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Saturday, November 22, 2014

 

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The Doctrine of the Trinity:
P White


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Of the plan of salvation very similar evidence may be given. It was necessary in God's sight that a member of the human race should be offered for the sins of the world. Not the inconsistent sacrifice of a mortal body for the salvation of an immortal soul; but the sacrifice of a man, a person, for the salvation of men and persons.

It was for this express object that God did not provide Himself with an angel, as the writer to the Hebrews states:

"He (Jesus) took not on him the nature of angels" (Heb. ii. 16).

 

But God ordained that Jesus the "body prepared" should come in the ordinary flesh and blood of human nature. There is no suggestion that it was an action on the part of the pre-existing Christ to take the lowly nature of man; it was of old ordained thus in the plan of the Father: Jesus should be revealed as man, and as no other being.

Jesus, therefore, was partaker of the nature of man: "flesh and blood, that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death." If, therefore, Jesus did not die, i.e., Jesus Himself, the actual being, then salvation for man has not be obtained. But God has affirmed that salvation has truly been effected, and Jesus therefore did truly and actually die, and "poured out His soul unto death." God being the Fountain of Life could not lay down His life, and therefore it must be obvious by the necessitated death of Jesus that He cannot hold a place in the Godhead: it entirely subverts the beautiful plan of salvation of the Father.

SON OF GOD

It would appear from quotations that many conceive that the mere use of the words "Son of God" constitutes proof of the Divinity of Jesus. To the attention of such the 38th verse of the 3rd chapter of Luke is particularly commended, where it is stated that:

"Enos was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God."

If therefore Jesus merely by reason of His title was God, then Adam also by the same title is partaker of the Godhead! The mere title rather is evidence of the miraculous birth of Jesus, as having a direct begettal by the Father of heaven and earth; and precisely in the same way may the title be applied to Adam, who received his being direct from the Creator; nothing more can be signified in the title.

On this title of "Son" Bishop Pearson writes some very interesting words:

"Among all the sons of God there is none like to that one Son of God. And if there be so great a disparity in the filiation, we must make as great a difference in the correspondent relation. There is one degree of sonship founded on creation, and that is the lowest, as belonging unto all, both good and bad: another degree above that, there is grounded upon regeneration, or adoption, belonging only to the truly faithful in this life: and a third above the rest founded on the resurrection, or collation of the eternal inheritance, and the similitude of God, appertaining to the saints alone in the world to come: For we are now the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him. And there is yet another degree of filiation, of a greater eminency and a different nature, appertaining properly to none of these, but to the true Son of God alone, who amongst all his brethren hath only received the title of his own Son. . . . And so at last we come unto the most singular and eminent paternal relation, unto the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed for evermore; the Father of him, and of us, but not the Father of us as of him." -Bishop Pearson, Exposition of the Creed, vol. 1, p. 42.

 

Surely this definition is far from the Athanasian Trinity! It virtually excludes it; for in the future the redeemed saints, when they, in the final sense, become "Sons of God" in the highest degree in that "different nature" (2 Peter i. 4) will not be one substance, and therefore how is there now three substances in the one Person?

CHAPTER XII: Three Persons

 


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