The sonship of Christ

The Sonship of Christ

Exploring the Covenant Identity of God and Man

Copyright © 2018 by Ty Gibson

Design by Brandon Schroeder

Back cover photograph by Shawn Brace

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Unless otherwise noted all Scriptures are from The Holy Bible,

New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

NIV indicates The Holy Bible: New International Version.

Copyright © 1978 by The New York International Bible Society.

Phi indicates Phillips New Testament in Modern English.

Copyright © by Macmillan Publishing Company.

KJV indicates King James Version.

All italics and words in parenthesis within quotations are supplied.

For additional resources and other available formats, please visit thesonshipofchrist.com.

ISBN: 978-84-7208-861-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted

or reproduced in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage

and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For Sue

Every beautiful thing I believe is informed by you

And for Jason, My Only Begotten Son

Being your father is always fun and sometimes dangerous

Endorsements

This is a fresh, new approach to the Sonship of Christ. Much original thinking, yet perfectly true to Scripture. The title is accurate, but understated. The Sonship of Christ is the central organizing point that lays the foundation for the book, but the implications of Christ’s Sonship amount to a comprehensive treatment suitable for a college or Seminary textbook. Yet despite the depth and breadth of the subject, the book is written in a relaxed, easy style that is eminently readable.

Jerry Moon, Emeritus Professor of Church History, Andrews University

Wow! It’s like those optical illusions that are impossible to see until you see it, and then it’s impossible not to see. It just seems so obvious that it is astounding that it has not been outlined before.

Paul Geelan, Vice President for Administration,

North New South Wales Conference, Australia

The book is brilliant. Simply brilliant. Ty Gibson offers an insightful and illuminating treatment of The Sonship of Christ, carefully unfolding Scripture’s teachings with consistent attention to the overarching, covenantal, story of the Bible. In so doing, Gibson paints a gripping and stirring picture of Christ’s Sonship and why it matters, which corrects a great many misunderstandings and brings to the surface many gems that are often overlooked.

John Peckham, Professor of Theology and Christian Philosophy, Andrews University

Amazing! In typical Ty Gibson style, The Sonship of Christ paints a big, beautiful picture of God. This book is brilliant!

Brendan Pratt, Ministerial Association Secretary,

Australian Union Conference, Australia

This book is absolutely phenomenal.

It is a work of first-rate theology.

My soul is stirred.

Pastor Nathan Renner

Amazing! This makes SO much sense. Not only does it bring clarity to this theological issue, it makes the gospel that much more beautiful!

Pastor Manny Arteaga

The Sonship of Christ is very, very good

and needs to be published around the world.

Woodrow Whidden, Retired Professor of Theology,

Andrews University

Breathtaking! Groundbreaking! Beautiful!

Every person on planet earth must read this.

Pastor James Rafferty

AMAZING! Seriously, this is one of the most amazing books I have ever read period. Everyone who believes in Jesus needs to read this book. It is so good, I don’t even want to put words to it for fear of cheapening what’s currently happening in my heart. This thing right here is “wow.” Every single chapter is rich. The entire narrative of Scripture comes to life. The Trinity debate is placed on entirely new ground. In fact, I feel this book changes the debate altogether. Trinitarian vs anti-trinitarian debates always take place on the metaphysical battlefield and consequently end up nowhere. You have changed the location of the battlefield and consequently changed the battle. It is nothing short of brilliant. This book is one virtuoso performance of theological and meta-narrative bliss.

Pastor Marcos Torres

In the debate about the Trinity, we need The Sonship of Christ. Instead of compiling proof-texts, this book traces the significance of the Son through the books of the Bible, illuminating the rich troves of meaning in texts we often skim over. Reading it will draw you past the noisy debates and will deepen your appreciation of the gospel. I highly recommend this book as a work of biblical theology.

Pastor Kessia Reyne

Finally! We have a book on the nature of God that appeals to the head AND THE HEART! Reading this work educated me theologically while simultaneously inspiring me personally. If you want a deeper revelation on the beauty of the character of God, READ THIS BOOK NOW!

Pastor Myron Edmonds

In his book The Sonship of Christ Ty Gibson takes a fresh, yet biblically sound approach, of deriving a fundamental understanding of the Godhead as the narratives of Scripture reveal it; specifically the role of Jesus as humanity’s Second Adam and Son of God. The result is one of the most beautiful and coherent presentations of the character, ministry and love of the Godhead that I have read in a long time. Please read this book! It will open your heart to a deeper appreciation of our God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Pastor Jonathan Walter

This book is a fine example of how deeply biblical and theological reflection may help answer important questions regarding the person and identity of Jesus Christ. Written in a lively and accessible style, Gibson makes a clear case for Christ’s full, co-equal, and co-eternal deity, by examining biblical evidence on the meaning and theology of Christ’s sonship. Gibson’s book comes at a time when interest in the doctrine of Christ is rising. His book is an important contribution and should receive the widest exposure possible.

