In discussing erroneous ideas that many non-Christians have about the Trinity, some of the most bazaar and farfetched ideas one could imagine are floating out there around the world. One of the extreme examples to be cited in connection with this involved a conversation that took place between a devout Muslim and an equally devout Christian. The Christian was relating the gospel of Christ to the Muslim and explained that Jesus Christ was, indeed, the Son of God who became man’s Savior through His substitutionary death on the Cross. The Muslim found it simply incredulous that God could have a Son and rejected the whole concept out of hand. He went on to say that Christians who insist on the Trinity and Christ being the Son of God reflect a position of great shame, which Muslims cannot abide. He explained the shame was in God having had sexual relations with the virgin Mary, which produced Jesus. This gross distortion is what they believe would be required in order for Jesus to be God’s Son. This idea, of course, Christians would themselves find to be abhorrent as well. Muslims find the whole idea of God having a Son, under any circumstances, to be completely unthinkable. They are persuaded that the very nature of God’s Oneness precludes the possibility of His having a Son, no matter how He was produced.
But there’s the rub. Scripture makes it clear that Jesus Christ was not produced as God’s Son. He had, from eternity, been God’s Son. In His humanity, He was produced by Mary, from a divinely implanted egg of God-created humanity, not of Joseph and not of sexual relations with any male, man or God. Isaiah 9 says messianically of Jesus seven hundred years before His birth, “Unto us, a child is born; unto us, a Son is given.” The text is clear. The Son was not born because He is deity, and He always was. “Before Abraham was,” Jesus said, “I am,” in John 8. It was only in Christ’s humanity that He was born of the virgin. This distinction is very important. The Son was given, not born. It was the child Jesus in His humanness that was born. This all belongs to the hypostatic union, the God-man taking human flesh upon Him…a theonthropic occasion. John tells us, in chapter one, that the Word, the Logos, became flesh and dwelt among us. That word constituted the very essence of communication from God to man in the Person of Jesus, God’s eternal Son. Jesus, as the Son of God, the Scriptures attest to the Trinity and the part that Jesus Christ has in it. For the careful student of Scripture, it is abundantly obvious.
CC-04-09
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