How is Jesus a true God?

Then, having thus brought us to "His Son Jesus Christ," John says very pointedly, "This [or, He] is the true God, and eternal life." No stronger affirmation of His Deity could we have. Also He is the eternal life, and, as we have seen, the Source of it for us.

What a marvellous summary of the Epistle is this brief verse! The life has been manifested, and Him that is true made known in the coming of the Son of God. As the fruit of His coming we have received an understanding, so that we may be able to appreciate and receive all that has come to light. But then not only is "Him that is true" revealed, and we rendered capable of knowing Him, but we are in Him, by being in the One who has revealed Him. Apart from this we might have been merely wondering onlookers, without vital connection with God. But, thank God, that vital connection exists. And the One, in whom we are, is the true God and eternal life.

The opening words of the first verse carry us back to the most remote moment that our minds are capable of conceiving: the moment when there began the first thing that ever had a beginning: the moment on the further side of which there was only — GOD. In that moment of "beginning" the Word "was," that is, existed. He did not begin then; He existed then. His eternal Being is proclaimed, and we are carried back before the opening words of Genesis 1. Further He was "with God." Our minds are still back at that remote moment, and we discover that then He was possessed of distinct Personality. The Word is not a title of the Godhead in a general way, apart from any special distinction, for in being "with God" a special, distinctive place is definitely stated.

This being so, the reasoning mind would be inclined to argue: then we cannot speak of the Word as being God in any full or proper sense; even if He is not exactly a creature, seeing He existed before creation. Such reasoning is flatly contradicted by the closing words of verse 1, "the Word was God." Essential Deity was His. Attempts have been made to weaken the force of this great statement, and translate it, "the Word was Divine," or, "the Word was a god," based upon the omission of the definite article; i.e., it does not say, "the Word was the God." But we are told by those who know the Greek that there is in that language no indefinite article, and the word translated "God" is a strong one, denoting proper and absolute Deity; and had it stated that the Word was the God, it would have confined Deity to the Word and excluded therefrom the other Persons of the Godhead. The words are chosen with Divine exactitude: the Word was properly and absolutely God.

To fully safeguard the divine glory of the Son, the Spirit of God adds, "The Word was God." If the Son has become Man, God has taken care to secure His glory in His word, lest occasion should be taken of His condescension to deny His glory. And how often has this very Scripture been used to assert the Deity of the Son when men have denied it. Fulness of Godhead is here claimed for Jesus by the Holy Spirit; although distinct in Person from the Father and the Spirit, the Word was God.

All this evidently flows out of the life eternal which we have if we believe on Him. This it is which is called in an unusual expression "the life of God" in Eph. 4:18, but "Christ our life" in Col. 3:3-4, and similar language in Gal. 2:20. For that matter John so remarkably intermingles God and Christ, that one can hardly say which of the two is precisely intended. But this is done expressly and for excellent reason: the Son is as truly God as the Father; and we are not allowed to forget it. His so writing is not from any want of care. The apostle John knew well what he was doing, and meant to say as he wrote. Only foolish men that have great confidence in themselves would dare to think otherwise of an inspired man. It is because the Father and the Son are God. Christ though become man remains just as truly God as any other in the Godhead. By His humiliation to vindicate God and bless man He never forfeited His divine glory for an instant. He was the true God when He deigned to be born of woman. Yet we know what a new-born child is, how entirely dependent upon its mother or its nurse. Is there any creature in the world so indebted to loving care as a human babe? But Christ even then was the true God just as much as when He raised Lazarus or any other from the dead. And when He died He was just the same, though on the opposite side of circumstances. He could not cease to be true God; this was not touched, nor at all affected by His dying. Even in a man the soul and the spirit are not affected by death; it is but severing the link between the body and the inner man. So for the Lord Jesus, He was always the Son. Jesus Christ no doubt was His name after He became man; but He is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen; just as truly as the Father and the Holy Spirit, Who never became incarnate.

Here, then, we are confronted with the unfathomable mystery of the person and being of the Lord Jesus Christ as uniting in Himself both Godhead and humanity. As God, life is as essentially His own—as eternal and self-existent in Him, as in the Father Himself (John 1:4); but as to His humanity, born in time, the privilege of having life in Himself as it is in the Father, is a derived result of that mysterious union into which the humanity of the Lord has been taken with His divinity. That life which is proper to God dwells as fully in the incarnate Son as in the Godhead itself, according to that other Scripture (Col. 2:9), which declares that "in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily."

