Jesus’ existence didn’t begin with His birth or conception, but pre-existed Creation, as made by Him and for Him. Jesus was both with God and God Himself. That such a divine Person exists is taught throughout Scripture, starting in Genesis. The plurality within the Godhead makes it possible for God to be intrinsically a ‘God of Love’.
In Jesus, God took on human nature, so He could die for our sins as a fellow human, taking the penalty we deserve for our sins. In fact, this was planned from Eternity, as the names of the Redeemed were already written in His Book of Life from the foundation of the World.
When Jesus took on humanity, this was an addition to His divine nature, not a subtraction of His divinity. Thus everything He taught, He taught with authority—including about Creation and the Flood.
It comes down to the most important thing: the identity of our Creator. In our Statement of Faith, we state:
(A) PRIORITIES
- The scientific aspects of creation are important, but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer and Judge.
- The doctrines of Creator and Creation cannot ultimately be divorced from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
As we showed in our previous article Christmas and Genesis (which we recommend reading before this one):
One whose birth is celebrated at Christmas was none other than the One who brought the whole universe into existence! Our Creator took on the nature of one of His creatures, a helpless infant.
The reasons these doctrines are even more important than creation is that the Bible provides at least two key concepts that were in operation even “before”1 the Creation of the world, let alone Jesus’ birth. The biblical teachings are impossible to understand without these.
1. Jesus pre-existed Creation
In between, we are told that a Person described as the Word (Greek λόγοςlogos; Hebrew memra—see discussion3) was both with God as well as God himself. V. 3 tells us that this Person, the Word, was the One by whom all things were created.
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning. 3Through Him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.
This Word is also called God the Son—in Hebrews 1:8, God Himself addresses “the Son” as “God”. To back up “the Word was God” in John 1:1, the Son likewise has all the attributes of Deity (Colossians 1:15–20, Philippians 2, Hebrews 1:3).
The God of Love
The plurality in the Godhead is vital for understanding the biblical teaching, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). A Unitarian God, such as Islam’s Allah, could not be a God of Love in his nature, since by definition love requires another person to be the recipient. Allah might conceivably be able to love after he created, but that would make love contingent on creation, not an intrinsic property of Allah.
But with the true God of the Bible, the love between God the Father and God the Son has always existed, even before creation. Furthermore, the Bible reveals a third person who is God, the Holy Spirit. This enables an even more perfect love that includes not only individual love, but collective love. This is the sort that should occur in a family, where the husband and wife love not only each other, but combine their love towards their child.
Genesis teaching on the plurality of the Godhead
As we have often taught, Genesis is the seedbed of Christian doctrine. This includes the teaching of the Trinity: one God in three Persons. While the overt doctrine of the Trinity is not taught, the plurality of the Godhead is, and the New Testament provided a fuller revelation. Meanwhile, even before then, as N.T. Wright points out:
The oneness of Israel’s god, the creator, was never an analysis of this god’s inner existence, but always a polemic against paganism and dualism.—N.T. Wright
In this context it is vital for our purposes that we stress one fact. Within the most fiercely monotheistic of Jewish circles throughout our period—from the Maccabaean revolt[4] to Bar-Kochba[5]—there is no suggestion that “monotheism” or praying the Shema, had anything to do with the numerical analysis of the inner being of Israel’s god himself. It had everything to do with the two-pronged fight against paganism and dualism. Indeed, we find strong evidence during this period of Jewish groups and individuals, who, speculating on the meaning of some difficult passages of scripture (Daniel 7, for example, or Genesis 1), suggested that the divine being might encompass a plurality. Philo could speculate about the Logos as, effectively, a second divine being; the Similitudes of Enoch might portray the Son of Man/Messiah as an eternal divine being; but none of these show any awareness that they are transgressing normal Jewish monotheism. Nor are they. The oneness of Israel’s god, the creator, was never an analysis of this god’s inner existence, but always a polemic against paganism and dualism.6
Even in the first verse of the Hebrew Bible, we see the beginnings of this doctrine: the word for God is the plural form אֱלֹהִים Elohîm, yet the verb “created” is the singular form בָּרָא bārā’, not the plural form baru.
