Understanding Jesus as the Son of God: A Theological Exploration

In this sermon, Don Carson explores the biblical and theological significance of Jesus being called the “Son of God” in the context of John 5:16-30. He discusses how this title for Jesus does not imply a physical progeny of God but highlights the unique and eternal relationship within the Trinity. Carson also addresses common misconceptions and deeper biblical meanings of sonship in relation to Jesus and God the Father, emphasizing the unity and distinct roles within the Trinity.

---

Does God have a Son? It’s strange language, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be too strange for the ancient Greeks and Romans whose gods were copulating quite enthusiastically and producing all kinds of interesting progeny. Eventually, you get an Oedipus as king (Oedipus Rex) who kills his father and sleeps with his mother. Oh, in that sort of polytheistic context, yeah, gods can have sons. But the God of the Bible who is immaterial, eternal, just one God?

The very notion of sonship becomes a bit slippery. In many, many religions, sonship language means different things. Hindus will say, “I believe Jesus is the Son of God. On the other hand, we’re all sons of God. We all belong to the same sort of relationship with the divine.” At the popular level, at the street level, many Muslims think what Christians think by the Trinity is God somehow copulated with or had an affair with something grotesque with Mary and produced Jesus. The Trinity then becomes God and Mary and Jesus.

They view it as bizarre, if not blasphemous, and I agree with them. It is bizarre, and it would be blasphemous, but it’s not quite what Christians think. More informed Muslims understand Christians hold that there is one God designated the Father, and yet this one God exists in three persons. One God and yet it’s a complex unity. It’s not a simplex vision of God. It’s a bit complicated. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God.

We have come to refer to God in this sense as Trinity, which simply means triunity. It stretches our minds, and we wonder how we put it together. Endless tomes have been written trying to figure it out. The Bible actually dares talk about these things in pretty straightforward ways. The Bible itself uses “son” language in different ways, in different contexts.

For example, in one of the books of the first two-thirds of the Bible.… I explained the Bible’s divisions a couple of nights ago. There are sixty-six documents of various lengths. Thirty-nine of them are referring to the period before the coming of Jesus, and then 27 of them are from Jesus’ ministry on for the first 100 years or so.

This gospel of John we’re looking at is the fourth book of that second division. The New Testament, we call it (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). They are four books that explain who Jesus is. Then later books unpack what happens after Jesus dies and rises from the dead. One of the Old Testament books, a book that is called Job, the angels of God are on one occasion called sons of God. The sons of God (that is, the angels) present themselves to God and very striking.

The nation of Israel in the book of Exodus (the second book of the first division) finds God saying, “Israel is my firstborn son.” Clearly, it’s metaphorical language in some sense. There’s no suggestion that this is the result of some sort of God/human intercourse or something of that order. It’s a metaphor of some sort. Elsewhere, once the Davidic dynasty is established (the dynasty of David in the Old Testament about 1000 BC) when the king comes to the throne, God says to the king, “Today, you have become my son.”

What’s going on in language like that? Part of our problem is when we think of sonship today, we think CSI. We think these crime scene investigations where you discover what the true paternity is by doing a DNA test down to parts per billion of probability. But the whole cultural notion of sonship was a bit different in the ancient world.

Let me try an experiment here. You men (just the men), how many of you are doing vocationally what your fathers did at the same age? Go on. Stick up your hand. Look around, folks. Four or five hands. That’s it. You women, how many of you are doing vocationally what your mothers did at the same age? Same few hands. Do you see?

Whereas in the ancient world, in an agrarian society and a handcraft society, before the Industrial Revolution, before the freedom we have today to move around, before those things happened, if your father was a baker, you became a baker. If your father was a farmer, you became a farmer. There were quite a lot of designations that had to do with function and vocation.

Jesus is sometimes referred to as the carpenter’s son, because he was widely viewed as being the son of Joseph. He wasn’t, but he was widely viewed as being the son of Joseph. Joseph was a carpenter. When the so-called father died, Jesus took over the family business before he entered into his ministry. He came to be known as the carpenter himself.

That meant the way you went to school was different too. By the time you get to the first century, a lot of Jewish boys went to a synagogue school and got some basic reading and writing skills. But where they got their training for life, where they got their training for vocation, was bound up with what they got from their fathers or, for girls, their mothers.

