LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
What Is His Name?
The Son of God
Harry Foster
If we could overhear a saint at his private devotions, we would be certain to hear him confessing his shortcomings, and the greater the saint the more likely would be his expressions of personal unworthiness. Jesus Christ excelled all others in saintliness yet, far from voicing self-abasement, His prayer on the eve of the crucifixion breathes an atmosphere of quiet confidence and perfect partnership with the Father in a love and glory which had neither beginning nor ending (John 17:5, 24). He addressed the eternal Father as though He knew Himself to be the eternal Son: and this is what He is; the Father's Fellow, the Father's much loved Comrade and Colleague.
Christ shared the planning of man's creation; and at the beginning of time He was Himself the One who executed this plan (Colossians 1:16). Further, He shared the planning of man's redemption, and in the fullness of the times He personally came down to earth to carry out this sacrificial plan (1 John 4:14). So Mary's baby, born in Bethlehem of a human mother and destined to live as a Man among men, and as Man to die for men on the Cross, was in fact the Son of God. Mary herself knew this -- none better -- and realized that only a miraculous intervention in her life by the Holy Spirit could make it possible for God's eternal Son to become a member of the human race (Luke 1:35).
Satan himself recognized this sonship, and in the wilderness temptations tried to use the fact as an argument to induce Christ to act in ways which would contradict His complete dependence on God. The lesser demons recognized it too, and even though it was to their own confusion, found themselves obliged to acknowledge Him as God's holy Son, though He had no wish for their recognition (Luke 4:41). The Jewish leaders knew well enough that Jesus claimed to be the unique Son of God, but instead of humbly investigating this possibility, they rejected it out of hand and had Him murdered on this very charge (John 19:7).
In the last dread hours of His agony on the cross, Christ was taunted as to whether He really was the Son of God (Matthew 27:40). The thoughtless mockers may have genuinely doubted His sonship, as even His disciples seem to have done, but the satanic spirits who prompted the cruel sneers had no doubts about it, but were in fact making their final effort to get Him to break with the Father and abandon the enterprise of man's redemption. He refused to come down from the cross, though He could easily have done so, and by His refusal He not only made the perfect sacrifice for sin but made it clear that He really is the Son of God (Matthew 27:54).
The resurrection made it even clearer. It exposed the folly and futility of the Jewish leaders' crime, for the mighty miracle of resurrection on the third day was the full and final authentification of Christ's sonship (Romans 1:4). After His ascension He resumed the glory which He had enjoyed before the world existed, and which He had temporarily relinquished for our sakes. It is to our enormous comfort that He resumed it with the added quality of sympathetic understanding which He had gained here on earth (Hebrews 4:14-15).
We must never allow the simple beauty of Christ's Manhood to obscure the vital fact of His eternal sonship. It is true that in His incarnation He emptied Himself of the outward evidences of His glory (Philippians 2:7), but He did not and could not divest Himself of that essential place in the Godhead which enabled Him to make the claim "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). It was understandable that at the moment when the Father was in heaven and He was on earth He should recognize that the Father was greater than He (John 14:24), but that was greater in position; never for a moment did He admit that there was anything less than equality between Himself and the Father. Every wise father longs for the time when his son will be mature enough to be his equal, with the sole difference between them of seniority in years. There can be no such seniority in the Godhead, where time considerations do not exist, so that this One, the Father's Son, is His perfect partner in an inexpressibly wonderful fellowship of love and life.
One matter is not easy to understand, and that is what may be involved in the disclosure of the fact that when His kingdom activities are completed the Son will subject Himself (1 Corinthians 15:28). He will certainly not be superseded nor be demoted from His kingship. The significance may well be that this will mark the fulfillment of His commission within the Godhead of restoring perfect harmony to the universe, marking a point in time, or at the end of time, when the eternal blessedness of God's supremacy will be unchallenged, and men will honor the Son as they honor the Father (John 5:23).
Acceptance of Jesus Christ as the true Son of God is not optional but essential. This knowledge brings assurance of eternal life (1 John 5:13); it is the basis of our personal experience of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 4:6); and it is the only sure secret of victorious Christian living (1 John 5:5). God Himself comes to live in the heart of the one who truly receives Jesus as His Son (1 John 4:15).
Out of his woeful sense of ignorance a man called Agur once demanded to know the identity of our Creator. "What is his name" he cried, "and what is his son's name; if thou canst tell me?" (Proverbs 30:4). Happily the New Testament can tell him, and everybody else who wishes to know for it discloses God's Name and nature by testifying of Jesus Christ, His eternal Son.