The Christophany to Abraham
Later on, Genesis reveals a curious incident, where God appears to the man He chose to be the Father of the Messianic People, Abraham, inGenesis 18–19. Genesis 18:1 explicitly tells us that YHWH/Yahweh/Jehovah (the LORD) appeared to Abraham, but what Abraham actually saw at first was three men (18:2). Yet these were evidently of such awe-inspiring appearance that Abraham bowed to them. Similarly, Mark’s Gospel describes an angel at Jesus’ tomb as a “man”, and again with an awesome appearance that at first alarmed the women who were the first at the tomb.
We see in Genesis 19:24that ‘the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens.’ That is, there was a Jehovah on Earth raining down fire from Jehovah in heaven, pointing to two distinct Persons with the divine name.
Later, we see that one of these “men” is the spokesman for the three, and described as the LORD in 18:13. The other two are just angels, and they are dispatched to Sodom (18:22–). The LORD remains with Abraham, and Abraham pleads for the city since his nephew Lot and his family were there. Yet although even 10 righteous people would have been enough to spare the city, such were not to be found. Thus Lot needed to be rescued. (Incidentally, this is one of many arguments against the local flood compromise—why didn’t God tell Noah to move to another part of the world that wasn’t flooded, given that Lot just had to leave the cities to be destroyed?)
In Genesis 19:1, we see only two angels arriving at Sodom. They rescued Lot, his wife and two daughters from the first recorded Gay Pride march in history (19:5). But where was the One who was one of the three ‘men’ who appeared to Abraham? We see in Genesis 19:24 that “the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens.” That is, there was a Jehovah on Earth raining down fire from Jehovah in heaven, pointing to two distinct Persons with the divine name. And the paraphrase of this passage in Targum Jonathan states:
“And the Memra/Word of YHWH caused to descend upon the peoples of Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the YHWH in heaven.”
2. The Book of Life predated creation
And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world (apo katabolēs kosmou,ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου) will marvel to see the beast, …
Revelation 13:8 uses the same phrase, and identifies the Owner of this book of life, the slain Lamb, who is also the Word:
All who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world (apo katabolēs kosmou, ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου) in the book of life belonging to the Lamb who was slain.7
This lines up with the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1:4 who uses similar wording, and states that the choosing even happened before the creation of the universe:
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world (pro katabolēs kosmou, πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου) to be holy and blameless in his sight.
But this writing presents a dilemma: how could we sinful people merit inclusion in a book belonging to the spotless Lamb of God?
The sin dilemma, solved by the Incarnation
God created us and therefore owns us, and has the right to make the rules for us. He has set a perfect moral standard of which we fall short (Romans 3:23). He is perfectly just, so must punish moral shortcomings. Since our shortcomings offend His infinite holiness, the punishment must also be infinite.
Either we must suffer such punishment, or else a Substitute must endure it in our place (Isaiah 53). This Substitute must fulfil two conditions:
1. He must be fully human to substitute for humanity. Hebrews 2:14–17 tell us that
Jesus died for mankind, precisely because He “shares their humanity”; but he didn’t share angelic nature, so sinning angels are out of luck. Furthermore, the prophet Isaiah foretold this coming Saviour as literally the ‘Kinsman-Redeemer’, i.e. one who is related by blood to those he redeems (Isaiah 59:20, which uses the same Hebrew word גּוֹאֵל(gôēl) as is used to describe Boaz in relation to Naomi in Ruth 2:20, 3:1–4:17). This is possible only because this Saviour is a physical descendant of the first man Adam via Mary (Luke 3:38)—and is called ‘the Last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45)—which makes him the relative of all humans in all ‘races’ or people groups who have ever existed. Thus theistic evolution doesn’t just undermine Genesis and a literal Adam, but jeopardizes this vital Kinsman-Redeemer concept as well.
2. He must be fully Divine to endure God’s infinite wrath (Isaiah 53:10), since a mere creature could not withstand it. Furthermore,יהוה/YHWH/Jehovah/God Himself said “I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no saviour.” (Isaiah 43:11). So calling Jesus ‘Saviour’ is logically calling Him YHWH since YHWH is the only saviour. No wonder that the great Trinitarian Church Father Athanasius (c. 293–373) noted: “Those who maintain ‘There was a time when the Son was not’ [i.e. was a created being] rob God of his Word, like plunderers.”
