Jesus Christ: The Only Begotten And The First Born

Five times in the New Testament our Lord Jesus Christ is called the only begotten and five times He is called the first-born or the first-begotten. Five times our Lord is called the only begotten—that is what He is in His essential deity. Five times He is called first begotten—that is what He became as a man. All I shall attempt to do is to turn you from one Scripture to another, linking these together with a few comments to bring out the true deity and the true humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The five instances in which the term, “only begotten,” is used are all found in John’s writings, four times in the Gospel and once in his first epistle. The four Gospel passages I will give you first. John 1:14: “The word was made (or literally became; it was voluntary on His part) flesh and dwelt (or tabernacled) among us, and we beheld His glory.” John is speaking for himself and his fellow apostles who had companied with the Lord during those three and a half wonderful years. “We beheld his glory as the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. The expression “became flesh” is, as we all understand, a title of deity. In the opening verse of the chapter we read, “In the beginning was the Word.” When everything that ever had beginning began—the Word was. Not “the Word became” but the Word was. “In the beginning was the Word”—there you have eternity of being; “and the word was with God”—there you have personality; “and the word was God”—there you have true deity; “the same was in the beginning with God”—eternal sonship; “all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made”—there you have the creatorial power. And this is the One who became flesh and tabernacled among us!

God Manifested

In the same chapter, in verse eighteen, he says, “No man hath seen God at any time.” That is, no man has seen deity at any time; as such deity is necessarily invisible to created eyes. No man has seen deity at any time. The only begotten subsisting (the word suggests where He always was and where He always will be—no beginning to this relationship and no ending), the only begotten Son, subsisting in the bosom of the Father, He hath called Him out.

Some people have a difficulty with the expression, “No man hath seen God at any time,” because in the Old Testament we have several instances where people are said to have looked upon the face of God and lived, or where Moses beheld the face of God. But I find that Scripture uses expressions very similar to ours. Take the sun, for instance. You and I have never seen the sun. You may say, thoughtlessly, “Why, the sun is one of the first objects we have beheld.” No, you have never seen the sun. You have seen the envelope of glory that surrounds the sun, but these eyes of ours cannot pierce that glory and see the invisible sun behind it. So man has seen various manifestations of the glory of God, but not until Jesus came into the world did any one ever really see God. But in Christ, we have God fully manifest, so that one can say, “Do you want to know what God is like?” He is exactly like Jesus.

Meeting God

I remember saying to a young man at the close of a meeting, “Friend, are you ready to meet God?”

“No, no, I am not ready for that,” he said.

“Then,” I said, “are you ready to meet Christ?” I meant, was he ready to decide for the Lord Jesus Christ, but he took a very different meaning.

“Oh, well,” he said, “that would not be so bad, would it? He loved us, didn’t He?”

He was not ready to meet God, but it would not be so bad to meet Christ! But, my friends, the love of Christ is the love of God, as the next passage shows us, the one we all know so well—John 3:16. Jesus did not die to enable God to love sinners. Jesus came to die because God loved sinners. Get acquainted with Christ, and when you meet God in heaven you will not have to learn Him for the first time.

There no stranger God shall meet thee,
Stranger thou in courts above,
But He who to His rest shall greet thee,
Greets thee with a well-known love.

God’s Unique Son

Now observe this expression, “His only begotten Son.” Do not connect this term with any thought of generation. It is not that Jesus is the only begotten Son in the sense of being the first Son that God begat, but that He is the only begotten Son in the sense of being God’s unique Son—His Son in a different way to what any one else will ever be. All believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, and yet He alone, as to His essential deity, is the only begotten Son. In the very first verse of our Bible we read: “In the beginning, God”—God, Elohim, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, created the heavens and the earth. Do get this clear: Our Lord Jesus Christ was God the Son before He ever became the Son of God. He was one Person of the eternal Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost; and God the Son stooped in grace to be born of a virgin and to become the Son of God as a man coming into this world. That is a tremendously important distinction.

Then observe the eighteenth verse of the third of John: “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Salvation, freedom from condemnation, is linked up for you and me with God in the eternal Son who came into the world for our salvation.

Just one other passage using that term: 1 John 4:9: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” People like to think that God is love; but the love of God provided the atonement. Now the point that I want you to observe is this: God the Father sent His only begotten Son into the world. He did not become the only begotten when He was born in the world. He was with God in the glory from all eternity. These five passages, then, have to do with His deity.

Image Of The Invisible God

Now five Scriptures that speak of Him as the first-born or as the first-begotten. Turn to the first chapter of Colossians. Here we have the double headship of our Lord Jesus Christ, the headship which is His because He is Creator and that which became His when He arose from the dead. Colossians 1:15: “Who (that is the Son of God) is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation.” The Son was just as truly the invisible God before the incarnation as the Father and Spirit were invisible. But now Christ is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.