If you’re a farmer, you teach your son when to put the seed in, how to do the irrigation, what kind of fertilizer you use, when you start reaping, how to build fences, and on and on and on and on. It’s all part of the training that goes into a farm boy’s life. Later on when there were still handcrafts (you’re not in the Industrial Revolution), the same thing follows.

Stradivarius Sr. teaches Stradivarius Jr. how to choose the wood and the right cuts and measurements and ratios and so on to builds violins. He teaches what kind of glue to make and how to make it and what kind of varnish to put on. He uses arsenic, which is nowadays illegal. That’s how you make violins. He teaches him everything he knows. Stradivarius Jr. is the father’s son. He is the violinmaker.

Out of this, in fact, come a whole lot of metaphors in Scripture that seem strange to us on first hearing. Jesus says, for example, in his day, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” Again, he is not thinking of intercourse taking place anywhere. What he is saying is God is himself so much the peacemaker that if you actually make peace, you’re acting as if you’re in the God family.

It’s not making a claim about your ontology, your level of being, saying you’re truly a god. At that level, it’s a functional sort of thing. Do you see? Similarly, if you’re full of hate and murderous revenge, bitterness, then Jesus elsewhere … in fact, in this book, in the eighth chapter … can refer to some people as sons of the Devil himself.

The notion is their conduct betrays who they are. The conduct of a violinmaker shows he belongs to the Stradivarius family. The conduct of bitter people shows they belong to the Devil family. There are all kinds of these functional uses that take place. But when you come to Jesus, things are ratcheted up in remarkable ways. There are a lot of ways we could begin to approach this question of who Jesus is, why he is called the Son of God.

But perhaps the passage that is most striking in this regard is in John, chapter 5. In this context, Jesus has just healed somebody. He overcomes the myths connected with the pool of water and so on, and he actually heals a paralytic. It’s a pretty spectacular miracle, but he does it on a Sabbath. This generates a certain kind of controversy. In the resulting exchange, we are then told four things of what it means to confess that Jesus is the Son of God.

1. The Son insists he has the right to do whatever the Father does.

Verse 16: “So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.’ ” Do you see what Jesus has done here?

They say, “You’re breaking the Sabbath rule. You told this chap to pick up his blanket. On top of all of that, what’s even worse is you yourself were healing on the Sabbath day. If you wanted to do one of your miracles, if you wanted to play doctor, well, do it the next day. You’re not supposed to be working on the side.”

What Jesus could have answered is something like this. “Oh, you guys. You’re twisting the Sabbath rules. I mean, the Sabbath rules are given to prohibit work that earns money and makes a living. I’m not a medical doctor earning a few pesos on the side. That’s not what I’m doing. I did a miracle. This is the outbreaking of God’s work to change somebody’s life. It’s not as if I’m breaking a whole lot of Sabbath laws.”

He could have answered, in other words, just in terms of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate from the Old Testament Scriptures that talk about the Sabbath. He could have answered that way, but instead he ratchets up the whole thing and makes a turn on them. Instead of saying their interpretation of the law is wrong, he says, “My Father works. He works to this very day, and I’m working too.”

Now it helps to understand that there was actually a debate going on in Jewish circles in the first century. You can follow it in some Jewish writings. It’s an interesting debate. The question was this. Does God obey the law of God? God gives the law in what we call the Old Testament (the first two-thirds of the Bible). Does God himself obey that law?

The theologians debated back and forth. Some said, “Yes, of course. Of course God obeys his own law.” The other side said, “Yes, but God upholds all things by his powerful Word. He is in control of the whole universe. If he sort of takes a day off, then who is in charge of the universe? I mean, doesn’t the whole thing collapse? I mean, surely he doesn’t obey the Sabbath law. Surely not!”

The other side said, “Well, you know, we’ve broken down the Sabbath law into 39 categories of prohibited work. Among the things you must not do on the Sabbath is, if you pick up something inside your house, it mustn’t be so heavy that you have to hoist it up on your shoulder, because that would be work.” That’s one of their prohibited categories.

