On a recent radio show, I read aloud an email question and answered this question over the air.
“Just checking a theology question if you don’t mind…So God was not made. That means God did not create Jesus and the Holy Spirit right? They were also always in existence? And, when Jesus refers to himself as the Son, and God as the Father, that is just an imperfect analogy but He doesn’t intend for us to carry it so literally that we think God created a son?”
This is an excellent question! Jesus always existed as God and as the Second Person of the Trinity, but NOT in the form of a man! Whatever He looked like before, whatever power He had before, He gave it all up when He emptied Himself of the form of God to come to Earth.
This is explained with significant detail in Philippians 2:5-11:
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be [f]grasped, 7 but [g]emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death [h]on a cross. 9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (NASB).
After His incarnation and birth through the Virgin Mary, He BECAME the Son of God.
In eternity past, the Second Person of the Trinity was not known as God the Son but rather God the Word
In John 1:1 we read,
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
Later, in John 1:14 says,
“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
In Greek (the language of the New Testament) “word” was sometimes portrayed as being beyond a spoken or written word as we understand it. They had a concept called “logos” and that is what is being translated here. This referred to a pre-existing, personified expression in eternity past.
A similar idea is found in the Old Testament. In the many pre-incarnate appearances of Jesus to people such as Abraham, Joshua and Jacob (who saw and interacted with what looked like a man, later to understand that this person was God) the word used is “messenger.” This word gets translated as “angel” in our English versions creating some confusion. Certainly there are other beings in heaven known as angels and yes these angels are also messengers of God. But apparently there was one special messenger known as the Angel of God, another way of describing the Second Person of the Trinity.
Notice the similarities of the titles, “God the Word” and ” God the “messenger.”
In any event, Jesus is NOT a created being and is called “Son” in reference to His incarnation.
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