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"By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had received the
promises offered up his only begotten son" (monogenes, Heb. 11: 17).
Here are four occurrences of the word, and its meaning is plain. There are five others,
and these refer to the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the epistle to the Romans the gift of Christ is compared with the offering up by
Abraham of his only son. "He that spared not His Own son" (Rom. 8: 32), where the
Greek words, "spared not", are the same as those which are used in the LXX of
Gen. 22: 16. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Word, become flesh, Emmanuel, God manifest
in the flesh. He it is Who is the only begotten Son of God, and He it is Who is the only
Mediator, Offering and Saviour of man.
Dr. Bullinger, whose orthodoxy on this doctrine is beyond question, says of the word
monogenes in his Lexicon: "The relation of Christ to the Father." In that simple
statement the whole matter is compressed.
(1)
It is a matter of "relation". It is not dealing with God as Absolute and
Unconditioned, for that is not a subject dwelt upon in Scripture.
(2)
It has to do with "Christ". Now "Christ" is the title given to "Jesus", and means
"The Anointed". This title has no reference to a period before creation or before
the miraculous birth at Bethlehem.
(3)
It has to do with "The Father". Wherever we see the title "The Son of God",
"God" refers to the Father" and both "Father" and "Son" are relative terms.
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son." Here is the Divine
half of John 3: 16. What follows touches human need and human response.
"That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
First, let us consider human need. It is summed up in the world "perish". The Greek
word which is so translated is apollumi, and occurs 92 times in the N.T. It occurs in the
LXX nearly 300 times, and in order completely to understand its meaning, these passages
should be examined and the equivalent Hebrew words investigated. We shall however
find all that we require for our present purpose in the N.T.
An objection has been raised by some advocates of the doctrine known as Eternal
Conscious Suffering, that it is unscientific and strictly untrue to teach that anything can be
"destroyed", as, for instance, a piece of burning word. It is pointed out that certain parts
of the wood go off into gases which are combined with oxygen in the process of
combustion; other components go off as smoke and vapour, leaving a residue of mineral
ash, and the Chemist's scales would show that not a particle of the wood had really been
destroyed, but that all of it still existed though in other forms. In spite of the apparently
dispassionate and scientific tone of this objection it is fundamentally and experimentally
false, for it is not the question of the indestructibility of "matter" that is involved, but the
destruction of the piece of "wood" as "wood". No one who swept up the ashes and
presented a few glass jars of gases, could say with truth, "There is your piece of wood":
the falsity and foolishness of the statement would be apparent. So when we teach that the