Another prohibited category is if you pick up something in your house, then you mustn’t carry it to somebody else’s house, because that would be prohibited work. In God’s universe, God is bigger than everything, so he never hoists anything above his shoulder. Besides all that, he owns the whole flaming thing in any case, so he is not taking it to somebody else’s house. He is withinside the rules. They said, “God is obeying the Sabbath.”

Now these seem slightly esoteric arguments to us today, but nevertheless it was meant to be a serious probing of the question, “What’s the relationship between God and his law?” Jesus cuts through the whole lot, because what he is saying in effect is, “Whatever God has the right to do, so do I.” Whoa. That’s no longer a question of dos and don’ts about law. He is now claiming to have whatever the prerogatives are that God has.

The whole thing is ratcheted up and now turns on his identity. After all, Jews could sometimes refer to God as their Father. They did. They never did so in a personal way where an individual Jew, so far as our sources go, says, “God is my Father.” But collectively, they regularly referred to God as their Father. That comes from the book I quoted just a minute ago, the second book of the Old Testament where God says, “Israel is my firstborn son.”

Collectively, they saw God as their Father, but none of them would have said, “Therefore, because God is our Father, whatever God does, we can do too.” To them, that would have seemed bizarre, presumptuous, and slightly ridiculous. But here’s Jesus coming along and saying exactly that.

In other words, Jesus insists he has the right to do what the Father does. In this context, like the Father, the Son works on the Sabbath. That causes more umbrage. So we read in verse 18, “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath [a nasty offense], but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

That is it sounded blasphemous to them too, not just to Muslims today. It sounded blasphemous to them, because now it sounded as if somehow Jesus was not only making himself equal with God, but you have two gods. You’ve now abandoned monotheism (that is, belief in one God). You’ve gone to ditheism (two gods). What Jesus answers in effect is what kind of equality with God he has in mind. That brings us to the second point.

2. The Son insists he is subordinate to the Father, but it is a remarkably carefully defined subordination.

Now if there is any place in this series of talks on Jesus in John’s gospel that stretches what Hercule Poirot would call “the little grey cells,” this is it. The Son insists he is subordinate to his Father, but it is a uniquely defined subordination.

Listen to what he says, first of all, in verse 19. The argument goes all the way to verse 23. “Jesus gave them this answer: ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing …’ ” In other words, Jesus does not want to present himself as being God number two, with God number one doing something over here and God number two doing something over here. That’s two gods. The two gods might not agree. God number one goes this way. God number two goes another way.

No, whatever the Son does is in line with (and he is functionally subordinate to) his own Father. There’s a perfect unanimity of purpose and direction and will. Then (so far easy enough to understand) he says something that blows you right out of the water. He says, “Very truly I tell you the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

Oh wow. It’s true that Jesus can say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” That is insofar as God is the supreme peacemaker and we start making peace, we’re showing ourselves to be aligned with God. But that doesn’t mean I’m aligned with God in everything he does. But Jesus claims, “… whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

Now in that sense, I’m really quite unlike Jesus. I mean, for a start, I haven’t made a universe recently. We saw the first night that the Son is presented as God’s own agent, one with God in creation itself. Later on, we’ll see Jesus is presented as one with the Father in the final judgment. I have no place in the final judgment. None! None! No authority at all!

You start going through all the things the Father can do, and whatever the Father does, the Son also does. Now any man who claims that sort of thing is either telling the truth (and then he is hard to distinguish from God) or he is an absolute nutter. There really isn’t a lot of space between those two positions. That’s what Jesus says. “… whatever the Father does the Son also does.” He goes on further to explain, “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.”

Now this is drawn from the ancient world of agrarian living and handcraft and so on, but it’s stretched to the farthest degree. For example, you’re not going to find Stradivarius Sr. saying to Stradivarius Jr., “Here, I’ll show you what kind of wood to choose. I’ll show you the exact ratios. There’s no way I’m going to show you how to make the glue. Oh, no way! You have to figure that one out yourself, and I’ll bet you it will never be as good as mine. Not a chance!”

He has something to pass on. Why? He loves his son. The farmer is not going to say, “All right. This is the right time to plant. This is the seed you use” and so on. “But I’m not going to tell you anything about irrigation. Trial and error. In 30 or 40 or 50 years, you might get close to what I’ve picked up from my parents.” Why? The father loves the son.