This required dual nature of the Redeemer fits perfectly with 1 Timothy 2:5:
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
An ideal mediator between two groups should ideally be a member of both. Thus Jesus is such a mediator, because He is the only member of both groups: ‘God’ and ‘man’.
And since the Bible teaches that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), this Substitute had to die to pay for our sins. (We see here how long-age teachings damage even the Gospel and Incarnation, because they all undermine this sin-death causality—see The Fall: a cosmic catastrophe: Hugh Ross’s blunders on plant death in the Bible). And as shown below, for a Divine Person to be able to die, He had to add human nature.
Divine/human Messiah taught throughout Scripture
We see when this happened in John 1:14:
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.
Yet this was fulfilling a long line of prophecy. Right after sin first appeared in the human race, God foretold of a coming Seed of the Woman who would crush the head of the tempting serpent (Genesis 3:15). This passage is called the Protevangelion or first mention of the Gospel in the Bible. It also prophesies the virginal conception of Christ—that is why He is the seed of the woman, in contrast to the usual biblical pattern of listing only fathers in genealogies. This is supported by Galatians 4:4, “God sent forth His Son, coming (γενόμενον genomenon) from a woman.”
That this passage was foretelling a divine seed was understood by Eve herself, as shown after she gave birth to Cain, the first human who began by normal conception and birth. She actually said something obscured by modern English translations but is clear in the Hebrew of Genesis 4:1:
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man: the LORD (YHWH/Yahweh/Jehovah).
Thus she understood that the seed would be both God and man, but she was grossly mistaken in believing that Cain was the seed in question. That is, her error was not in theology but in application—see discussion under Eve and the God-Man, as well as in the box below about Martin Luther’s view.
No, this future human-divine Seed was still in the future. Yet her understanding was backed up about 3,300 years later by the prophet Isaiah (c. 700 BC). In Isaiah 9:6 (9:5 in Hebrew numbering), we read:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace.
That is, he foretold a child who would be born, yet he was also Divine, as shown by all these titles not just the explicit ones—see Isaiah 9:6–7:The coming Child who would be called ‘Mighty God’.
A later prophet, Micah, reinforced this. Micah 5:2 is most famous for prophesying the birthplace of the Messiah (cf. Matthew 2:1–6):
But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.
Yet this prophecy made it clear that the One who was to be born in Bethlehem did not in fact begin there, but has been in action since Eternity Past.
Jesus Himself was most aware of His pre-existence in John 8:58:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am”
His enemies knew perfectly well that He was claiming divinity, which is why they planned to stone Him. The Greek ἐγὼ εἰμί (egō eimi I am) is important, because the Greek verbs already had information on the person—εἰμί means “I am” on its own. There are a number of these I AM statements, which also relate to God’s statements in Isaiah, ani hu. This one would have brought to mind to God’s revelation of his special name to Moses in Exodus 3:14:
because the Greek LXX has ἐγὼ εἰμί ὁ ὢν (egō eimi ho ōn, I am the being/the one). His Jewish enemies certainly understood Him this way, because they tried to stone Him (John 8:59).
Furthermore, Jesus contrasts Abraham’s γενέσθαι (genesthai) denoting that he came into existence at some point in the past, with His own “am”, which is in the present tense because He just exists. It is very clear that He is claiming not only to have pre-existed Abraham, who died long before He was born, but even more: that He didn’t even come into existence.
How could a Person be God and man?
The passage Philippians 2:5–11, called “Carmen Christi” or “hymn of Christ”, is one of the most important for the Incarnation:
5In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped; 7rather, he emptied Himself by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
As we see from the above, Jesus already pre-existed the time when He was born. He was also God in His essential nature8. Furthermore, He had no need to grasp equality with God, because He already had it.9
Kenosis
Jesus never ceased to be divine … He didn’t empty anything out of Himself, such as
divine attributes; rather, He emptied himself. And He did so by … adding human nature to His divine nature, not taking away anything divine.
It’s vital to understand that Jesus never ceased to be divine, contrary to the kenotic heresy. Yes, this passage does refer to “emptying” (kenosis10), but what does it actually say? “He emptied Himself by taking … ”. That is, He didn’t empty anything out of Himself, such as divine attributes; rather, He emptied himself. And He did so by taking. That is, it was a subtraction by means of adding—adding human nature to His divine nature, not taking away anything divine.
