What is the Son in the Trinity?

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.

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.

Finally, as though to forbid for ever any comparison of Personalities or of glories in the Godhead, or in our conceptions of the Deity, He says "the Word was God." Whatever language the Lord used of Himself after He took a servant's form, or whatever terms might apply when He had become a Man, we should be utterly wrong in supposing that He held an inferior place in Deity before He came. This last clause in our verse is absolutely destructive of any idea of an inferior place in Godhead. "The Word was God"; and God cannot be inferior to God.

In the beginning, then, before there was any creature, was the Word, and the Word was with God. There was distinct personality in the Godhead, therefore, and the Word was a distinct person Himself (not, as men dreamt, an emanation in time, though eternal and divine in nature, proceeding from God as its source). The Word had a proper personality, and at the same time was God — "the Word was God." Yea, as the next verse binds and sums up all together, He, the Word, was in the beginning with God. The personality was as eternal as the existence, not in (after some mystic sort) but with God. I can conceive no statement more admirably complete and luminous in the fewest and simplest words.

Then, in verse 2, His distinctive personality with God in the beginning is affirmed, the emphatic pronoun being used in the original to identify Him beyond dispute with the Word: "He [this very One, just named as the Word] was in the beginning with God." We learn, therefore, our hearts meanwhile being charged with adoration, that the Word Who became flesh was not in the beginning an abstract quality or attribute, nor a special emanation of the Deity, but a Person existing with God; and moreover, that this Word was God Himself. Thus, the Word was not a personal distinction of God, but a distinct Person with God, as well as and as truly as He was God Himself. We do not read God was the Word, but the Word was God; let us carefully store in our hearts this distinctiveness of expression.

He Who Was Son in Deity Takes up Perfect Manhood into Union with His Person.

He took up perfect manhood into union with His Person. His incarnation did not in the least detract from His eternal deity nor from His eternal relationship in the Godhead, but only gave to His humanity His infinite perfection. So in manhood He was Son as He ever was in that eternal, unchanging and unchangeable relationship which He had with the Father in the Godhead.

As to the meaning of the term, "the WORD," it brings before us the fact that "He is, and He is the expression of the whole mind that subsists in God." All that God is, is therefore revealed in Him; and hence it was said, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." (v. 18.) Only here, He who was the Word is spoken of as the only begotten Son. As the Word He is, and He is the expression of the whole mind of God; but as the Son, the eternal Son, He is, in incarnation, the revealer of the Father.

The great mistake some make is that they consider that since in human relationships a son comes after his father, then Christ as Son of God must have become Son. But the word "Son" does not imply derivation at all. The Lord Jesus was Son of the Father from eternity past, implying His place of dignity and unity and fellowship with the Father, and His being the Son is the background for sonship in human relationships, not the reverse. "All men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father" (John 5:23). We honour the Father as One who is infi­nite, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal. Therefore the Son is to be honoured precisely in those things. He is by nature the Son of God. Believers become sons of God by adoption (Gal. 4:1-7). They become children of God by new birth, which was never the case with the Lord Jesus, for He is not the child of God, and He is Son by nature, certainly not by adoption.

In a divine sense, I assuredly believe our Lord Jesus bears this title. He is called Son of God, when His full, unqualified, eternal Deity is expressed, when revealed as one with the Father and the Holy Ghost (three Persons in one God). For John says, "Therefore the Jews sought to kill Him, because He had not only broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father;" making Himself equal with God (John 5:18). And again, after speaking largely of Himself as Son of God, He closes with assuming full divine glory, saying, "before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). And the divine dignity of this title clearly appears from John 10:30-39, and from 1 John 1, 2. Indeed on the truth, that there is Father and Son in the Godhead, the very life of the christian seems to depend; for this life is fellowship with God in love; which will be found to be fellowship with the Father and the Son. "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father" (1 John 2:23). "Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God; he that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son" (2 John 9).

Each of these errors destroys the Trinity in Unity, the first by denying the Unity of the Essence, the second by denying the Trinity of the Persons. The true and scriptural doctrine of the Trinity steers between these two erroneous extremes, and holds a Trinity of Persons in a Unity of Essence. Now, the Lord Jesus, as the eternal Son of the Father, is distinct from Him as His Son, and yet necessarily one with Him as partaking of the same Essence; and the Holy Spirit, as proceeding from the Father and the Son, is distinct also from those Persons of the Trinity, and yet, as eternally proceeding from both, partakes of their Essence likewise. Thus we have a Trinity of Persons, but a Unity of Essence—One God, but eternally subsisting as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Eternal Sonship gives to the Son a Unity of Essence with the Father, and yet a distinctness of Person; thus, as the Son He is one with the Father (John 10:30), and yet as the Son He is distinct from the Father. So eternal procession from the Father and the Son gives to the Holy Spirit Unity of Essence with the Father and the Son, and yet a distinct Personality. Upon this firm basis the Trinity stands. But if you remove the eternal Sonship of Christ, you also must take away the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit; and by so doing you destroy the Unity of Essence and inter-communion of Nature of Israel’s Triune God. If the denial of the eternal Sonship of Jesus involve such consequences, well may we tremble at such an error as removes the very foundations of revealed truth. All other views of the Sonship of Christ lower His essential and eternal dignity and, however craftily disguised, tend to, and usually end in, Arianism. If His Sonship be not His eternal mode of subsistence, it must, in some way or other, be created Sonship, and what is this but Arian doctrine in its very root and essence? How the Son can be eternally begotten, and how the Holy Spirit can eternally proceed, is a mystery which we cannot understand, much less explain; but we receive it by faith, in the same way as we receive the “great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.” If once we begin to reason on these matters, we are lost at the very threshold of our inquiry. To believe, not to speculate; to receive the testimony that God has given of His Son; not to doubt, argue and cavil, is the only sure path, as well as the peculiar blessedness of a child of God.