Apologia Radio | James White on Deity of Christ, Jehovah's Witnesses, and More

Greetings and welcome to Apologia Radio. Yes, I'm getting $20 per mispronunciation of the term. Jeff promised me that and so I'm counting on it. So Apologia Radio, I'm up to 40 already right there. It should be Apologia, but I'm just going with the flow and when people promise me money, I just go with it.

So we're good. Welcome to Apologia Radio, that's 60. Hi, my name is James White. Still getting over a little bit of what everybody got last week. Did you notice that? Everybody got the same stuff. I'm starting to wonder about the black helicopters personally, because when everybody gets at the same time, it's just a little strange.

But I'm here in my Coogee vest in honor of the ninja. He has a Coogee. I think maybe some of you have seen the pictures of he and I in my studio when I gave him a Coogee sweater to wear. And I am so honoring of the ninja that today I wore my Coogee shoes too.

So Coogee shoes, Coogee vest. It's too warm for the Coogee sweater quite yet. Once there's a seven at the beginning of the temperature, for those of you who use Fahrenheit, all right, then we can go for the Coogee sweater too.

I just didn't want to end up as a puddle here in the ninja seat at Apologia Radio. I'm filling in because Jeff and the crew have headed off to, let me tell you something. One of the toughest flights you'll ever take.

I regularly fly from the United States to South Africa. That's a seven, nine hour shift. It depends on what time of the year it is, but somewhere between eight and nine hours normally, time shift there.

And that's rough enough. But for some reason, going across the Pacific, the other direction, ends up being a 17, it's 17 hours, but you're a day ahead or something like that. It's really, really confusing.

And by about the second day, you're just completely lost as to what time it actually is. And the first time I went to Australia myself, I made the mistake of allowing them to schedule me to speak the night of my arrival.

So I got there sometime in the morning, which was in the middle of the night for me or something. And by the time I spoke that evening, the Sydney atheist showed up and I didn't have a clue what I was saying.

I don't even remember what I said. It was bad. It was very, very, very bad. So hopefully they won't do that. But they're down in Australia. I think they're gonna be in Brisbane and Sydney. Two of the places I go to, by the way, it's Brisbane.

Make sure you say that. They can tell when you're a foreigner, when you say Brisbane or something like that. Brisbane and Sydney, Melbourne, places like that. And try to, I forgot to mention to Jeff, try to use as many rugby references as possible.

It will help with the natives, all the natives there in Australia. In fact, once, I shouldn't mention this, but once at one of the churches I was at, we moved the entire service an hour forward so that we could watch the Rugby World Cup match between the All Blacks of New Zealand and Australia, who of course are mortal enemies, on the big screen after the service was over.

That's just what it's like in Australia. Just get used to it. So they're down in Australia. I guess in Queensland they just, and this really surprised me, they just legalized abortion in Queensland, which I've been down there a number of times and I was not aware of that.

And it surprises me because Australia, the churches in Australia will tell you it's hard ground. It's very secularized. And so I would have expected that abortion on demand was already the reality there.

But sadly that's not the case. They've gone down there to do the right thing and to start helping the churches down there with end abortion now and stuff like that. So that's where they are. And that's why I'm sitting here filling in for the ninja himself in the ninja seat.

There is a little known tradition and I'm surprised that Jeff does not do more with this because it would help him out. But there's a little known tradition that when you fill in for a ninja, you have to bring the ninja, you have to bring an offering for the ninja, a gift for the ninja.

And so part of the gift is this particular mosquito here that is exceptionally, you know, Desiderius Erasmus, the early Greek scholar and humanist back in the 1500s believed that mosquitoes were demons, which is understandable in the summer in Basel, Switzerland, why you would think that mosquitoes were demons, but he did.

And so maybe that's what we've got going on here, but I just exercised that one. Anyway, you are supposed to bring an offering for the ninja. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave these right here. This is a set of Ravencrest Tactical balanced throwing knives and I'm gonna leave them right there for the ninja as my offering for sitting in the ninja seat, because I figure if you're a ninja, you probably already know how to use those.