Jesus came to die, so had to add human nature
This addition was indeed an emptying, since as a human being, Jesus was subject to all the things that humans are subject to, such hunger, tiredness, and temptation. The only difference is that not only was He without sin, He was incapable of sin.
And like all humans, He was subject also to death. Indeed, this was the whole reason He came. This is even shown in the symbolism of certain events around the time. When He was born, he was wrapped in cloth, which in the context of the time and place, was burial cloth, as burial cloth was left in mangers. And almost two years later, when the Wise Men came, one of their gifts was myrrh, an important herb used in burial rites.
However, because Jesus never lost His divinity, no one could have killed Him if He hadn’t laid down His own life. This is why He bowed His head first, then gave up His spirit on the cross; the usual order would be to die and muscles go limp and the head collapse. But in His divinity, He could not die.
What about the divine powers?
What actually happened in the kenosis is that Jesus voluntarily surrendered the independent exercise of divine powers without His Father’s authority. For example, this explains why Jesus, in His humanity, did not know the day or hour of His return, because it was the Father’s prerogative. However, He could immediately switch on these powers at will, e.g. to know what people were thinking.
But Jesus never surrendered such absolute divine attributes as His perfect goodness, truthfulness, mercy, etc. which is why He was not only without sin, but incapable of sin.
(Progressive creationist Hugh Ross has erred on these points, and fallen into a false kenotic view of the Incarnation, and his fellow old-earth apologist William Lane Craig has severely criticised him for it, pointing out problems for the Atonement.)
The Kenotic Heresy and Genesis compromise
And other Genesis compromisers such as ISCAST, BioLogos, and Denis Lamoureux admit that Jesus affirmed a straightforward view of Genesis Creation and the Flood, but claim that He was wrong here.
Several things can be stated about these errors:
A) If the claim is basically, “Jesus was mistaken, because in the Incarnation His omniscience was masked”, then this commits the Kenotic Heresy. But:
Therefore [Eve] called [Cain] ‘the Man, the Lord.’ She thought that he was the one whom the Lord had meant when He said, ‘Thy Seed shall bruise the serpent’s head.’ Though Eve was mistaken in her hope, her words show that she was a pious woman who believed the promise of the coming salvation by the blessed Saviour.—Martin Luther
This confuses limitation and misunderstanding:11 while Jesus was in His humanity, He did not know all things. But this does not entail that He was mistaken about anything He said. All human understanding is finite, but this doesn’t entail that every human understanding is errant. Also, what Jesus did preach, He proclaimed with absolute authority (Matthew 24:35, 28:18), because He was speaking with the full authority of God the Father (John 5:30, 8:28), who is always omniscient. So if Genesis compromisers wish to accuse Jesus of error because of His humanity, they must logically charge God the Father with error as well. Or else, if Jesus taught an inerrant Bible and attributed his teaching to the Father and such teaching is wrong, Jesus must be a charlatan in a hopeless muddle.
Where do you draw the line? If Jesus was wrong in His view of Scripture, maybe He was wrong in other areas too. Where does it end? After all, Jesus told Nicodemus (John 3:12): “I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” If Jesus was wrong about earthly things (like a recent creation and a global flood), was He also wrong about a heavenly thing like John 3:16, only four verses later? If not, why not? Who decides whether He is right or wrong? We must, so we become the authority instead of Jesus. And Scripture becomes a restaurant menu, where we choose only the parts that suit us, while we slide down to total unbelief. Many atheists testify that their rejection of the Bible and Christianity started with compromises on Genesis, e.g. Billy Graham’s former fellow evangelist Charles Templeton (see Death of an apostate).
B) Another excuse that doesn’t blatantly fall into the kenotic heresy is, “Jesus deliberately accommodated Himself to the mistaken views of His audience.” But:
This confuses adaptation to human finitude with accommodation to human error:11 the former doesnot entail the latter. A mother might tell her four-year-old ‘you grew inside my tummy’—this is not false, but language simplified to the child’s level. Conversely, ‘the stork brought you’ is an outright error. Similarly, God, the author of truth, used some simplified descriptions (e.g. using the earth as a reference frame, as modern scientists do today) and anthropomorphisms, but never error.
Jesus often challenged His audience, so He would not have failed to point out their mistaken views on Scripture, if such they were.
If Jesus acquiesced in this error, maybe He did so elsewhere as well. Who ultimately decides when Jesus is acquiescing? We must, so once again, Jesus loses His authority.
