ever there was a place where the actual wording of Scriptures must be carefully handled

and adhered to without addition or subtraction, it is here. Yet what do we find? Too

often mere influence or guess-work form the basis of theological ideas which cannot

therefore be equated with the revealed truth. Some dogmatically push the sonship of

Christ before Bethlehem, totally ignoring the fact that there is no direct statement of

God's Word or revelation on this point. Where the Divine Book keeps quiet, we should

be quiet too. We are certain that Divine sonship is true of the holy Babe yet to be born,

for the angel definitely states this to be the case in Luke 1: 35. Note he does not say that

the holy thing that shall be born is called the Son of God but "shall be called" so.

The two important passages which deal with Christ's pre-incarnate existence are

John 1: 1 and Col. 1: 15-19.  What a magnificent opportunity the Apostle John had,

when writing the prologue to his Gospel, of stating the eternal Sonship of Christ, if this

was truth! He could have written:

but he did not do so! Before Bethlehem the Lord Jesus was the Logos, the Word. Here

we are on sure ground. Being originally the "Word" must therefore be parallel or

identical with "being in the form of God", and had this been carefully considered, much

profitless speculation that has been written on this passage would have been avoided. Of

Christ's eternal existence we have no doubt, for if he was God, this must be true, but in

what capacity had He always existed, is the point at issue.

Those who deny the Deity of Christ are unreliable expositors of the passage with

which we are dealing. They rest on false premises. They perpetuate the fallacy of

arguing from human experience, that a son implies a pre-existing father, not realizing that

the word "son" is used in both Old and New Testaments divorced from the idea of

generation or priority. In Hebrew, age is expressed by the phrase "the son of --- years",

and the N.T. uses such expressions as the "sons of disobedience". It was one of the

commonest ways of expressing identity.

Having misunderstood this, Arians often project the father-son relationship before

Bethlehem and so, with a double error, they give us darkness rather than light. John 1: 1

"In the beginning was the Word . . . . . and the Word was God", must be before our minds

all the time when dealing with Phil. 2: 6-11 or we shall surely go astray. We have read

a number of expositions from well-known scholars where  John 1: 1  is not even

We come to the other great passage which deals with Christ in His pre-incarnate

existence, namely Col. 1: 15-19, where He is designated as the "Image of the invisible

God". The Greek for `image' is eikon which the LXX uses to translate the Hebrew

tselem, image, in Gen. 1: 26, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness".  In

Dan. 3: 19 we have the phrase "the form of his (the King's) countenance", where the

Aramaic equivalent tselem is rendered in the LXX by morphe. In fact eikon and morphe

are used as interchangeable terms in the Greek Bible which helps us in our understanding

of morphe in Phil. 2: The same can be said of eikon and doxa, glory, in the LXX, and