And all I can use them for is buttering my bread, which is not what they were designed for initially. So to allow them to be used in the proper hands, we leave that there for the ninja. He's done some pretty strange things when he's filled in for me on the Dividing Line, which is my program.

And we don't have any problem. I talk about apologia. What is that, 80 or 100 now?

I forget.

Apologia all the time on the Dividing Line and they talk about the Dividing Line. It's really neat that there is no competition here. I suppose if it was a zero-sum game and we were competing for funds and stuff like, and sadly, I have to report, there are people in Christian ministry who think that way and view others as competition and stuff like that.

Never crossed my mind. I hope it would never cross Jeff's mind or anybody else's mind. First of all, God owns the cattle in a thousand hills, which is, you don't want to use a fundamentalist interpretation of that because there are Texans who own more than the cattle in a thousand hills.

But it refers, of course, to God's unlimited supply and his ability to take care of his people. And so, we're all on the same page. It's wonderful that Jeff can come over and do the Dividing Line. I can come over here and do Apologia Radio, 120.

And there's no sense of competition. He has his areas of strength, I have my areas of strength and we're not in competition with one another. We encourage others to support the other's work and that's the way it should be, I would think.

And certainly, in our days, with the culture and its hatred of the Christian faith so clearly manifested, I would hope that more and more that would be the case. I just realized, wow, that actually tore right through the edge of that thing.

That's a very sharp little thing there. I wanted to think I was trying to kill him or something like that, but anyway. All right, what in the world are we going to do on Apologia Radio today? Well, I brought the text.

Some of you know, this is the Post-Tenebrous Luxe Rebind of my Nestle All-in -28th Edition Greek New Testament. It is unique, it is beautiful, it changes color. I don't know how in the world that works, but it does.

There is no question that it does. But I brought my Greek text today and I thought one of the most enjoyable things that I can do, sometimes I'll just sit down with a chapter and I'll just read it fresh and comment on it and things like that.

That's really enjoyable to do. By the way, I do have a brother, Jeffrey, at Post-Tenebrous Luxe, sort of an advertisement here, I guess, at PTL. Well, Jeff has an ESV from PTL as well, so we're all on the, we love his work, bandwagon.

But I just sent him a new project and I'm not sure how it's going to work out. It may be too big to put in one volume, may end up being the two volumes that I sent him. But Hendrickson has just come out with a edition of the Greek Septuagint called the Reader's Edition, the Greek Septuagint.

There is a Reader's Edition of the Greek New Testament if you've taken first year Greek. And so you have what's called the 50 word vocabulary, all the words used 50 or more times in the New Testament.

There is a Reader's Edition, which will give you the lesser, less frequent vocabulary and rare forms. So you can just sit there and read without tapping on something or looking something up in a lexicon back in my day.

We had something called Psyche Kubo, the Psyche Kubo Greek lexicon, Reader's Greek lexicon, which you'd sort of have open next to your Greek text. And it functioned the same way. Well, someone said, hey, why don't we make one volume out of this?

So you've got the Reader's Greek New Testament. Now there's a Reader's Greek Septuagint. And if you don't know what the Septuagint is, the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was, the Septuagint was the Bible of the New Testament church.

When John, for example, well, we may look at this one in John chapter 12. When John quotes from Isaiah, he's quoting from the Greek Septuagint and he's expecting his audience to be reading that same text.

And so he can make references even to places where there are textual variants between the Greek and the Hebrew. And so I've sent, Hendrickson has just come out with a Reader's edition of the Greek New Testament.

And I want to initially just read through the Psalter, but eventually, you know, see how much of the Old Testament I can get through in the Septuagint itself, just as a devotional reading type thing. It is a little bit different than Koine Greek in the New Testament.

There's about two centuries worth of development there, but ancient languages didn't change as quickly as, for example, modern English is. I think, think of the number of words that now exist in our vocabulary that did not exist in our vocabulary 50 years ago.

It's astonishing. And so that wasn't quite the same thing in the ancient world. So there are subtle differences, stylistic differences in the grammar of the Greek Septuagint. And of course, not all the Greek Septuagint is of the exact same quality.

The Pentateuch, for example, very, very well done. Obviously, exceptionally good translators that were working on that 250 to 200 years before the time of Christ. But some other portions, not so good.