Darius Jankiewicz, Chair, Department of Theology & Christian Philosophy, Andrews University

Once I began reading, I couldn’t put The Sonship of Christ down. WOW! This book is truly stunning. Ty has unearthed an undeniable truth regarding the eternal nature of Christ and His covenant-son relationship with the Father. If you have ever asked how Jesus could possess underived life and still be called God’s “Son,” you will find the crystal-clear answer from Scripture in this amazing book. Without doubt, the exposure of this truth will have a profound impact on Christendom.

Shelley J. Quinn, Author, Speaker, and 3ABN Program Development Manager

I simply cannot contain my enthusiasm for the message of this book. Ty’s approach to the ancient question of the simultaneous Divinity and Sonship of Jesus Christ is refreshing, biblical, and, to me, entirely persuasive. I pray this book gets the widespread attention and affirmation it deserves. The Sonship of Christ is, above all, a joyous exploration and celebration of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. Thank you, Ty!”

Pastor David Asscherick

“Daughters of Eve, after all you’ve been through, I want you to know you were in my thoughts every sentence along the way.”

preface

KIDS KNOW STUFF

This book was written purely by accident.

No kidding.

It seems to have written itself. Yes, I was involved in the process, painfully so at times. But my next book was going to be about something else. In midstream, I got diverted, then obsessed, then overwhelmed by an unexpected vision of God’s beauty, and I had to follow the light wherever it might lead. There were so many people asking the same basic question—people in Germany and Australia, Spain and California, and at the Village Market in Collegedale, Tennessee—that I started composing notes and answering emails, until, next thing I knew, this book popped out of my computer.

So here it is.

The Sonship of Christ

Exploring the Covenant Identity of God and Man

Admittedly, it’s not a super catchy title, but it is very specific to the content of the book. So I’m hoping the title, and the subtitle, will become extremely meaningful to you before our journey’s end. As I chased the thread woven through the pages ahead, before I knew it more than 100,000 words had been written. “Yikes! Stop already,” I said to myself. So I stopped, and I edited. I didn’t want to bury or bore you, so I cut the thing down to 43,459 words. That’s manageable. In fact, at an average reading speed of 200 words per minute, you can get through this little volume in about three and a half hours. No sweat. That’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I am confident it will be well worth your time.

Another thing about the title: yes, I am aware, extremely so, that “Sonship” is a boy word.

Daughters of Eve, after all you’ve been through, I want you to know you were in my thoughts every sentence along the way. Please keep in mind throughout this exploration that everything of which we speak regarding sons is equally applicable to daughters. Throughout the biblical narrative, Sonship is a covenant mechanism for tracing the lineage of Christ. Point is, my dear sisters, you are not excluded from any of the glorious implications of the biblical Sonship theme any more than men are excluded from the biblical portrayals of God’s church as a woman and ultimately as a bride. Men along with women are represented by the bride, and women as well as men are represented by Sonship.

I’m so excited about The Sonship of Christ that I can’t wait for you to read it. Please email me at [e-mail] and let me know what you think. I am praying, just so you know, that the

ideas you are about to encounter will blow your mind and take you to a whole new level of biblical comprehension.

Finally, since books are expected to have introductions, here’s mine:

Children tend to know more than adults—not more in mass, but more in meaning. As we grow older and “smarter” we tend to forget profound things nobody ever had to tell us. So this book is a wink and a nod to a little boy who intuitively sensed the essential make up of reality when he asked the rather brilliant question, “If we was created, well, that must mean God was alone before we was here, so how could God be nice way back then if there weren’t nobody to be nice to? Maybe God weren’t never alone.”

Precisely, little guy.

Contents

endorsements 7

preface: kids know stuff 12

contents 17

TWO IDENTITIES 18

READING SCRIPTURE ON ITS OWN TERMS 24

A PROPHECY OF PROGENY 30

ISRAEL, MY SON 38

DAVID, MY SON 46

SOLOMON, MY SON 54

COVENANT IDENTITY 60

THE GRAND REENACTMENT 68

MATTHEW’S GOSPEL—SON OF ABRAHAM 76

LUKE’S GOSPEL—SON OF ADAM 88

JOHN’S GOSPEL—ONLY BEGOTTEN SON 96

ROMANS—GOD’S FIRSTBORN SON 112

HEBREWS—OUR ETERNAL BROTHER 128

SON OF MAN 138

THE LAST ADAM 158

ETERNAL COVENANT PLEDGE 180

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 192

THE GENIUS OF THREE 202

CUTTING DEEP INTO GOD 218

THE UNFORCER 234

A COVENANT STORY 260

“The Son of God cannot be God in the same eternal sense that the Father is God, we reason, or else He would not be called the Son.”

