “All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.” He starts this verse by telling us that “All things were created through him”, that is the Word, Jesus. It’s important to note that John says “All things”. That is to say that all of Creation was made though the Word, therefore all of Creation belongs to Him, and He reigns over it. John brings all things into view, because nothing that the Word created could possibly be greater than the one who created it. Therefore, Jesus is necessarily supreme, and nothing could overcome Him (We’ll come back to this).

Again, John reiterates, and pushes the point further by saying, “apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.” John is doubling down so that it is perfectly clear that ALL things were created through the Word. John takes great pains to make it perfectly clear that NOTHING has supremacy of the Word. This is the foundation of his case, Jesus is God. John wants to make it so that no one who is truly seeking truth would come to any other conclusion.

Paul say it like this in Colossians-

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn over all creation.
 For everything was created by him,
in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—
all things have been created through him and for him.
 He is before all things,
and by him all things hold together.
 He is also the head of the body, the church;
he is the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead,
so that he might come to have
first place in everything.

Some get caught up on the “firstborn” language, but it’s important to note that Paul is using this term in a metaphoric sense to illustrate Jesus’s position of supremacy and primacy over and before all creation, much the same the a firstborn son would be in a first century Jewish home. In this we are reminding that Ancient sensibilities and understandings can very widely from ours, so we must keep the context of the original author and audience in view when we are studying Scripture. Without such context we could espouse a great number of heresies due to a fundamental misunderstanding in what was being said. This becomes vitally important when talking about the deity of Jesus, and His position in and over the Church, and further all of Creation.

This is where the heresy of Arianism comes in. Either Jesus is God, and therefore co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit, as John and Paul both attest, or He is something else, something lesser than Yahweh, indeed even created by Yahweh. It seems amply clear through a survey of the New Testament that Jesus always has been, is, and always will be God, one of three person co-eternal in the Godhead, and equal in all attributes. Understanding this is of first order importance, which is why John drives the point home from the very outset that Jesus, the Word, is unquestionably God, and that just as we would say that God the Father is the Creator, so to in God the Son.