In fact, in the Bible, what we have portrayed for us is this dramatic relationship in which the Father shows the Son whatever he does, and the Son does it. Let me just back off and quote a few Bible verses all from John’s gospel to show you how this plays out within John’s gospel. On the one hand, Jesus is regularly presented in John’s gospel as one with God. We saw one of those verses the first night. “In the beginning was the Word …” That is God’s self-expression. This self-expression was with God (God’s own fellow), and this self-expression was God (God’s own self).

A little farther on in John, chapter 8, Jesus says, “Before Abraham was (who had died 2,000 years earlier), I am.” Not even, “Before Abraham was, I was,” which would have been claiming some kind of preexistence. But, “Before Abraham was, I am,” taking the very name God uses on his own lips. “Do you want to know who I am? I define myself. I am what I am.” Jesus dares to take on the same name for himself. Again, he is understood to be blaspheming.

Then when he is talking to his disciples just before he is going to crucifixion, he says to one of them, “Have I been with you such a long time, Philip, and yet you haven’t known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Then two nights from tonight, we’re going to look at one of the most remarkable passages where one of the apostles after the resurrection who frankly doubts Jesus rose from the dead eventually is led to confess to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

On the one hand, the gospel of John is full of those things, but on the other hand, the gospel of John is equally insistent that Jesus in some sense is subordinate to his Father. Not only this passage but a little farther on in chapter 5, verse 30. “… I judge only as I hear.” “By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.” Jesus’ entire life is characterized by willingness to submit to the Father.

Again, the night he is betrayed, before he is going to the cross, Jesus says this remarkable thing. “I have told you now before it happens …” That is, that he is going to the cross. “… so that when it does happen you will believe.” That is, they won’t be shattered. “I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming.” That’s Jesus’ way of referring to the Devil and his own death because of all of the attacks of evil. “He has no hold on me, but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.”

Do you hear that? On the one hand, the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he does. On the other hand, the Son loves the Father and does exactly what he shows him and no more and everything he shows him. If the Father is active in creation, the Son is active in creation. If the Father is active in providential care over the universe, the Son is active in providential care over the universe.

It’s an astonishing claim, and yet it’s not two gods. It’s not moving off in separate directions. It’s not moving off as if they’re having a dialogue once in a while and disagreement of opinion about what exactly should be done in the universe. Rather there’s a kind of functional subordination and a perfect alignment of will, and this out of love. The Father loves the Son.

In fact, by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, it goes so far as to say the Father’s determination is that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father, because the Father loves the Son. The Son’s determination, as we saw from John 14, is that he should always do exactly what and everything that the Father does.

One of the most moving scenes in these first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is where Jesus is heading to the cross. Did some of you see the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ? It opens with Jesus in an agony in the garden of Gethsemane, and he is crying, “If it be possible, take this cup from me. But not what I will, but what you will.” That is the deepest, deepest reason why Jesus goes to the cross. It’s to please his Father.

Oh, it’s true to say Jesus loves us. Yes, that’s true. We saw last night that it’s true to say God loves us. That’s a wonderful truth. God loves us so much he gives his Son, and yet there’s a deeper, more fundamental love in God himself. Out of the Father’s love for the Son, he is determined that all should honor him as they honor the Father.

Whatever respect for, adoration of, trust in, belief in Jesus should be exactly the adoration, reverence, belief in, submission to you have toward God, for that’s God’s own good pleasure the text says. All should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. In other words, the picture of God in the Bible is that although he is but one God, he is complex … he is not simplex … which is also what makes sense of the statement, “God is love.”

Supposing God existed one God but simplex, no other in eternity past, before anything else was.… Supposing God existed in that context, what would it mean to say, “God is love”? It would be incoherent. To have love, there has to be other, unless you’re just loving yourself, which is one of the reasons why, although there are some very grand pictures of God and his sovereignty in the Qur’an, it’s not a book that likes to emphasis God’s love. It emphasizes his sovereignty, sometimes his grace, but not, on the whole, his love.

