01.02. The Proof of the Lord's Deity

Dronsfield ESOF: 02 The Proof of the Lord’s Deity THE PROOF OF THE LORD’S DEITY

See John 5:17-18. The Lord had just healed a man on the Sabbath Day, to the anger of the Jews. His answer to them was, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work", which appears to be the first time He said publicly that God was His Father. This condemned Him utterly in the eyes of the Jews, for they saw that by saying that God was His Father He made Himself equal with God.

Here we see that the Lord’s Sonship demonstrated His equality with Deity — not His subjection as the followers of J. Taylor teach. Could it be that the Jews had reached the truth of His claim to equality by the wrong reasoning? No, the inspired words do not say that it was just what the Jews said, but assert plainly that He made Himself equal with God by saying God was His Father. The reasoning of the Jews was as correct as their conclusion.

Why did the Jews see this? Because in the Hebrew thinking, and in the Scriptures, a father is presented as being of the same nature as the one he begets. Here are a few examples:

There is the common term, "sons of Belial". Belial means "worthless", so the term "son of Belial" simply means a worthless person.

Joses was surnamed Barnabas by the apostles (Acts 4:36), meaning "son of consolation", because he was by nature one who consoled for he was a good man who exhorted the brethren that with purpose of heart they would cleave to the Lord (Acts 11:23-24). The Lord surnamed John and James the sons of thunder.

Judas is called the son of perdition because he was by nature one that would perish. Perdition means perishing.

He called the Pharisees a generation of vipers because they had the nature of vipers. See also "children of light", "children of wrath", "child of the Devil", etc.

Every being begets after his own kind (Genesis 1:1-31). Therefore the Jews saw that if God has a Son, that Son has the nature of Deity. There is only One True Son of the same eternal essence as the Father — the Only Begotten Son. But the objection will at once be raised, "If God has begotten a Son, there must have been a time when the Son was begotten, and therefore He has a beginning". This is quite wrong reasoning, for the right implication is exactly the opposite. If an eternal Father, without beginning nor end, begets a Son, that Son also must have neither beginning nor end; else He is not a True Son according to the Father’s essence. God’s nature is infinite, therefore His Son’s nature is infinite.

We must abandon all reasoning from the finite. Every finite creature begets a finite creature with a beginning, but the Infinite begets the Infinite with no beginning. The word "Only Begotten" does not imply carnal or low thoughts of begetting, but implies equal nature. This is what the ancient orthodox teachers called "The Eternal Generation of the Son". The begetting is not an event of the past, however distant.

Let us not lessen the force of the word "Only Begotten" by saying that it might just be translated "Only" or that it means simply unique or uniquely precious. It means far more than that. It means that He is the only Son according to the Divine Essence. To justify this lessening of the force of the word "Only Begotten", the case of Isaac is put forward who is called Abraham’s only begotten son although there were other sons. However, in God’s eyes, Isaac was the only son. Abraham said, "O that Ishmael might live before Thee!" but Ishmael was not recognised by God, the covenant was not to be with him (Genesis 17:18-19). On the other hand it has been stated, that because of the Septuagint use of the word "only begotten" for the Hebrew "only one" (jachid), that "only" is all that is meant by it. But the Septuagint is often an inaccurate translation and certainly cannot be cited as a greater authority than the New Testament itself. Those who have come to the defence of Eternal Sonship by denying that the real meaning of the Greek word monogenes is "only begotten", have actually obscured the issue. But what then are we to say about all the other sons? Are there not many sons brought to glory? (Hebrews 2:10). Are we not sons? (Galatians 4:6). Are we not begotten of God? (1 John 5:1; 1 John 5:18). Are not the angels called sons of God? (Job 1:6/Job 38:7).

It is true that we are brought into sonship by the grace of God. We have been begotten of God as regards the new nature, when we were born again by the Word and the Spirit. This is the divine nature (1 Peter 1:4). It is the nature of God morally — God’s true nature from the moral standpoint, but it is not sonship according to essence. That is, we do not partake of Deity and thus become omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, etc. Only the Son has Sonship according to essence. From the moral aspect He is the Firstborn among many brethren, but from the point of view of Divine Essence He is the Only Begotten with no brethren. As regards the angels, the Scripture insists that the Lord’s Sonship distinguishes Him from them. "For unto which of the angels said He at any time, "Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee" (Hebrews 1:5). Never has God called an angel His Son. Yet the angels are called sons of God in the book of Job. We suggest that this is because they had no progenitors and are all directly created by God to reflect His glory. In like manner the only man to be directly created by God, and not humanly generated, was Adam, and as he had no progenitor, he is called the son of God (Luke 3:38).