Jesus did not just acquiesce to the views of His audience on the inerrancy of Scripture, but was in fact reinforcing them.
Summary:
- Jesus pre-existed creation, and never came into existence because He existed eternally. It was through Him that all created things came into existence.
- This entails a plurality in the Godhead, which is taught even from Genesis, and this also enables God to be a ‘God of Love’.
- Our names have also been written in the Book of Life belonging to the Lamb, Jesus, from the foundation of the world.
- As sinful creatures, this means that our sin must be punished by a Substitute who was human as we are, but divine to be our Saviour.
- This required our Creator to add human nature to His divine nature.
- Jesus never lost his divine attributes, which provide authority to His teachings on every subject.
Eve and the God man—Martin Luther
Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis12 has good insights into this passage:
3:15
Seed of the woman [Latin version has feminine pronoun, hence Mariolatry]. The promise and the threat (in this text) are both clear and obscure. It left the serpent in the dark about which woman should give birth to the Seed of the Woman, so that he had to think of every woman as (possibly) becoming the mother of the blessed Seed (Christ). On the other hand, it gave our first parents great faith that from that very hour they expected the Saviour. When Eve brought first her first son, she surely believed that she had given birth to Him. (Luther rightly translates Genesis 4:1: thus: “I have the man, the Lord.” This properly is the meaning of the Hebrew original.) Isaiah added clarity to the promise by saying, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive.” This prophecy made it clear that the Saviour was not to be the offspring of the union of a man and wife. In the NT this (fact) was revealed still more clearly by the angel (Luke 1:26–28). Since, then, there was promised man, through the Seed of the Woman, deliverance from the Law, sin and death, and there was given to him a clear and sure hope of the resurrection and renewal in the future life, it is clear that he could not by his own power remove sin and its punishment. Nor could he (by his own power) escape death and make amends for his disobedience. Therefore the Son of God had to sacrifice himself and secure all this for mankind He had to remove sin, overcome death, and restore what Adam had lost by his disobedience. … pp. 80–81.
Gen 4:1
The words of Eve, “I have the Man, the Lord” [In his commentary, Luther translates, “I have gotten a Man of the Lord,” that is the Redeemer. In his Bible Luther translates more correctly, “I have the Man, the Lord.”—Mueller] supply another reason why she did not call Cain a son. In her great joy and reverence she did not want to call her offspring a son, for she believed that he was to be much more, the Man who was to bruise the serpent’s head. Therefore she called him “the Man, the Lord.” She thought that he (Cain) was the one whom the Lord had meant when He said, “Thy Seed shall bruise the serpent’s head.” Though Eve was mistaken in her hope, her words show that she was a pious woman who believed the promise of the coming salvation by the blessed Saviour. Therefore she did not call him a son, but the Man, the Lord, whom God promised and gave (to her). Her faith in the promised seed was laudable. By faith in this promised Saviour all saints (in the OT) were justified and saved. But her faith that Cain was the one who would end the misery of sin was misplaced, for this she believed without a definite sign and Word (from God) by her own conviction. Just because she was so sure of the promise that she regarded her first son as the one who would carry out what the Lord had promised. Her mistake was that she did not know that from (sinful) flesh nothing could be born but (sinful) flesh, and that sin and death could not be overcome by flesh (corrupt nature). (p. 91).
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References
- Since God is the Creator of time as well as space and matter, the use of “before” in this case doesn’t mean prior in time, but prior in logic. Return to text.
- The Septuagint (LXX) was a Greek translation of the OT. The name comes from the Latin septuaginta (70), because according to legend, 72 rabbis (six from each of the twelve tribes) were responsible for the translation in Alexandria in c. 250 BC. In reality, it was composed over a period of time which could range from decades to a couple centuries, beginning in the 3rd century BC. Return to text.
- The article on Memra in the Jewish Encyclopedia states:
- “The Word”, in the sense of the creative or directive word or speech of God manifesting His power in the world of matter or mind; a term used especially in the Targum as a substitute for “the Lord” when an anthropomorphic expression is to be avoided. …
- – In the Targum:
- In the Targum the Memra figures constantly as the manifestation of the divine power, or as God’s messenger in place of God Himself, wherever the predicate is not in conformity with the dignity or the spirituality of the Deity [then provides a huge number of examples where the Targum has “the Memra” where the Bible has “the Lord”].
