Concerning various heresies abroad today which John was aware of, could you please clarify the fact that Christ was the eternal Son?
This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Unity, Origin and Victory’ (1987).
Well if I wanted to clarify the fact that Christ was the eternal Son, I think the first verse I would go to is 1 John 2:23: 'Whoever denies the Son, the same has not the Father: he that confesses the Son has the Father also.' Now I must be careful what I say, because there are folks about whose salvation we have no doubt, who nonetheless have decided that the term 'son', when used of the Lord Jesus, is a term that denotes an office that he took up when he became incarnate. They hold that he existed before, he was the second person of the Trinity from all eternity, but before he was incarnate the relationship he had with God was not that of son to father. So they believe in his eternal existence that he was eternally the second person of the Trinity, but they feel that the term 'son' was something that was given him at his incarnation. Their intention is not to cast any doubt upon the person of our Lord and they will quote to you verses such as 'Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee' (Psalm 2:7), suggesting that this was a thing in time, rather than eternity.
With all due respect nonetheless, I would point them myself to verse 1 John 2:23: 'Whoever denies the Son, the same has not the Father.' I take that to be a logical consequence. If there is no Son of God then you can't have a Father, can you? You can't be a father of nothing, so if there was a time when Jesus wasn't the Son, there was a time when the first person in the Trinity wasn't the Father, surely? And therefore, if you say the relationship, father–son, was something that only happened at the incarnation, you would be obliged to hold that God wasn't a father until then and that, I should want to say, is false. According to John 5, Jesus said 'My Father is working until now, and I am working. Whatever the Son sees the Father doing, that he does in the same manner' (see John 5:17, 19).