So it is a fascinating thing. So just thought I'd mention that for those of you who are maybe looking for something to get your local Bible study professor at the college, something for Christmas or something like that.

You could look up that Hendrickson Greek New Testament. But what I would like to do is to just work through a few passages, primarily out of the Gospel of John. And talk a little bit today about the deity of Christ.

And then make some applications toward the end. Because I know Jeff has been, y 'all are doing something called cultish where you're dealing with various of the cults and things like that. And most people know that the person of Christ, the deity of Christ, is a central aspect of the focus of false religion.

The focus of the cults is to present a different Jesus. And so for many, many decades, believing Christians have, you know, at least taken the time maybe to attend a Wednesday night class on the cults to sort of, well, you know, when those little Mormon missionaries come by, at least I want to be able to say something nice to them or something along those lines.

And so most people have at least the general concept that there are certain aspects of Christian truth that are normally under attack. And so people take the time and maybe they'll flip to the back and find a blank page before the maps someplace and make a few notes, you know, some verses to share with Jehovah's Witnesses or with Mormons or Muslims or wherever else it might be.

Unfortunately, that has been pretty much the extent of our knowledge of the cults and related issues for many, many decades. And that's not deep enough. That does not go deep enough to be an effective witness.

And certainly today with the internet, attacks upon these fundamental beliefs go much, much wider and much deeper. So with that in mind, I would like to invite us to go a little bit deeper into the text and I will simply be translating and commenting on the text.

So if you're asking, well, what translation are you using? I'm not using a translation. Especially on this subject, if you're dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, they will frequently raise original language argumentation.

Almost no Jehovah's Witnesses I've ever encountered were actually fluent in any sense or trained in any sense in Koine Greek, but they've done, a lot of them have done some reading. And so they will at least allow you to think they are, even if they are not.

I have told the story a number of times before. I think I was in second, I think it was only in second year Greek at this time. So this would have been somewhere around, oh, I'm gonna date myself here, around 1983 or four, 84 probably.

And that sounds really long ago to some people today,.

Doesn't it?

It really doesn't feel that way, honestly. But I was meeting with some Jehovah's Witnesses in someone's home. And I've used to get to do that a lot before YouTube. YouTube in some ways diminished, now it greatly expanded our ability to communicate and to witness to people in other lands and things like that.

But here in the United States, I can't get away with anything anymore. I used to role play for churches and stuff, come in and pretend I was a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or something like that and role play with them.

And they didn't know because there wasn't a YouTube. I can't do that now for obvious reasons because, oh, come on, we know who you are. We've seen you on YouTube before. Same thing in meeting with Jehovah's Witnesses in people's homes.

It's not as common as it once was. And some of the best witnessing encounters I've ever had were in that particular context. But I was meeting with some Jehovah's Witnesses and the lady, as far as I could tell, a housewife.

There wasn't anything special about her in the sense of her making any claims to scholarship or training or anything like that. But she went through the standard pre-memorized speech on John 1 .1 because the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses renders that particular text and the word was a God.

And she was talking about definite articles and indefinite articles and pre-verbal, anarthrist nouns and all the rest of this type of stuff. And I had my, back then, Nestle-Aland 26th edition, this is the 28th, that's how long ago it was.

And it has no English in it. And so I, when she got done with her little speech, I handed it across to her. And I said, could you show me a definite article? And she didn't even know which way to hold the text.

She couldn't even tell which way was up with it. So it was a pre-memorized speech. She didn't know whether it was right or wrong. There was no way she could verify it one way or the other. But give her credit that she had taken the time to pre-memorize it.

We can't get most of our folks to go door to door, let alone memorize stuff to use in that. So, but that's one of the reasons you have to get a little bit more deep into things with individuals like this.

Because they have that kind of argumentation. And some of their people, some of their people, they're not the norm that you're gonna meet at the door, but some of their people can be quite challenging.

It can be quite challenging.

There have been a few times, mainly in the earlier years, when the only reason that I was able to do what I did in the sense of keeping a person from becoming a Jehovah's Witness or answering their questions, the witnesses ended up leaving and I was left the person, was because I had knowledge of the original languages.