Chapter One

TWO IDENTITIES

What does the Bible mean when it calls Jesus “the Son of God”?

Oh, no! Is this gonna be one those boring, hairsplitting theological exercises?

Actually, no.

In fact, if you will take this little journey with me to its end, I assure you the rewards will be rich. You may even find yourself deeply moved by the beauty of God’s character and awestruck by the utter genius of the biblical narrative. Even if you find the above question boring at first glance, I promise you our time together will not be boring in the least.

First of all, you should be aware that this question has challenged Bible students for nearly two thousand years. It’s not an easy nut to crack. Scholars have been endlessly intrigued and baffled by the topic. And it’s easy to see why. On the rather compelling premise that Scripture calls Christ “the Son of God,” various groups have arisen throughout church history insisting that He could not, while bearing a title like that, preexist without a point of beginning, nor could He eternally coexist alongside the God whose “Son” He is. Logic, they insist, precludes a

son from chronologically coexisting concurrent with a father.

You can hardly blame them.

Our normal understanding of “son” includes the idea of birth, and Jesus is said in Scripture to be “begotten” or birthed. Naturally, then, to be a “son” suggests a point

of origin and a point of beginning. Since Jesus is called God’s “Son,” doesn’t it follow that He must have been generated from God and, therefore, had a starting point

as a distinct person from the Father?

Certainly, there is logic to the perspective.

So I want to say to those who take this view, you will find no disrespectful or dismissive attitude from me. I affirm you for being studious and for using your brain. As Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” You have simply attempted to be logical and consistent, and I commend you for that.

But on the premise of your honesty and logic, I am asking that you take a serious look at what we will explore on the topic, because I think you will find the perspective in this book to be profoundly convincing. I will make the bold claim, in fact, that what we are about to discover is so obviously the truth regarding the Sonship of Christ, that once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it. I realize this is a lot for this little book to live up to, but please allow me to give it my best shot by taking the journey with me to the last page. And whatever you do, do not jump ahead. Take the material in its order, because, in our treatment of the topic, one piece of the picture is vital to the next,

and the next, and so on, to the end.

No matter who you are or what position you have taken on the Sonship of Christ, you have no doubt felt the tension and complexity involved in trying to make sense out of two apparently contradictory claims in Scripture.

On the one hand, the Bible calls Jesus God’s “only begotten Son” (John 3:16) and describes Him as occupying a subordinate position under the Father (John 14:28;

1 Corinthians 15:27-28).

On the other hand, Scripture also states that Jesus is “in very nature God,” insisting that He shares “equality with God” (Philippians 2:5-6) and that He is the One who “made” all things that are “made,” placing Him, by contrast, in the unmade category (John 1:1-3). He is even called “the everlasting Father” (Isaiah 9:6, KJV), the eternal “I AM” (Exodus 3:14; John 8:58), and “the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8).

The tension between the two identities is immediately apparent.

The solution needs to be consistent with both of these claims . . .

and worthy of our wonder.

“Most Christians have been taught to handle Scripture as a doctrinal textbook, with the assumption that it basically operates like an encyclopedia from which to compose a collection of theological propositions.”

Chapter Two

READING SCRIPTURE ON ITS OWN TERMS

I’m going to suggest that the reason we struggle to make sense of the Sonship of Christ is due to a selective and narrow reading of Scripture that ignores the overall storyline of the book. Not that anyone intends to read the Bible selectively or with a narrow focus. It’s just that most Christians have been taught to handle Scripture as a doctrinal textbook, with the assumption that it basically operates like an encyclopedia from which to compose a collection of theological propositions. So we don’t really read the Bible, per se, but rather we tend to comb its pages searching for verses, sentences, even partial sentences and isolated words, and we then assemble the disjointed mass of “verses” into topical categories from which we compose “beliefs.”

The Bible writers themselves seem to know nothing of this topical framing of truth. It is apparently foreign to the ancient Hebrew way of processing reality. They, by contrast, see and convey the truth in the form of poetry and song, symbol and story—mostly story, since even the poems, songs, and symbols are enlisted to tell the story.

When the Bible is studied in a prooftext manner that overlooks context, it is possible, of course, to harness its many “verses” to formulate just about any “doctrine” a person is inclined to believe. Bible study, with this approach, is a rather subjective exercise in which I look for “verses” to support a premise that I usually bring to the Bible—and, no surprise, I find the support I’m looking for.

Using the prooftext approach to Scripture, we can easily, and with good intention, take hold of the word “son” as it occurs in reference to Jesus and then proceed to reason, quite apart from the biblical narrative, that He must have emerged from God sometime, long, long ago. The “Son of God” cannot be God in the same eternal sense that the “Father” is, we reason, or else He would not be called “the Son.”