We will now consider other scriptures that support this truth. Here it is necessary to find scriptures where the abstract concept of sonship is the subject matter. It is not sufficient to look at places where the name "Son of God" is mentioned because, as we have seen, it is common to identify a person by a name or title even when referring to occasions when the person did not possess that designation. All the scriptures which say that the Father sent the Son do not prove to those who hold the temporal sonship theory that the Lord was the Son before He was sent, because, they say, the Divine Persons were not known by any distinct names before the incarnation, and therefore can only be referred to by the names they took afterwards.

Hebrews 5:8. "Though He were Son". There is no definite article before Son; it is characteristic, and the relationship of Sonship is the prominent thought. "Though He were Son, yet learned He obedience". As the Son, the experience of obedience was unknown to Him, and so He learned what that experience was by the things that He suffered. In this passage we see that the idea of obedience and subjection was foreign to His Sonship. This is the opposite to the doctrine of temporal sonship which maintains that His Sonship is to be identified with subjection. No, it is not as the Son that He learned obedience, but in spite of His being such. The reason a man is subject and inferior to his father in human relationships is that the son is always the junior, the father obviously being born first. To argue from this that the Lord’s Sonship denotes subjection is plainly wrong for there can be no seniority between Divine Persons. It is another example of trying to understand the Infinite by a comparison with the finite.

Now turn to John 1:14. The literal translation is "We beheld His glory, the glory of an only begotten with a father". The glory is that of the abstract relationship rather than that of the Person Himself, that is to say, the glory in this passage is specifically that of His Sonship. This glory shone through the veil of His flesh so that His disciples recognised it. It was His Divine glory. This will be immediately challenged by those who deny His eternal Sonship. They will say that it is His moral glory, which He had as the Perfect Man. We will, therefore, test this by searching the Scriptures. When those who had to do with Him in His life here were constrained to confess Him as the Son of God, what made them do so? Was it His moral glory or His Divine glory? Let us look at the incidents involved.

(1) Nathanael (John 1:49) confessed Him as the Son of God and King of Israel. It was His omniscience that opened His eyes. The Lord had shown that He knew some secret that only Nathaniel could have known.

(2) The disciples in the boat. (Matthew 14:33). The Lord had just shown His Divine power as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, walking. on the water and stilling the wind and the waves. Here we have Him as the omnipotent One.

(3) Martha (John 11:27). The Lord had just revealed Himself as the Source of Life. Only God is the Source of Life. All other beings receive their life through Him.

(4) The man blind from birth (John 9:35-38). Here the man is told directly from the Lord Who He is. It is the man’s reaction that is noteworthy as he immediately worships the Son of God showing that he recognised His Deity; for the Lord accepted his worship as offered intelligently. We can contrast this with the man in Matthew 19:16-17 who said "Good Master". At once the Lord checked him, because he had ascribed something to Him that only applied to God, without realising that the One he was speaking to was indeed God.

(5) The Centurion (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39). Here the reasons for the centurion’s confession are plainly stated. In Matthew it was due to the severe earthquake, the rending of the rocks and the opening of the tombs. In Mark it is specifically stated that it was due to the Lord’s shouting with a loud voice just before He gave up His spirit. This was remarkable to the centurion who had no doubt seen large numbers of such executions. A man crucified gets weaker and weaker until he cannot speak above a whisper. Here was One who could shout with a loud voice just before He died, showing supernatural strength. It was, therefore, not His moral glory that convinced the centurion, but His Divine glory, as was the case in all the foregoing cases.

We will refer to Peter’s great confession in Matthew 16:16 and John 6:69 later.

