(Soon we will begin posting on the Letter to the Hebrews. We have a few "odds and ends" related to Hebrews that we will also post, starting today.)
This is a question
that might not have occurred to you to ask: “When did Christ become the Son of
God?” Perhaps you assumed He was always
the Son of God, which is the view of most conservative theologians. Perhaps, as I said, it just didn’t occur to
you to ask. But the question comes up in
Psalm 2:7, which is quoted in Heb. 1:5: You are My Son, today I have
begotten You.
The question is,
what day is “today?” Logically one might
wonder if it is the day the Psalm was written.
Did David write this Psalm in light of the covenant God made with him in
2 Samuel 7? However you answer the “which
day” question, Psalm 2 almost certainly, in David’s mind, is related to the Covenant
where God says of the Davidic kings, “I will be his Father, and he shall be my
son” (2 Sam. 7:14). Whoever wrote Ps. 2,
the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, saying things that went beyond what the
human writer might have had in mind. It
is just one of those areas of Scripture where the prophet speaks as God prompts
him, and yet he wonders just what it means (1 Pt. 1:10-11).
The “day” that God
begot His Son comes down to 2 possibilities: either it was what the theologians
call the “eternal generation” of the Son (i.e. from eternity the Second Person
of the Trinity was always the Son, as the first was always the Father); or it
was the day of Christ’s resurrection.
Consider the latter
option first. Christ’s resurrection and
Sonship is linked in two NT passages. In
Rom. 1:3-4 Paul says, … concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was
born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of
God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from
the dead. Again, in Acts 13:32-33,
in Paul’s sermon at Antioch in Pisidia, And we declare to you glad tidings –
that promise which was made to the fathers.
God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up
Jesus. As it is also written in the
second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, today I have begotten You.’ Do you see the linking of Sonship to resurrection?
But note that in
both passages it is the “declaration” of Christ’s Sonship that is related to
the resurrection. As Romans says,
through the resurrection the truth that Jesus was the Son of God was declared
with power. That fits the fact that
Jesus, before Calvary and the empty tomb, was declared to be the Son of
God. John 3:16 tells us God gave His
only begotten Son to the world. In John
5:18 the Jews were ready to kill Jesus because He “said that God was His
Father, making Himself equal with God.”
He was the Son of God when He came into the world.
What we are left with is that He was begotten
by God in eternity past. It has always
been that way, that God existed as Father/Son/Holy Spirit. It was “today” in God’s sense, the eternal
God who lives outside of the restraints of time. The point in saying it that way is to
emphasize that it is a true Father-Son relationship where the Son is begotten
of the Father.
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