The scripture for today, February 23 (2/23), is 1st John 2:23 as found in the New Testament of the Bible:
“No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”
This verse tells us the Son and Father are one. Isaiah 9:6 calls the child to be born both the Son and the Father and Mighty God. The Son gives birth to the Father; the Father gives birth to the Son. In other words, God is self-existent and one.
When you speak into a tape recorder and your voice then comes out of that machine for other people to hear, that doesn’t make you two. You are still one; you have just chosen to put your voice in something where you can be heard by people away from you. That tape recording is just another form of you. You can also put your voice and body in a movie. That doesn’t make two of you ~ one on the screen and one in your physical body. You are still one.
God is One, and yet he revealed a part of himself in a burning bush to Moses just like you revealed a part of yourself in the tape recorder or movie. Does that mean there were two Gods ~ one in heaven and one in the bush? No. God can and has sometimes revealed himself in different ways. Remember how he walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden?
Some say, “If Jesus was God on earth, when he died, God was dead.” No. That temporary body was dead, but God’s Spirit, God’s Soul, God’s being continued to live. Jesus, the Word of God, did not depend on a body to be alive.
Why would Jesus be called the Son of God, since he was not a son created in the literal way we have sons? You have thoughts, and those thoughts have existed as long as you have. But you still created those thoughts. When your thoughts become hearable or seeable, people call that your “brainchild.” In that same sense, Jesus was God’s “brainchild” ~ God’s thoughts in hearable and seeable form.
How was he the only begotten Son? God has only one Word ~ the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3). When God spoke the world into existence, that was Jesus. Every time God spoke, that was Jesus.
Isaiah 9:6 says the Son shall be called Mighty God and Everlasting Father. And so he was. And so he is.
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