The Only Begotten Son

Answer

It is worth testing in your own Bible, because the result is decisive. The phrase “the Son of God” appears again and again — confessed by the Father from heaven, by the disciples, by the demons, even by Christ’s accusers. The phrase “God the Son” appears nowhere at all. That is not a trivial difference of arrangement. “The Son of God” names a real Father and a real Son who proceeded from Him; “God the Son” replaces the relationship with a label and, in doing so, erases the very thing Scripture is trying to tell us.

And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

When Peter confessed Him, Jesus called it a revelation from the Father (Matthew 16:17). When the Father Himself spoke from heaven, twice, He did not say “this is God the Son”; He said, “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5). And the Jews who sought to kill Him understood the claim exactly: He had said God was His own Father, “making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). If the Sonship were only a figure of speech, that charge would have been groundless. The Bible’s own vocabulary, then, is our starting point: not a Son who is a title, but a Son who came from a Father.

Answer

There are only three ways the title “Son” could be understood. Either Christ was created and then called a son (as men adopt a son), or the Sonship is a mere metaphor with no real begetting behind it, or He was literally begotten — brought forth from the Father. Scripture closes off the first two and leaves only the third. The word John uses is monogenes, “only-begotten” — literally the only-born:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John repeats it: God “sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). The same word is used elsewhere of a widow’s “only son” and of Jairus’ “one only daughter” (Luke 7:12; 8:42) — places where it can only mean a child literally born. To take it as bare metaphor everywhere except where it touches Christ is to bend the text to a doctrine rather than read the doctrine from the text. The Son was neither manufactured nor merely nicknamed. He was begotten.

Answer

He must have been, for the simple reason that you cannot give or send a son who does not yet exist. John 3:16 says the Father gave His only begotten Son to the world; the gift was already a Son before He was given. Isaiah, centuries beforehand, announced the same: “unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6). And Micah locates His origin far back beyond Bethlehem:

But thou, Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

Paul calls Him “the firstborn of every creature” — first not in rank only but in origin, the One who is before all and by whom all things were made (Colossians 1:15-17). And in His own prayer Christ looked back to “the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5). The Son did not begin at the manger. The manger was the second of His begettings, not the first.

Answer

Proverbs 8 gives us the clearest window into the Son’s origin, speaking in the voice of Wisdom — whom the New Testament names as Christ, “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24, 30). The decisive words are “brought forth,” a phrase of birth:

When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth.

The Hebrew behind “brought forth” is chul — to be born, to be travailed into being. This is the language not of construction but of birth: the Son was brought forth from the Father before the depths, the fountains, the mountains, and the hills — before anything created existed. (The earlier line, “The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way,” verse 22, fits the same picture — to “possess” a son is to have one, as Eve said, “I have gotten a man from the LORD,” Genesis 4:1 — but it is verses 24 and 25 that say plainly how: He was born.) Wisdom then stands “by him, as one brought up with him,” daily His delight (Proverbs 8:30) — not an attribute God once lacked, but a Person at His side.

Answer

The distinction is everything, and it is not difficult. To be created is to be made out of nothing, by an act of power, into a nature unlike the Maker’s — this is how the angels were brought into being, and Adam, and Lucifer, “created” and “perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created” (Ezekiel 28:15). To be begotten is altogether different: to come out of the Father, sharing His own substance, inheriting His very nature and life. A man does not make a son out of nothing; his son comes from him and is of one kind with him. So it is with the Father and His Son:

For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.

The Father has life in Himself, underived; and He gave the Son to have that same life in Himself. The Son is therefore “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). A creature could be none of these. This is why the begotten Son is the Creator and not a creature: “all things were created by him, and for him” (Colossians 1:16). Begotten means He carries the Father’s own nature; created means brought from nothing into another nature entirely. Christ belongs wholly to the first.

Answer

Scripture speaks of the Son being “begotten” at three moments, and seeing them together guards us from confusion, for one principle runs through all three: in every case the Father is the source of the Son’s life. The first is the begetting in eternity already seen in Proverbs 8 — the same of which the Psalm says,

I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

The second is His begetting through Mary, when the eternal Son took our flesh: “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). The angel told her, “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). The third is His begetting from the dead at the resurrection — for He is “the first begotten of the dead” (Revelation 1:5), “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18). Paul preaches that the raising of Jesus fulfilled the very words of the second Psalm:“Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee” (Acts 13:33). The manner differs each time — without mother in eternity, of a human mother in Bethlehem, out of the grave at the resurrection — but the theme is one. No one disputes that the second and third begettings speak of life received from the Father; consistency asks us to read the first the same way.

Answer

He is equal by Sonship and inheritance, not by being “the second person of a trinity.” A true son is of one nature with his father; what the father is, the son is. So the Son, being begotten of the Father, inherits all that the Father is. He inherited the Name above every name — “being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they”(Hebrews 1:4). He inherited the same self-existent life (John 5:26), and in Him dwells “all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). He is rightly worshipped: “let all the angels of God worship him”(Hebrews 1:6). The Father even addresses Him as God: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8). This is full equality of nature.

Yet that same chapter, in the very next breath, keeps the order intact:“therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee” (Hebrews 1:9). The Son who is worshipped as God still has a God. After His resurrection He told Mary, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). Equality of nature does not erase the Father’s headship:

…and the head of Christ is God.

And at the end, when all is accomplished, “then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The Son is equal to the Father as a son is equal to his father — fully sharing his nature, yet honoring him as the source and head. This is not a contradiction; it is exactly what Sonship means.

Answer

Here we must speak carefully, for no single verse states in so many words, “Michael is Christ.” The identification is reached not by grammar but by comparing Scripture with Scripture— and when the texts are laid side by side, it proves a strong and consistent reading. The name itself means “who is like God,” and the title “archangel” means not a created angel but the chief or arch Messenger — the same Prince who has ever stood for God’s people:

And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people…

In Daniel, Michael is “one of the chief princes,” the heavenly Prince who alone contends for Israel (Daniel 10:13, 21). Jude tells us that “Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses” (Jude 9) — and we know it was the Lord who would raise that body. Paul says that “the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel” (1 Thessalonians 4:16) — the returning Christ speaking with that very voice. And in the war in heaven it is “Michael and his angels” who cast out the dragon (Revelation 12:7), the same victory Christ won. No one of these texts, taken alone, is a proof; but together they point in one direction — the chief Prince who stands for His people, who contends with Satan, whose voice raises the dead, and who leads the armies of heaven, is the Son of God. We hold it, then, as a sound and well-grounded identification, while being candid that it rests on the harmony of many texts rather than on a single verse that names Him outright.