Then, in order to deal with the other “verses” that present Jesus as God, we are obliged to venture into more philosophical, abstract explanations that Scripture itself does not offer. We say things along the line of, “Yes, Jesus always existed in the Father before He was brought forth from the Father, so He wasn’t created by the Father, but rather emerged from the Father.” And we feel like we’ve said something meaningful and deep, although we don’t really have any idea what we’ve said and we know the Bible, of course, says no such thing. But when we use a prooftext method that is not careful to notice context, we have no choice but to fill in the gaps with speculations that are not inherent to the text. In other words, we have to make stuff up.

Of course, we can’t blame people for trying to make sense of difficult language. Operating within the prooftext methodology, focusing on a few trees while failing to see the whole forest, it really is quite challenging to make heads or tails out of “God” being “begotten” as “God’s Son.” So we either downplay or over interpret the verses that don’t fit. Those who take the opposing view generally respond by assembling their own list of verses and offering their own strained interpretations. So we end up stranded on a prooftext impasse, my chosen texts against yours and yours against mine.

But there is a solution, and it is very clearly seen to be the solution once we engage with it and see where it leads:

Read the Bible.

The whole thing.

On its own terms.

When we read the Bible as an unfolding narrative—as the big story it actually is—with key characters played out in an overarching, intentional plot line, the meaning of the Sonship of Christ becomes unmistakably evident. In other

words, if we really want to understand the sense in which Jesus is the Son of God, we need to pan out from our selected verses to take in the grand historical tale the prophets are telling.

When in doubt, pan out.

And when we do that—wow!—a whole new world of biblical understanding opens before us, and there is no need for strained interpretations. We just see it. The story tells us the truth in ways that micromanaging individual verses never can.

So let’s do just that. Let’s read the Bible on its own terms and see where it leads.

This is going to be exciting.

“When we use a prooftext method that is not careful to notice context, we have no choice but to fill in the gaps with speculations that are not inherent to the text. In other words, we have to make stuff up.”

Chapter Three

A PROPHECY OF PROGENY

The biblical story opens with God creating Adam and Eve.

They are the first human beings.

All other humans come from them.

There is an immediately evident pattern to the narrative: creation, procreation.

God created Adam and Eve in God’s “own image” and then Adam, with no small amount of help from Eve, “begot a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Genesis 1:27; Genesis 5:3).

And this Adam fella, well, he is the first “son of God”

in the biblical narrative, and he’s the initial character in

the story that gives meaning to the Sonship identity that is woven throughout the rest of the Bible. When we skip forward in the narrative to the New Testament, the deliberate intent of the “son” theme becomes evident. In Luke’s genealogy of Jesus, each person in the lineage is called the “son” of some human father, until we get all the way back to Adam, the first man, who is distinguished from all the others like this:

. . . Adam, the son of God. Luke 3:38

Do you see what just happened? The New Testament deliberately loops all the way back to the opening of the biblical story in order to tell us who Jesus is, and it does so by telling us who Adam was. There’s Adam, and there’s Jesus. And these two figures constitute the premise of the entire biblical story, as we will see with greater and greater clarity as we proceed.

From the outset of the story, God has a “son,” and his name is Adam. God has a daughter, too, and she forms a vital thread of the story, as well, which will soon become evident. For now, we are interested in tracing the biblical thread of “son” in order to comprehend the Sonship of Jesus.

According to Luke, Adam is the “the son of God” in a more foundational sense than any of the human beings that follow him.

Why?

Well, quite simply because he is the first of his kind, the first human, from whom all others will emerge and receive their identity.

Adam and Eve were created.

Everyone else was procreated.

That’s how the biblical story begins.

Adam was the head of the human race, from whom all of humanity would receive their “likeness.” Beginning with him, the “image” of God was to be passed on from generation to generation, creating an ever-widening circle of human beings with the capacity to love like God loves, living in God’s “image” or “likeness.” That was the divine plan in humanity’s creation. There was to be a succession of sons and daughters who would pass on God’s image. Again, for clarity:

God created Adam and Eve in God’s “own image” (Genesis 1:27).

Then Adam “begot a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Genesis 5:3).

What a wonderful plan!

But right here the story makes a tragic shift. An interruption was imposed upon the plan:

 an interruption we call the Fall of humanity

 an interruption in which the fallen angel, Lucifer, deceived humanity into believing God is arbitrary, restrictive, untrustworthy, and self-serving (Genesis 3:1-5)

 an interruption that nearly effaced the “image” of God from “the son of God,” thus disrupting the capacity of God’s son to transmit God’s image from generation to generation

And because there was an interruption, an intervention was needed:

 an intervention that would have to happen from the inside of the human situation