We are therefore fully justified in asserting that the Lord’s Sonship denotes His Deity and does not pertain to His lowly dependence and obedience as the Perfect Man. A possible reason why some think that the glory of John 1:14 is moral and not Divine, is the words that immediately follow: "full of grace and truth". We are sure, however, that the Authorised Version is correct in putting the clause "and we beheld His glory, the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father" in brackets. The words "full of grace and truth" refer to the statement before the parenthesis: "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". The parenthesis is put in to show that in spite of the veil of flesh, the Divine glory shone through for His own to see. In saying all this we are not wishing to infer that moral glory is not included in Divine glory for "God is Light". The idea that we are opposing is that it was exclusively His moral glory as seen in manhood.

Many are convinced of the Lord’s Eternal Sonship but do not rank it among the fundamentals. They point out that its denial may be sincerely done in the belief that it is something that guards the Lord’s glory, and that it is not accompanied by any doubt as to His eternal personal Being. We, however, maintain that it is a necessary component of the Doctrine of Christ. To demonstrate this, we will refer to the early contention in the professing church when the greatest challenge to the Truth came from Arius, who denied the Lord’s Deity.

Now Arius was not like the modern Unitarian who thinks that the Lord was a mere man. His system taught that the Lord was the first and greatest creature that God made, and the only creature that God made directly. To this great creature God gave the task of creating everything else, so all things, apart from Himself, were created by Him. He was God’s representative, and expressed God to every other creature. As God’s representative, He was entitled to worship, and as such was rightly addressed as God. One thing only Arius would not accept, and that was the truth that the Lord was of equal substance (or essence) to the Father. He said that he was of similar substance but not of equal substance to God.

These two expressions, "similar substance" and "equal substance", differing in Greek by only a single letter, became the great battleground on which the whole of Christianity depended. Athanasius was the great orthodox champion. Constantine the Emperor favoured Arius, and Athanasius had to go into exile. Only to the Scriptures did both protagonists turn. Every Scripture that showed that the Lord was God, that proved He is the Creator of all things, that showed He must be worshipped and honoured by creatures as though He were the Father, was accepted by Arius as agreeing with his system. What scripture then was left to prove that the Lord was of equal substance to the Father? Mainly the truth of Eternal Sonship — the bulwark of John 5:18, that His Sonship proved His equality to the Father, because of His eternal generation. At first the Emperor did not realise the vital importance of the controversy, and he issued an edict that as the words "similar substance" and 11 equal substance" were not in the Scriptures, the contention was to cease as being an insoluble question. This, however, was not obeyed. How like was Constantine’s stratagem to those today, who say that as the term "Eternal Sonship" is not in Scripture, they will neither affirm nor deny the doctrine!

How right Athanasius was when he pointed out that although the difference between the contenders might appear to be small, yet really the difference was infinite! Truly the difference between the finite and the infinite is infinity, no matter how great the finite might be. How serious it is to take away this most important weapon of Eternal Sonship, which proves the truth of the Lord’s Person!

Let us also notice the extreme importance that is placed in Scripture upon the confession of the Lord’s Sonship. In 1 John 4:15 it says, "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God". Such a blessed spiritual result as this does not come, of course, from the repetition of a form of words but from the affirmation of the heart in complete awareness and acceptance of the confession’s full implications. Many a time, representatives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — the modern Arians — have called at the front door, and to the question "Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?", they willingly give the answer in the affirmative. Does God dwell in them and they in God — these deniers of the Lord’s Deity? Obviously not, for they do not affirm His Eternal Sonship, nor accept that it is essentially connected with His Deity. In their minds the Lord’s Sonship had a beginning; not in incarnation but far back before any other creature had been created.

Peter’s confession of Matthew 16:16 also brings before us the great importance of this doctrine, for we find that it is the foundation rock on which the Lord builds His church. "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God". Because He is the Son of God He is God. The Father is the Living God, who has life in Himself, the Source of Life, so likewise the Son is the Living God and has life in Himself, the Source of Life. In Mark 8:29 and Luke 9:20, the story of Peter’s confession is given, but only the first half, "Thou art the Christ" is mentioned. Consequently there is no reference there of its vital importance as the foundation rock of the church. Without Eternal Sonship the foundation is missing. How solemn that some well-meaning brethren have so little understanding that they are tampering with the church’s foundation!