Whereas the Bible, precisely because God is love and he is not simplex but complex … in eternity past, the Father loved the Son … in the very being of this one God, there is other. The Father loves the Son and shows him everything, and the Son does everything the Father does out of love for the Father. I know that hurts the brain, but that’s the picture of God that is found in the Bible.

It’s not as if God is standing over against us in judgment, really angry, big, bad God, really mean-spirited, and then along comes Jesus who says, “Oh, it’s all right. Heavenly Father, I love them so much that I’ll die for them.” No, no, no. That won’t work at all in the Bible, because God … this triune God … does stand over against us in judgment, but he stands over against us in love because he is that kind of God.

It’s the Father’s plan to send his Son, and he wants the Son to be lifted up, to be honored, to be glorified. The Son goes to the cross. Yes, it’s because he loves us, but it’s because he loves to do his Father’s will. There’s a sense in which all of God’s love for you and me to change us is a spillover, an outflow, of the love that already exists in the very being of God from all eternity.

That’s why a little farther on in this book, in John 17, again still in the night before he goes to the cross, he prays a long prayer. He wants Christian love to be modeled on the love that is in the very heart of this triune God from all eternity. It’s very moving. We can’t pick up every line here. Let’s come to the third thing that is said about this Son. (I’m going to insert some hyphens of my own, okay?)

3. The Son insists that, like the Father, he has life-in-himself.

He has life-in-himself. He doesn’t just have life. He has life-in-himself. Now this introduces us to one of the strangest verses in John’s gospel (verses 24 to 26, especially verse 26). It’s a strange text, and yet it turns out to be quite wonderful.

Verse 24. Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me …” Did you hear that? Not, “Whoever hears my word and believes me …” But because all of Jesus’ words are just the words of the Father who sent him, he only says what the Father gives him to say. He only does what the Father gives him to do. If you listen to Jesus’ words and hearken to them, then it’s because you’re listening to God’s words and hearkening to him.

“He who hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.” I’ll come back to that in a moment. “Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.” Then verse 26: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”

Now at this point, my brain hurts. What does it mean to say of God that he has life in himself? Well, what does that mean? What it means is he is the Creator. He is not dependent on others for life. He has life in himself. He is self-existing. That is to say he depends on no other. According to the Bible, everything else in the universe does not have life in itself. It derives from God. God first made things, but God himself has life in himself.

Okay, that’s clear enough. There are a lot of texts in the Bible that insist God has life in himself in one fashion or another. Then the text says he has granted the Son to have life in himself. You say, “Wait a minute. There’s a point of logic here, isn’t there? If he grants the Son to have life, then the Son doesn’t have life in himself. If the Son has life in himself, then how can you say it was granted to him?” Do you see what I mean?

This text says the Father granted the Son to have life in himself, which seems, on the face of it, like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? Am I the only one who sees the contradiction in terms here? Over the centuries, Christian writers and thinkers trying to be submissive to Scripture, trying to make sense of this, trying to figure out what it means, the closest they can come up with (and this is as close as I can get, that’s for sure) is something like this.

This is an eternal grant. That is, not that it happened at some time in the past or some time in eternity. There was a previous eternity and then God granted this and then more eternity and then the creation or something like that. But it’s the very nature of the entire relationship between the Father and the Son. That is to say there is a oneness of purpose, a oneness of task, a oneness of vision. The Father wants the Son to do certain things. The Son does those things, both of them out of love.

The Son has life in himself because this is an eternal grant of the Father’s own will and mind and heart. That’s as close as I can get. Anything God does, Jesus does. If the Father grants life in creation, if the Father grants life to us today, another kind of life, the Son does the same. That’s why he came.

We have a Son who is functionally subordinate to his Father, but all his deeds and words are coextensive with his Father. All the worship and adoration due God himself is due Jesus himself. That’s as close as I can get to it. It’s as close as this has been revealed here. If you were to say, “Yeah, but is it possible instead that this ‘son’ language is just used when the eternal Word, this one who was with God, actually became a human being? It’s just talking about God as a human being, something like that.”

No. No, it won’t work. It won’t work. You may have noticed we skipped over a verse last night in John 3. There we’re told not only that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, but also he sent his Son into the world. He is already the Son. That’s as close as you can get to describing this second person of the Trinity. He is the Son of God. He does all the Father gives him to do. He says all the Father gives him to say.

