Knowing Jesus: The Eternal Son Who Was Never Just a Man
There is a question that cuts to the heart of everything the Christian faith stands for, and it is more urgent than most churches are willing to admit: Do we actually know who Jesus is?
Not what He can do for us. Not what authority we can claim in His name. Not what blessings flow from following Him. But who He actually is, in His nature, in His person, in His eternal existence. Because if we have the wrong answer to that question, everything built on top of it is built on sand.
The uncomfortable truth is that a version of Jesus has been circulating in many Christian circles that looks like Jesus, sounds like Jesus, and even quotes Jesus, but is not the Jesus of Scripture. He has been reduced. Domesticated. Made ordinary. Presented as little more than a Spirit-filled man, a kind of prototype for what any believer can become. And according to the New Testament itself, that is not just a theological error. It is another Jesus entirely.
In the Beginning Was the Word
The Gospel of John does not open with a manger in Bethlehem. It opens with eternity. John 1:1 establishes that the Word, identified throughout the Gospel as Jesus Christ, existed before creation, was in intimate relationship with God the Father, and was Himself fully God. John 1:3 goes further, stating that all things were created through Him, and that nothing in existence came into being apart from Him.
This is not a minor detail. If Jesus created everything that exists, He cannot belong to the category of created things. He cannot be simply a man who was filled with the Holy Spirit the way any believer is filled with the Holy Spirit. He is in an entirely different category, one that no human being shares.
Colossians 1:15-17 reinforces this, describing Jesus as the one through whom all things in heaven and earth were created, visible and invisible, and the one in whom all things hold together. Hebrews 1:2-3 describes Him as the one through whom God made the world, the brightness of the Father's glory and the exact representation of his nature.
He Had Glory Before the World Existed
In John 17:5, Jesus prays to the Father and references the glory He shared with Him before the world existed. This is not the language of a man who came into existence in a Judean stable. This is the language of an eternal being who stepped into human history from outside of it.
John 17:24 adds that the Father loved the Son before the foundation of the world. The relationship between the Father and the Son did not begin at the incarnation. It is eternal. And when Jesus declared in John 8:58, before Abraham was, I AM, He was not making a grammatical error. He was invoking the divine Name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14, where God identifies Himself as I AM. The Jewish leaders understood exactly what he was claiming, which is why their response was to pick up stones.
The Only Begotten God
Perhaps the most striking and overlooked truth in this entire conversation is found in John 1:18. Most Christians have heard this verse rendered as identifying the only begotten Son as the one who makes the Father known. But some of the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, including Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, which date to the late second and early third centuries and rank among the most significant surviving New Testament manuscripts, read not only begotten Son but only begotten God.
Several respected modern translations reflect this. The New American Standard Bible (1995) reads "the only begotten God." The New Living Translation reads "the unique One, who is Himself God." The Amplified Bible describes Him as "the one and only begotten God, that is, the unique Son." The New English Translation reads "the only one, Himself God."
The Greek word translated as only begotten is monogenes, which carries the meaning of unique, one of a kind, the only one of His kind. When that word is paired not with Son but with Theos, the Greek word for God, the statement becomes staggering. Jesus is not merely the only begotten Son in the sense that believers are adopted sons. He is the only begotten God. He is unique in a category that no human being, no matter how Spirit-filled, can enter.
This is not a minor translation footnote. It dismantles the idea that Christians are essentially carbon copies of Jesus, that what He was, we are, and that the only real difference between Him and us is the God part. The God part is not a footnote. It is everything.
The Danger of Another Jesus
Paul warned the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians 11:3-4 that he feared their minds would be led astray from sincere devotion to Christ, and that they might too readily accept someone who came preaching another Jesus. That warning has not expired.
A church that does not know who Jesus truly is will inevitably reshape Him into something more manageable, more flattering to human ambition, more useful as a vehicle for personal power and authority. It will seek what He can do rather than who He is. It will pursue demonstrations of power rather than the formation of character. It will talk endlessly about the believer's authority while quietly sidelining His Lordship.
The remedy is not to abandon the pursuit of a genuine, living faith. It is to begin where the New Testament begins, with the eternal Word who was with God and was God, who created all things, who shared the Father's glory before the foundation of the world, who stepped into human history as the only begotten God made flesh, and who remains the head of the church in a way that no human being can rival or replicate.
You cannot truly love someone you do not know. You cannot worship in spirit and truth someone you have fundamentally misunderstood. Knowing Jesus, the eternal Son, is not the starting point of Christianity because it sounds theologically tidy. It is the starting point because everything else depends on getting it right.
Full Teaching Here:
Be Blessed,
Marty, Brigitte, and the R.A.I.S.E. Team
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