The Christadelphian, December 1958, John Carter

“The Name of Salvation”

4—The “Name” and the Son of God

“He who will be”, the name God has chosen for Himself, is a “memorial” of His purpose to effect deliverance from bondage for Abraham’s seed. This was accomplished in type in the redemption of Israel from Egypt—in type, because Joshua did not give them rest and there still remains a rest for the people of God. Yet the experiences of Israel at the Exodus provide a striking and interesting parable of a a far more important redemption. The parallel between the two redemptions extends even to the names of the “leaders” of God’s people with the very important distinction made by the apostle that the Joshua (Jesus) of the Exodus was son of Nun, but the deliverer from sin and death is Jesus the Son of God (Heb. 4:8, 15).

It is the “seed of Abram” who are the subject of this divine work. The natural born, the seed on the basis of flesh descent, experienced a deliverance which concerned the present life: but the seed of promise “born after the spirit” (Gal. 4:28, 29) will enter into life eternal. To effect this the redeemer must be of their own stock. “He took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted” (Heb. 2:16–18). But the “faithful High Priest” is also “a great High Priest”: “seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:14–16).

“Son of man” and “Son of God”—the two titles define the relationship of the Saviour to men and to God. He was one with us in nature, but divinely begotten; hence, while sharing our temptations he exhibited a character that was perfect, holy and without sin. In this he stands alone; all others have confessed their shortcomings, but he could say “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” The superb magnificence of the man can so easily be overlooked. His challenge has the ring of truth about it.

A writer of two generations past coined the phrase that the Bible is not such a book as man would have written if he could, nor could have written if he would. We may apply the statement to the record of the life of Jesus. Would an evil man think of attributing the claim of sinlessness to Jesus? It would be beyond his thought. Neither could a good man ever conceive the idea of a sinless man, if it were not true. It is equally so of the one who makes the claim. An evil man would never think of asserting his sinlessness, and an ordinary man who is a seeker after righteousness could not make such an assertion. Yet in the gospels we find Jesus uttering the words as a challenge to his enemies. How shall we explain the fact of his sinlessness? He himself points to the only explanation in the context. He asserted his sinlessness as evidence that his claim to be the Son of God was true.

A statement of similar striking import is his claim “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”. Jesus had declared that he was the way to the Father, and that “if ye had known me ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him and have seen him”. It is a startling assertion that to know him was to know God, and we can sympathize with Philip asking, “Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us”. The answer of Jesus was a patient remonstrance with disciples who had been his companions yet had not penetrated to the most vital fact connected with him. “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?” (John 14:9). Then followed the simple yet unfathomable words of the close relationship of the Son and the Father, “Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (verse 10).

Here then was the dwelling place of God among men. The Father was the source of the power: the Son’s works were really His; the Son’s words were the Father speaking in him. In Jesus we have the manifestation of the Father; in him we have the word made flesh and dwelling among us; in him was realized the promise of the name that God would become salvation for men. It follows naturally that Jesus then speaks of the name. “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” “In my name” is something other than the concluding of a petition with the words “For Jesus’ sake”. “In my name” involves a relationship in the saving purpose of God.

The purpose of redemption in and through a Son of God is basic to Old Testament revelation. Only through God acting can salvation come, for man cannot realize it by his own efforts. When man sinned God did not arbitrarily forgive the sin. Sin is too radical, too far reaching in its effects, to be put aside easily. To forgive, for God, involved not only a resumption of relationship sundered by sin, but the removal also of the effects of sin. God’s forgiveness, in other words, embraces the removal of the evil that has come by sin. Jesus illustrated this when he healed a man. The onlookers were expecting Jesus to say “Be healed”, whereas he said to their surprise and to the consternation of some who heard, “Thy sins be forgiven thee”. But they were not idle words, and to show that the Son of man had power to forgive sins, he said to the palsied man, “Take up thy bed and walk”. Forgiveness involves that God will remove the evil in the flesh that sin has caused.

Sin is a moral lapse and involves the moral relationship with God whose law is transgressed and whose will is defied. It therefore involves action on the part of both parties. It requires on man’s part an awareness of his sin, a sense of repulsion toward it, and a turning from it. Jesus shows the required attitude in his description of the prodigal: he felt he must acknowledge, “I have sinned against heaven and before thee”. Till then he could not go home. The father waited and welcomed, but to have dragged home his son before he had “come to himself” might have changed the boy’s dwelling but would not have made it home. But God, in His wisdom, has required more than this. No one parable, and no one text, can give the whole of what God required. He needed the declaration that He was right in involving sinners in death, in the voluntary death of a member of the race. He required it in a sinless member of the human family, for in the death of the sinless one there could be no obscuration of the principle by it being regarded as punitive for the sins of the one sacrificed. But He required it further in such a one, that the offerer might be the Saviour—in himself an illustration of redemption from death, and empowered to give life to men and women forgiven for his sake. The vital necessity of identification with Jesus is evident. We must be buried with him by baptism into death, to be raised with him. We must suffer with him that we might be glorified together.

The first promise, while cryptic in form, requires the birth of the seed of the woman to suffer the serpent’s bruising, but to destroy the serpent. In declaring that the ravages of sin would be undone by the seed of the woman it points to the fact that he was not of human generation. It is difficult to find a reason for the language if we do not recognize a reference to the redeemer being the Son of God.