It’s working out of this handcraft, agrarian society. There’s a oneness of purpose. You see father and son out in the field. Stradivarius Sr., Stradivarius Jr. working together in a perfect unanimity of goal and purpose. This is the Stradivarius identity. This is God. All of this plan, we’re told here, is toward this end.

Verse 24. Jesus says, “… I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me …” (That is, believes God, because my words are God’s words.) “… has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.” In other words, Jesus assumes people live in death. What he gives is the kind of life that enables you to escape death.

The kind of death he is thinking about includes what we mean by death, the cessation of this organic construct that is me standing in front of you dressed, more or less, compos mentis, more or less in clothes. He means more than that. This death is first and foremost death to God.

In one of the questions that was put up on the screen last night, somebody said, “You know, all this stuff about Jesus is good and all that, but supposing I don’t feel guilty. I don’t really feel a need for him. I don’t feel as if I need forgiveness.” Well, in one sense, it’s not too surprising you don’t feel a need for it, because the Bible describes us as being dead. That is, dead to God.

If we were perfectly alive to God, if God were real to us, if God were our passion, then it would be natural … the easiest thing, the only thing, the inescapable thing … to love this God with heart and soul and mind and strength, to be delighted by him, to think about him, to seek his ways, to be happy with his lordship, to recognize our creaturely dependence, to enjoy corporate worship. That would be natural.

But if we’re dead to God, then it all seems foreign and alien. Our very sense of not bothering is already a mark of how dead we are. It’s a mark (to use the Bible’s category) of idolatry. We have replaced God with our own gods, with our own cherished goals, with our own cherished self. This is portrayed in the Bible as not only tragic but as culpable. By nature and by choice, that’s the way we treat God. So we’re dead to God.

Ultimately, we’ll face his judgment, his own wrath because his own creatures rebel against him and treat him that way. Out of this kind of death to God comes all the rest of the panoply of social evils we acknowledge sometimes as sin from rape to pillage to whatever. But all of these things from the things that are secrets in the heart (jealousy and envy and nurtured bitterness and malice, those sorts of things) all come from being dead to God in the first place and having ourselves as god at the center, dead to God.

This text says whoever believes Jesus’ words and trusts the one who sent Jesus (because Jesus’ words are God’s words) has eternal life. We come back to what we saw last night. It’s bound up with this new birth. It’s bound up with this regeneration. God gives us some life by his Spirit. It changes things. It makes us alive to him again. We become aware of him. We see the guilt. We see the shame.

We want to turn from it, but then we discover too that this same God who discloses himself to us so we become alive to him has provided a way of paying for that guilt too. The same Son who speaks God’s words goes to the cross in God’s plan to take our sin himself on the cross. That’s why Jesus says, “If you believe my words, if you trust me, it’s the same as trusting God. If you do that …”

It’s not a question of earning enough brownie points to get in. It’s not a question of belonging to the right religion. It’s not a question of doing certain things or performing in a certain way. It’s a question of trusting this Christ who came and disclosed God by his actions and his teachings and supremely in his death, paying for our sin. If you trust this Christ and his words, you’re trusting the God who sent him. You cannot finally distinguish between them.

Such a person passes over from death to life … eternal life, life begun now, life in which you’re aware of God. Oh, it doesn’t mean you turn into sinlessly perfect or anything. It doesn’t mean that. It’s a pilgrimage. You start off, and you’re now aware of God as you never were before. This life passes on ultimately to eternal life, to resurrection life at the end. Then the last note Jesus strikes about his sonship is this.

4. The Son insists he is the judge of all.

We saw earlier that whatever the Father does, the Son also does. If the Father creates things when Jesus is God’s own.… Before he actually became a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son actually is God’s own agent in creation. So also God is the final judge of all, but this text says God has given all judgment to the Son. The Son, for his part, says he judges exactly as the Father decrees. He is entirely in line with what the Father wants.

Listen to the wording. God has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man. He is a human being. The fact of the matter is God as judge is not human. But in the person of his Son, you have this God-man who actually has experienced things as we experience is ideally situated to be our judge.