A Parable

I have a friend, a Hindu, whom some of you may have met. He had been a professor in a college in India and at that time was a Buddhist. Before, he had been a Brahman. His hungry heart had not found satisfaction in either of these religions and he became interested in Christianity. He came up against the great doctrine of the incarnation—God became man—and he said, “I cannot believe that the Supreme God would ever so degrade Himself as to become man.” But this thought was in his mind day and night.

One day he was out in a field. You know a good Brahman will never kill any living creature. As this Hindu professor was walking he was attracted to a large ant hill. Thousands of the little creatures were busy gathering up food. He noticed that as his shadow came between them and the sun, there was a great flurry among them. Whether their eyes were such a character that they could observe that an immense giant was standing over them, I do not know, but they were frightened and ran around hither and thither. When he stepped to one side, he noticed that they went on with their various ant activities as usual. He stepped back again, so that his shadow fell across and ant hill, but this time he remained quietly there for some ten minutes, and soon he noticed that the ants ceased to be disturbed. As he stood there looking down at them he said, “I wish I could make those little creatures understand my feelings toward them. They are evidently frightened because they do not know who I am, or how I feel. Perhaps they are afraid I am some great monster that will crush them beneath my feet. How I would like to be able to give them to understand that I have nothing but compassion in my heart for every living creature.”

And then, as he stood there, this thought came to him: There is only one way I could ever do that. If it would be possible for me in some way to compress my mentality into the brain of an ant so that I would have all an ant’s instincts and be able to communicate with my fellow ants, and yet have a man’s brain, I could do it. In that way I would be able to make known to those little creatures just how this man feels toward them. And in a moment, it flashed upon him—that is exactly what God has done in the incarnation! That is what God has done in the person of Christ! He has come so near to these poor, suffering sinning creatures that He has compressed deity into the body, into the humanity, of a man and thus He is able to make God known to us. As the Hindu said, “I turned away from that ant hill, a Christian.” Our Lord Jesus is the image of the invisible God; He is the first-born of all creation. He comes into the world as a Man, and God says, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” This has to do with His virgin birth.

When Was He Rich?

Some time ago, an evangelist was waiting in a railroad station. He saw two men engaged in a very serious conversation. One of them was a brilliant up-to-date American Unitarian; the other was a little, lumbering German Lutheran brother whose English was somewhat broken. They were having a heated argument. The American was trying to prove that the Bible nowhere stated that Jesus Christ had any existence before He came into the world. The old German brother was insisting that the Scriptures were full of the pre-existence of Jesus, but he was not able to make any progress in the argument.

Then the evangelist appeared and both the men turned to him. “What do you think?” they said. “Do you think Jesus Christ had any existence before He came to this earth?”

“One verse settles that for me,” he replied.

“What verse is that?”

“Second Corinthians 8:9: ‘For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.’”

“Well,” said the Unitarian, “I do not think that is touching the subject at all.”

And even the old German brother, who hoped to find an ally in the evangelist, was forced to say, “I confess myself, I don’t see where that has anything to do with it.”

“Tell me, gentlemen,” the evangelist returned, “when was He rich?”

Was He rich when He was born in a stable and cradled in a manger? Was He rich when He grew up in that mean little village of Nazareth and worked at a carpenter’s bench? Whas He rich when He went about over the hills and through the valleys of Galilee and Judea and Samaria, when He could say, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head”? Was He rich when they wanted a penny and He to, “Show me a penny”?

The old German’s face lit up and he said, “I know when He was rich.”

But the Unitarian replied, “I am not going to discuss the subject at all.”

Just then the train arrived for which the evangelist had been waiting. As he stepped on board he saw the Unitarian hurrying away, the German following, and he heard the latter saying, “Tell me, tell me, when was He rich?”

We Shall Be Like Him

What did man do with God’s first born? They cried, “Away with him!” They hurried Him to a cross of shame. But what happened there? He offered himself without spot unto God, a sacrifice for our sins. He made peace by the blood of His cross, and now, having been raised from the dead, He is head of the church, the first-born from among the dead. Oh, what glories have accrued to Christ by way of the cross! As Redeemer, he holds even a higher place; He is now the head of the church. Head of what church? Head of the church which is His body.

In the eighth chapter of the epistle tot he Romans, we have our Lord again spoken of as the first-born: “Whom he did foreknow he also did predestinate, to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

Two Christians were about to retire. “Good night, John,” one of them said, “we will soon be thirty three.”

A friend heard this and said, “You will soon be thirty-three? Why, you are eighty-four now.”

“Oh yes,” they replied, “but we are going to be like Him and he was just thirty-three when He was nailed to the cross.”

Some day we shall every one be just like Him—God’s blessed First-born—like Him spiritually, like Him morally, like Him physically, when we get our glorified bodies.

In the first chapter of Hebrews, verse six, we read, “And again, when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, “And let all the angels of God worship him.” Here is a more critical translation, “And when he bringeth the first begotten into the world AGAIN, he saith, Let all the angels of God worship him.” It is carrying us on to His return. He who came once and was rejected as God’s first-born, is coming into the world again and not only will men own that He is indeed the first-born, the first-begotten of the dead, but all angelic intelligences will fall at His feet and worship Him.