- The article closes with the admission, “Possibly on account of the Christian dogma [of the Logos or Word], rabbinic theology, outside of the Targum literature, made little use of the term ‘Memra’.” Return to text.
- This was the revolt of Judah Maccabee and his brothers against the Greek ruler Antiochus IV (c. 215–163 BC). He blasphemously called himself Theos Epiphanes, meaning God Manifest, banned biblical Jewish religious rites, and sacrificed to Zeus in the Jewish temple. The successful revolt is the basis for the Jewish festival of Hannukah (‘dedication’ [of the Temple]), which Jesus celebrated in John 10:22–39. Return to text.
- Bar Kochba led a revolt against the Romans in AD 132, in the reign of Hadrian. At first, Jewish Christians joined the revolt as loyal Jews. But Rabbi Akiba declared Bar Kochba to be the Messiah, and the Jewish Christians then refused to follow a false Messiah. The break between Jewish Christians and other Jews can be traced to this. The rebellion was crushed in AD 135, and Jerusalem was plowed under, renamed Aelia Capitolina, and declared off-limits to the Jews. Return to text.
- N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, SPCK, London/Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p. 259, 1992. This doesn’t mean an endorsement of Wright’s later heterodoxy of the ‘New Perspective on Paul’—see detailed refutation. Return to text.
- Some translations wrongly render this passage: “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” That is, they apply the phrase apo katabolēs kosmou to the crucifixion instead of the writing of the names. But Jesus was not crucified till about AD 30, over 4000 years after creation. While the phrase apo katabolēs kosmou comes after the slaying, word order is flexible in Greek. So thus it makes more sense to compare Scripture with Scripture, and the other cited passages support applying the phrase to the writing of the names. Return to text.
- The Greek is μορφῇ morphē; “form” is an inferior translation. Return to text.
- The Greek is ἴσος isos, from which we derive many words beginning with iso– meaning equal or same. Return to text.
- From the Greek in this passage, ἐκένωσεν ekenōsen. Return to text.
- Geisler, N.L. and Nix, W.E., A General Introduction to the Bible, Moody, Chicago, Revised and Expanded 1986; pp. 62–64 contains helpful discussions of these points.. Return to text.
- Martin Luther, Genesis, tr. J. Theodore Mueller, Th.D., Ph.D., Prof of Christian Doctrine and NT Exegesis, Concordia Seminary, St Louis, Missouri, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 1958. The brackets in the quote are those of the translator. Return to text.
- hat we
Dr Jonathan D Sarfati *Jonathan received his B.Sc. (hons) in Chemistry and his Ph.D. (Physical Chemistry) from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has co-authored papers in mainstream scientific journals including one on high-temperature superconductors published in Nature when he was 22 years old.
He has long been interested in apologetics, and was a co-founder of the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society (New Zealand). His first book Refuting Evolution (1999, 2008) was written to counter a teacher’s guidebook by the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. It now has over 400,000 copies in print. He later wrote Refuting Evolution 2 (2002, 2010) and the highly acclaimed Refuting Compromise (2004, 2010), both as responses to attacks on the biblical view of history, plus the booklet Mammoth: Riddle of the Ice Age. Jonathan is co-author of the updated Creation Answers Book and 15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History (2006).
In 2008, he finished By Design: Evidence for nature’s Intelligent Designer—the God of the Bible. And in 2010, Dr Sarfati wrote The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on evolution, a response to leadingatheopath Richard Dawkins’ latest book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (seewebsite ).
He works full-time for Creation Ministries International in Atlanta GA as author, speaker, apologist, and scientist, having relocated there in April 2010 from the Brisbane, Australia office. Jonathan is a co-editor of Creation magazine and also writes and reviews articles for the in-depth, peer-reviewed Journal of Creation (formerly TJ), as well as being active in speaking ministry. Jonathan is also an accomplished chess player and is a former New Zealand Chess Champion, representing New Zealand in three Chess Olympiads (and drew with Boris Spassky, world champion 1969-1972). In 1988, the International Chess Federation awarded him the title of F.I.D.E. Master (FM). For the fun of it, he regularly accepts challenges from multiple players while he is blindfolded. He then plays from memory with up to 12 players simultaneously.
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