“Don’t be amazed at this,” Jesus says, “for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live. Those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. By myself I can do nothing.” He is still insisting on this sort of functional subordination. “I judge only as I hear. My judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.”

His judgment is the judgment of God. That is taught elsewhere as well. In the Sermon on the Mount (one of the passages people still remember to quote now and then), toward the end of it, Jesus actually says, “On the last day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, haven’t we preached in your name? Haven’t we done miracles in your name?’ ” Jesus will say to them, “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.”

That is, he is the final judge on the last day. The distinction here between those who do what is good and those who do what is bad has already been defined for us. This is not saying, “Provided you’re nice enough and good enough, you get in. If you’re bad enough, you don’t.” No, in the context, he has already told us what’s good and bad. What’s good is to believe in the word of Jesus, which is the word of God.

My mother died after nine years of Alzheimer’s. Six weeks after she was banged on the head from a mugging, we could see her personality beginning to change. She went through the various stages of declension. Six or eight months before she died, if you sang old hymns to her (because she was brought up in a Christian home), she’d give you a little squeeze back. Her eyes were still vacant, but she could hear. Hearing is one of the last things to go. She’d give a little squeeze back.

A year before she died, if you’d hold up pictures of her grandchildren, you’d get a little flicker or a little squeeze. The last four months, nothing. Nothing! No response at all. On the last day, the Son, whose purposes are exactly one with his Father’s, will say, “Elizabeth Margaret Maybury Carson, arise!” My mother will arise. He will say, “Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, arise.” They will arise. Everyone will give an account to him on the last day.

Those who have come in from a background full of self-righteousness and their own pretentions and their own self-perceived strengths and have never actually acknowledged anything from God because they are so full of themselves, they are described in the Bible as those whose righteousnesses are as filthy rags. They’re dead to God. They too will give an account on the last day.

Those who enter the righteousness of resurrection, the resurrection of bliss, are those (according to verse 24) who have listened to Jesus’ words and, in consequence, trusted him, trusted the one who sent him in the plan and purpose of God to send this Son to die for our sins and disclose God to us. Listen. Christians say, “I believe in the Son of God.” Let us pray.

We thank you, dear heavenly Father, for disclosing yourself to us in words in a Book, in great events that have taken place at various times across the centuries, and supremely in your dear Son. It is such an amazing thing that this Word described in the first chapter who was one with you from eternity has now become a human being, sometimes described as Immanuel, God with us. Such that all he says and all he does, all he speaks and the way he loves and what he judges, what he has done is nothing other than what you have said and done and judged.

We thank you that all of this has come about because of the overflow of your love for your own Son and of his love for you, determined to please you in every respect, even in going to the cross, that we might be forgiven. We hear this promise, “If anyone believes my words, then in truth he is knowing, he is obeying, he is hearing the very words of God. O Lord God, we do believe these words. We see here is the passage from death to life, and we say with other people of old, “Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief.” In Jesus’ name, amen.

Male: Don, if it’s okay, we might just jump into one of these questions. “Christians call themselves sons of God. How is this different from Jesus’ relationship to the Father and how is it the same?”

Don Carson: Terrific question. We’re sons and daughters of God in the same sense that Jesus in the passage I quoted earlier could say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” That is, there are dimensions in which we do act something like God and show ourselves to belong to him.

But there are all kinds of ways in which I can’t say with Jesus, “Whatever the Father does the Son also does.” I can’t say that. In that sense, his sonship is absolutely unique. That’s why the different writers of the New Testament documents have different ways of making that distinction.

For example, one of the writers … his name is Paul. He is one of the closest people to Jesus. He writes about 13 documents out of the 27 of the New Testament. He says Jesus is the Son of God, and we’re sons by adoption. That’s the kind of distinction he makes. In substance, though, what it really means is Jesus is the Son who mirrors what God does and says, exactly. “… whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

But that can’t be said for you or me or any other human being. There will always be a distinction in being. I will never be a creator in that sense. I have no authority to judge at the end. I don’t rule over the universe. But the eternal Son has all of these things. “… whatever the Father does the Son also does.” He is the one who gives life. He has life in himself. I don’t have life in myself. I’m a derived being.