First, then, we lay it down as undeniable scripture truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son Of God as God. This is the express testimony of the Father Himself—”But. to the Son He says, Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8). Is it not clear from this express declaration from the Father’s own lips, that the Son is God, and God as being the Son? How else is He “the brightness of God’s glory, and the express image of His Person”? (Hebrews 1:3) The human nature of Jesus was not “the brightness of God’s glory,” for how could a created, finite nature represent the brightness of the glory of the infinite, self-existent I AM? Nor could the nature assumed in the womb of the Virgin be “the express image of God’s Person.” The Person of God must necessarily be divine, and the express image of it must be necessarily divine also.

Jesus, the Son of God, was “In the beginning,” eternal in His being, and yet distinct in Person, for “The Word was with God.” The fulness of Godhead was His, for “The Word was God,” and the distinctness of His Person was not only in time, but in eternity, for “He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:2). Moreover, the creation is attributed to the Son, as it is also in Colossians 1 and Hebrews 1. How the Spirit of God delights to safeguard the divine glory of the Son who has become Man.

To separate the Son of man and Son of God is to dissolve Christ. See John 3:14-16. See again, 1 John 5:20, "We know that the Son of God is come, and has given us an understanding that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This [He, οὖτος] is the true God and eternal life." But Jesus is the name of Him who was born of the virgin Mary, and Christ is the anointed Man. And the apostle emphatically adds in contrast, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." There is a most striking passage in 1 John 2:28-29 and 3:1-2. The inseparableness of personality and the distinction of nature is very striking - "Before him at his coming," "is born of him" in verse 29, so that we are "sons of God" (3:1), and yet the world "knew him not" - "sons of God" (ver. 2), but we like Him when He shall appear. All this blessed truth is lost if we dissolve, as I have called it, Christ. And yet I must know Him as a man: that is the distinctness of the nature, for He prayed to God and died, and yet He "was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death" - when in the form of God, "made Himself of no reputation (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν), yet, being thus, could say, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." "No man knows the Son but the Father." But he who loses these things loses the Son. Speaking of worshipping a man is losing the Person of Christ. And if the angels are to worship Him [Heb. 1:6], worship is a just service as to what is - for it is not our being exempt which is in question, but His being entitled to it. And there it is Christ, though His Godhead is brought out, yet as incarnate; for it is said, "when he had by himself purged our sins," and He is "the first begotten" (not the "only begotten"), and Psalm 2 is quoted where He is distinctly celebrated as Messiah - Christ, or, as in English, "His anointed."

On the other hand, the evidences of His Divinity are no less clear to the anointed eye. Who but God could cleanse the leper, open the eyes of the blind, raise the dead to life, and control the winds and the waves? Hence He said to Philip, in answer to his demand to show him the Father, "Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? the words that I speak to you I speak not of Myself: but the Father that dwells in Me, He does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake" (John 14:10-11). And what He was, what He is declared to be in the Scriptures is, if possible, still more conclusive. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:1, 18). He is said to be "the brightness of God's glory, and the express image of His person" (Heb. 1:3). In another epistle He is described as "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist" (Col. 1:15-17). Consider moreover His own words: "He that has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9); "I and My Father are One" (John 10:30); "Verily, verily, I say to you, Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58); and who can doubt that He claimed to be Divine?

In John 5, having healed the impotent man on the Sabbath day, the Lord was confronted by the Jews. In verse 17 we have the words of the Lord Jesus Himself: “But Jesus answered them, My father works hitherto, and I work.” Verse 18 tells us what we are to understand from these words. It is not merely what the Jews inferred from them, but what John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote: “Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.” This passage shows that the incarnation did not change the nature of His Sonship. Just as He was not one whit less God after the incarnation than before it, so His Sonship too was unchanged by it (See footnote on next page). John 10 shows this just as clearly. The Lord says: “I and My Father are one.” He is of the same nature, of the same essence, as the Father. The Jews knew very well what the Lord was claiming and they accuse Him of blasphemy, “Because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God” (John 10:30-33). As proof of His Divine and eternal Sonship the Lord there refers to the fact that He was sanctified and sent by the Father into the world, and that as having come into it He did the works of His Father (John 10:34-39). These works showed that as the Son He has the nature of God in all its fulness. In John 5 we read that: “The Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that Himself does,” and “What things soever He does, these also does the Son likewise” (John 5:19-20). As the Son He could be shown everything that the Father was doing, and as the Son He could do the same things Himself. But there is one work in particular which shows that the nature of the Son is deity: He gives life to the dead. “For as the Father raises up the dead, and quickens them; even so the Son quickens whom He will” (John 5:21). It is this attribute of Deity that Paul refers to in Romans 1 in proof of the Divine Sonship of Christ: He is “Marked out Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by resurrection of the dead” (Rom. 1:4 — J. N. D. Trans.).