Who Is This “Son” We Worship?

All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was
made. —John 1:3

Who is this Son we worship?

Thinking people naturally wrestle with the notion of an all-knowing God having “hopes” for human beings, and giving us free will. After all, the all-knowing God already knows all! He knows how his hopes will be realized. He knows what choices we will make.

Yet the identification of the Son in the verse above as the one through whom “all things were made” actually speaks to this apparent contradiction. The Son-God as the creative agent of the Father-God provides us with a precious insight—a picture, or perhaps just a glimpse, into the way that our God is simultaneously omnipotent and engaged.

The Son, also called the “Word,” was with the Father in the beginning. The start of John’s gospel says this (John 1:1-2), but the very beginning of the Bible says this as well. In Genesis, in the first three verses, all three members of the Trinity are present.

The Father is in Genesis 1:1. The Spirit is mentioned in 1:2. Then, in Genesis 1:3, God says “Let there be light” before any material sources of light have been created. The sun hasn’t been invented yet. Instead of the sun, this light is the Son. John’s gospel actually confirms this identity—calling the Son “the Light” just before repeating the essential point that the world was made through him (John 1:9-10).

Therefore, what we see in Genesis 1:3 is God sending in the Son—the one who is charged with making every part of the world according to the Father’s will. The Father is the author or designer of the world, while the Son is the craftsman. The Son is, if you will, the carpenter.

This is the one who gave us the Commandments. He identified himself to us in both the Old and New Testaments as “I AM.” Old Testament scripture refers to him as “Lord,” with New Testament scripture making the distinction that God is the Father while the Lord is Christ (I Thessalonians 1:1, for example). In other words, this “Son” has been active and near since well before Jesus. When the Son became human in order to return us to God, he simply embodied in the flesh the very same role he plays through every moment and molecule of the universe. In the flesh or beyond it, the Son is the loving link between God and his creation.

As scripture also puts it, the Son is the vine by which the fruit grows, while the Father is the keeper of the vineyard (John 15:1).

Of course, both are also God. Both are also one God—the same God. “Father” and “Son” are human terms that help humans hold onto these senses of the different ways that God is. Father-God and Son-God are simultaneously the same and separate, simultaneously integral and different.

What are the differences? One of them might be time.

The Father exists outside of time. Necessarily so. He created the linear phenomenon we think of as “time,” and he could not create anything to which he himself is subject. But the Son—while he, too, transcends time—somehow also descends into time to carry out his role. After all, we see the Son working in seasons and following plans that unfold in steps. The Son also pursues and communicates with beings who do live in time, such as you and me.

Another difference between Father and Son might relate to information or perspective. God the Father knows all. God the Son can know all, because the Father would deny him nothing. However, we see hints that the Son knowingly works with less than complete knowledge, leaving ultimate knowledge with the Father. (Mark 13:32 is significant.)

To be sure, the Son knows vastly more than we ever could. From our perspective, the Son is practically omniscient. From his perspective, though, there is one who knows more. Between “practically omniscient” and fully omniscient there lies a distance that, as far as we know, might be great indeed—as great as the distance between the vine and vine keeper. This is the distance before which the Son worshipfully bows to his Father.

The picture that develops from these glimpses shows us something so contrary to our expectations that we still have difficulty imagining it. Namely, ours is a humble god. The Son is as vast as the universe, but at the same time he is so close that we can barely conceive of his intimacy. Rather than standing above us as master, he wishes to stand beside us as friend (John 15:15). What we thought we saw as logical contradictions about the nature of God thus become resonant notes in Christ—harmonizing to voice the very song of his nature. The Son-God fulfills these two separate but complementary roles:

He is the king of all of the cosmos.

Yet he is also the workman, the reverential servant, the maker of creation. He is the one who is faithfully fulfilling every detail of his Father’s perfect plan.

Photo: Detail of MCC chapel courtesy of John Cowell.

The Way of the Scissors

“The teachings of Jesus are what matter. The rest was all made up.”

I heard that statement recently from a friend—someone I respect and admire. His belief that the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were all fabrications places him in some distinguished company.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, held the same belief. He cut up a set of bibles, clipping out gospel passages and rearranging them to create a bible more to his liking.

H. G. Wells thought the same thing. The writer known for fiction also produced a wonderful, comprehensive work of historical non-fiction—The Outline of History. Jesus is treated admiringly in this book, but he is also held at arm’s length. Wells, too, insists that the account of the resurrection could only have been a fabrication that was added to the gospel account after Jesus’ life.

These were intelligent men. However, they were also religious men—in the specific sense that they insisted upon a particular religious understanding of the world. One of the precepts of this religion is that God is irrelevant if he exists at all, because any “God” is aloofly uninvolved in the human world. Thus, Jesus could not possibly have been God living as man, and there could not have been any resurrection. This is the default religion of most who claim to have no religion today. For Jefferson and Wells, trying to reconcile this religious outlook with the surviving documents and the surviving facts of the early church required feats of illogic. The “way of the scissors” as exemplified by Jefferson—that is, the scripture of convenience that insists that “only the teachings are true”—poses at least two great and striking logical problems.