In that sense, there are similarities all right, so much so that Jesus, after his own resurrection from the dead, can actually refer to his own disciples as his brothers. But there will always remain a distinction. Another writer (John’s gospel) doesn’t make the distinction between son and adopted sons. He makes a distinction between son and children of God. Jesus alone is the Son, and the rest of us become children of God, but not the Son in this tight, tight, tight sense.

The New Testament documents always make the distinction. There is some overlap but huge distinction. I don’t stretch back into eternity. Nobody can say of me I was one with God, and I am God, or something like that, which is exactly what is said of the Word, the Son of God, who exists from all eternity. It’s a good question. It’s important to clarify the difference.

Male: Thanks for that, Don. “Why would Jesus be born into a specific culture when cultural differences make it so easy for the modern world to misunderstand his teachings?”

Don: That’s a wonderful thing. I’m actually going to talk a bit about that on Friday night as well, but I’ll say this now. The biblical claim is that God disclosed himself to human beings in history. If he discloses himself to human beings in history, then it’s at a particular point in history with a particular group with a particular language with a particular whatever. Do you see? He does not come as an abstract, universal, human being, genderless, cultureless, language-less, tasteless, preference-less. He doesn’t! He comes as a first-century Jew.

There’s a whole antecedent disclosure of God to Israelites in the past. He comes at a certain, specific time and place in history. That means that to be a good reader of the Bible, to be a good understander of the Bible, it’s important to try to understand how the words were used by the people who wrote them when they were written.

You can’t just make association games and fit it in anywhere. That’s part of God’s graciousness in disclosing himself to us in actual history such that he could be touched and handled. People spoke to him, listened to his words, knew who he was. Although it makes it more challenging to try to understand things cross-culturally, nevertheless, we’re doing that all the time, aren’t we?

We’re familiar with that. We have to do it in Melbourne. There are enough different cultures here that if people make a good effort to try to understand each other across cultures in substantial measure, you can do so. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever have an absolutely perfect understanding of everything in the Bible.

But what’s God’s alternative? If he is going to come to us as a real human being, real human beings live in space and time. They live in space and time in a certain culture, at a certain country, at a certain place. That’s why Jesus came in a certain space and time and place in a certain culture. The entailment of that is it means part of our job is to try to understand the words and frames of reference and so on within the culture in which God disclosed himself.

Male: Thank you, Don. I think we have time for one more. “If Jesus is God, why does he worship God?”

Don: That’s a very good question as well. I’m not sure that worship is exactly the right word all the time, but he certainly comes and does exactly what the Father gives him to say. He honors him and reverences him. On the other hand, the Father equally has determined that all should honor and reverence the Son, even as the Father is himself honored.

Now God doesn’t say that to me. He doesn’t say it to you. In that sense, there is the insistence of the Father that the Son be reverenced and worshiped and the insistence of the Son that the Father be reverenced and worship. The way he honors the Father, worships him in that sense, is precisely by doing whatever he wants. “Not my will but yours be done,” he says in an agony and goes to the cross. That’s the kind of worship of God (by doing what the Father wants).

He is the perfectly obedient Son because out of love, he is reflecting the Father perfectly. That is the shape of the worship of the Son. The Father then is, in our own passage, equally committed to the Son being honored and revered. In the last book of the Bible (it’s called Revelation), it’s in high symbolism we sometimes call apocalyptic literature today. Eventually, there’s a spectacular vision of the throne room of God in the fourth and fifth chapters.

After that, almost every time God is mentioned, it’s, “He who sits on the throne and the Lamb.” That’s one way of referring to Jesus, because he was the slaughtered Lamb, the sacrifice. There is honor and praise to him who sits on the throne and the Lamb. Now granted that God is God, there is only one God. The Bible says of him, he doesn’t share his glory with another. He is not saying, “I am God, and I get worshiped,” and then a second class, a second inferior being, also gets worship. God doesn’t do that.

God is God, and yet this Lamb, this Jesus, is so associated with the Father that whatever honor and worship are due to the Father are also due to Christ. Within that framework, Christ honors his Father absolutely out of love. The Father out of love insists the Son be honored equally. That’s the framework of this Trinitarian faith, this self-disclosure of God as one God yet complex and focusing on God’s self-disclosure in Jesus.