In Isaac’s birth we see a child of promise begotten by the inflow of divine energy in an old man and woman. Before this happened the flesh was dramatically repudiated in the rite of circumcision. In the blessings of the tribes, Reuben loses his birthright and Judah becomes the royal tribe, with the promise of Shiloh to whom the peoples will be gathered. But of all Jacob’s sons one stands out for his excellence, and the life of Joseph is a parable in dozens of details of the redeemer. At the end of all the selections made as the guide posts of the history of the book of beginnings, we come to Joseph. Seth, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob; and then, not Judah of whom as pertaining to the flesh Christ came, but Joseph the saviour of his brethren, is the theme of the historian. How fitting then that in the blessing of Joseph we find the promise of the divine sonship of the Shepherd of Israel. Joseph was made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob, and Jacob then adds the parenthesis “from thence is the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel”. Shepherd and stone — the figures run through the prophecies with a Messianic reference. The Messiah is of Judah’s tribe and is also “from the mighty God of Jacob” (Gen. 49:24).

The Messiah had to be a virgin’s son. The divine sonship is involved in the names bestowed on the Messiah: he is David’s lord (Psa. 101:1, comp. Matt. 22:42–45). He is “the Lord” and “our God” whose way is prepared by the baptist (Isa. 40). He is “the Lord our righteousness” (Jer. 23:6). The “messenger of the covenant” is identified with the Lord in Malachi 4. God, in a remarkable way, identifies Himself with the crucified in Zechariah’s prophecy: “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced” (12:10). Isaiah has a prophecy of Eliakim which Jesus takes to himself (Rev. 3:7) in which “the glory of his father’s house” rests upon him. The house is God’s house, therefore the Messiah is the Father’s Son: for he is a “glorious throne to his father’s house”.

In the Psalms Messiah comes before us in many aspects. In his sufferings he says: “I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children”. He shared the mother with his brethren, but his paternity was divine. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s house?”; that was the appropriate place to seek him, and zeal for it was later to “eat him up”.

Psalm 139 is particularly concerned with the Messiah’s birth: “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb”. He was fearfully and wonderfully made: this is true of all, but pre-eminently true of the one who was Son of God as well as son of man. The special regard of the Almighty for the Son in the formative processes of gestation are set out in verses 15 and 16. “Curiously wrought” points back to the skilful interweaving of the different strands of the vail of the temple, the word used by the Psalmist only occurring here and in Exod. 35:35; 38:23. The vail was “his flesh”. The Son of God had to be born on earth: the preparation was in the lower parts of the earth, that is, lower in relation to heaven where God dwells: “the lowest parts, even the earth”, the genitive being used in apposition. Paul quotes the phrase of the “descent”, or birth, of the Christ, where again his idiom is that of God’s manifestation. The Psalm ends on a striking note: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Who is this who dares to invite God’s scrutiny of his thoughts and his ways? Only one man could do that—the sinless son of God, who could also say “He is near that justifieth me”—that pronounces me to be righteous. We sing the words of the Psalm, yet dare any of us invite God to see if there be any wicked way in us? Only the one “curiously wrought” could say it in the fullness of the words’ meaning. It is appropriate that the Psalm of the sonship of the Messiah should end on the note of his sinlessness.

The divine sonship of Jesus is affirmed in the message to Mary. Efforts have been made to eliminate Luke 1:34–35 from the record; but to do so leaves a rent, for there are too many allusions in later verses which would be suspended in the air. Verses 26, 36, 39, 41–43 and 56 all derive their significance from verse 35. The paternity of Jesus was repudiated by Joseph, while God claimed Jesus to be His son (Matt. 1:20–23). But John’s gospel is the gospel of the sonship of Jesus. Here we read of the word becoming flesh, and of the revealed glory of God in the Son. John’s reference to his fullness of “grace and truth” and the whole context of John 1:14 take us back to the declaration of God’s name to Moses. “Show me thy glory”, Moses pleaded: and God caused all His goodness to pass before Moses and He declared His name. But Moses did not see God: He was hidden away; and John points the contrast between servant and son—the one in the cleft of the rock, the other in the bosom of the Father. God declared His name by setting forth His character:

“And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” That character was embodied in flesh—for the word was made flesh and was full of grace and truth for men to receive of that fullness.

The comparison of Scripture style in describing God in manifestation together with the recognition that the word was made flesh explains many hard sayings of Jesus. He was before John; he came down from heaven; he was the bread from heaven. John can comment after his ascent that “No man hath ascended into heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” (John 3:13). Hard as some of these sayings might at first appear, they do not involve the difficulties of the Trinitarian approach. Jesus was not the Son made flesh; nor yet the manifestation in flesh of the Trinity. He was the word made flesh, for he was the embodiment of the Father’s purpose, the Son of God raised up for mortals’ sake. Because he was the Son of God “the name” of God was revealed in him:

“Thy grace and truth became

Flesh for a saving name.”

In the supreme crisis of his life Jesus could say: “For this cause came I to this hour. Father, glorify thy name”. The heavenly voice declared: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again”, for the perfect manifestation in character was to be perpetuated in the perfection of the divine nature. The last prayer of Jesus shows the thought of Jesus absorbed in these themes. “I have glorified thee on earth . . . glorify thou me with thine one self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word” (John 17:6).

“I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me: for they are thine. And all mine are thine and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled” (verses 9–12).

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me” (verses 20–33).

The end is reached in the words: “I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (verse 26).

The name declared is revealed in the love of God in Christ, extended to those in whom the reciprocal indwelling is realized—God’s love in him, now in them, and Christ in them, for they are all one in the Father and Son.

John Carter.