One is that Jesus’ teachings actually include references to his own divinity. In perhaps the most wonderfully ungrammatical statement ever made, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). His audience certainly got the reference—“I AM” is the way God identified himself in the burning-bush encounter with Moses. Jesus identified himself the same way.

Jefferson chose to leave this quote out of his scissors-bible, along with various other quotes to the same effect. In other words, in trying to focus on “just the teachings,” Jefferson went so far as to exclude many of those teachings. Presumably, he could “just tell” which gospel quotes were really from Jesus and which were not.

The other logical problem is this: From a historical standpoint, it would actually be easier to defend the statement, “The resurrection of Jesus is what matters, and the teachings were all made up.”

For the early believers, there was little more than the resurrection. They did not yet have the teachings. The news of the resurrection was what ignited the spiritual movement in the lands surrounding Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and this spiritual movement lacks an explanation if the resurrection is dismissed.

Paul wrote a letter before any of the gospels were written that records the creed he heard when he first encountered other believers. This statement of shared belief spoke of several things. It spoke of Jesus dying for our sins, rising from the dead, and appearing in the resurrected flesh various times to various witnesses (I Corinthians 15:3-8). Yet it did not say anything about the beauty of Jesus’ wise teachings. Those teachings would not be circulated until years later, after the gospel writers compiled them.

Still, both of these logical arguments are, in a way, beside the point. The way of Jesus Christ extends into areas of our lives and souls that lie deeper than logic. That is why the very idea of “the teachings are all that matter” is in fact the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.

If the value of Jesus is to be found solely in his wisdom, then that would mean Jesus came to persuade. Salvation is external, in other words. We listen to the wisdom, accept various pieces of it here and there, and in this way we put on the “Jesus lifestyle”—and that’s all.

But this is not what Jesus taught. Salvation is internal. It is a matter of the heart. Read again the well-known verse, John 3:16. Jesus came because Jesus himself is the vehicle by which people can be saved. He is the door through reality that leads to freedom. We give him our hearts and those hearts are transformed, so that we can awaken from the perishing life into the eternal life—an eternal life that begins here and now.

This transformation is the factor that the religion of the world cannot accept. That is why no purely logical argument can save someone from the bondage of a perishing life. No one can be changed as a matter of reasoning alone, because the reasoning mind is not powerful enough. That mind is subject to what the heart believes. Rather, we give our hearts to Jesus—once we recognize that the burning we experience in our hearts (Luke 24:32) is God’s call.

Our minds change when our hearts do. We give our hearts, and we see what we never saw before ... at which point we discover—perhaps slowly, like a new sunrise—that now we truly have become receptive to what Jesus taught.

It Begins With Belief

The person who comes to God must believe that God is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. —Hebrews 11:6

The heart continues to be the location of the most profound personal discovery I have made through the walk of faith. The center of my self has changed. Before, I always thought I weighed evidence to get to my conclusions. I always thought that my belief began in my mind. My “heart,” the spiritual locus of who I am—to the extent that I considered such a thing—then followed along accordingly. So I thought.

The truth I discovered is that belief starts with the heart. The reasoning mind is a powerful instrument for reaching conclusions, but the very scope of its possible conclusions are shaped by what the heart reveres—and every heart reveres something. I discovered this only in retrospect. My heart changed and my mind changed with it. I saw what I had never seen before.

Yet God didn’t take that heart by force. He didn’t storm his way in, as of course he could have. We are small—yet somehow we are also significant, and our choices are significant. The hope of God is that we care enough about the existence in which he has invested us that we will peer intently into it, catching a glimmer of what is truly real. His hope is that we care enough about the hearts he has given us to lay them before him voluntarily.

The choice is necessary, because that same heart is where deception flourishes. Our hearts chase after what is corrosive, imprisoning, or poisonous—in each case calling it good. Jeremiah 17:9 expresses this. The deceived heart that shapes what we know is the very heart that must be redeemed. For this to be possible, it must be that a part of us remains unstained—a part that can make this choice. There is a locus of the self even deeper than the darkened heart. It is out of this hidden part of who we are that we still call to God, and it is within this hidden part of ourselves that we still can recognize the One who calls to us. It is the small and still-pure part of the self that declares I do have a heart and I do hear God, so that with these declarations the One can begin to heal the other.

In other words, you lead your own heart. You choose, and perhaps tremblingly, you stand with the choice. You believe—maybe even before your heart does.

We saw this with Saul, who was to become the Apostle Paul. Before his transformation began, he made his own decision to identify the One who met him on the road as Lord (Acts 9:5).

We saw this in a negative way with the other Saul. Saul in the Old Testament was a king chosen by God, but this Saul made the choice to turn away. He held his own pride before men in higher esteem than his humility before God. And God honored the choice—as God honors all our choices. Thus, it was God himself who sent the very darkening of the heart that Saul was seeking (I Samuel 16:14).

All of us have God. He is the One in whom, said Paul, we “live, move, and have our being.” We might lose the touch, feel, and communion with him over the course of a life in which we cage our spirits within cynical or protective shells. But God is still speaking, still calling, still trying to touch us where we are vulnerable, and still daring us to be vulnerable to him—still ready to lead us through the process of breaking those shells so that we can live joyously and free.

We choose.

Our hearts might not even be in it at first—but that’s OK. The important thing, the transformative thing, is what gets into our hearts.