That's how good they were. That's, it was a draw on the exegetical side, but the languages allowed for something more than just a draw. So looking at John chapter one, I do not suggest that you start with John 1, 1 with a Jehovah's Witness.

They've heard it before. And with Jehovah's Witnesses, what you want to try to do in the limited time you have is to get them thinking independently from the Watchtower Society itself. And so using a text that they've heard a thousand times before, they know all the answers to, is not what you want to do.

At the same time, at some point, if you've been successful in presenting other evidences of the deity, you're going to have to deal with it one way or the other. And so I'm not looking just at dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, it's a key passage.

And it is meant that the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John called the Prologue of John is intended to function as the lens through which you read the rest of the Gospel. And so if you get that right, if you get the lens right, then so much else in the Gospel is going to come into much clearer and sharper focus.

If you don't have that lens, then you're going to be missing a lot of the important stuff that comes at a particular later point. So the prologue, got to get that down. And when you explain something to someone who, maybe they're just a believer that just hasn't been well-taught.

Maybe they go to church where the sermons do not illustrate exegesis. And I mean, that's the best way to teach exegesis, by the way, is by consistent exegesis of the scriptures from the pulpit. You don't have to have a class on hermeneutics.

It's fine to do that. It's fine to teach people about context and original language and all the rest of the stuff that goes into meaningful hermeneutical process. But the best way to teach it is to do it.

Week in, week out, consistently. That's what matures a people and that's what grounds a people in trust in the word of God. So when you look at the prologue of John, the first 18 verses, what we find in the prologue is something called book-ending, book-ending.

Now, this doesn't mean as much today as it did back in my day. But back in my day, you would have books on a shelf. And if the books didn't fill up the width of the shelf, you would have something called book-ends.

And normally they had a little thing that you would sit the books on that would hold it in place. Sometimes it'd be a horse head or something like that that would be decorative. And they would prop the books up and hold the books in place if it wasn't in a situation where you were filling the whole shelf and there were, hence there was a way of holding the books in place.

Well, book-ending is a stylistic writing technique, a literary technique, where you start and end by presenting and repeating the same concepts but in different words. And then that creates a literary whole out of everything that's in between.

And so what I want you to do is look with me at verses one, well, one and two, really. And let me just, just in passing, I know the vast majority of people in this audience know this, but let's remember chapter and verse divisions are a modern innovation.

I know I just bummed out some of you that are into Bible numerology and things like that, but they are a modern innovation. The chapters were introduced first and then the verse divisions, at least in the New Testament that we utilize today, were first provided in 1551 by a man by the name of Robert Estienne, or as he was better known by his Latinized name, Stephanus.

And so in the 1550 Stephanus Greek text, there are no verses. The 1551, they have been introduced. And let's give Stephanus the benefit. He did a pretty decent job,.

But not a perfect job.

And look, sometimes it's really hard to know exactly where to break things off. It's not, it wasn't easily done. The point is they're artificial and they are a great help in being able to find things and discuss things in scripture.

But I wish we talked a little bit more about the dangers of them. There are dangers to verse divisions. When you memorize half of a sentence, that's dangerous. And given that, for example, you have pretty much just one sentence in the first 10 verses of Ephesians or so, you end up memorizing portions of sentences.

Well, better to memorize something than nothing at all, I guess, but you can see the danger if you're memorizing only a portion of a sentence, you should at least be pretty familiar with what the rest of it is.

And in the same way, when we look at the prologue of John, I was saying, well, verses one and two, that's an artificial division. What is the proper breakdown of the thought from the author? And so in John 1, 1, we have, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

This one, the logos, the word, was in the beginning with God. Then you go to verse 18. No one has seen God at any time. I'm just gonna give you the Greek and then we'll talk about the translation of it.

Monogenes theos, unique God, the one being in the bosom of the father, this one has explained or exegeted him. Now, these are your bookends, and there's all sorts of vitally important stuff in between.

For example, verse 14, and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory, glories of the unique one from the father, full of grace and truth. Yeah, there's really important stuff in between.

But what I want us to see is the bookends and how verse 18 sheds so much light on verses one and two, but of necessity, how verses one and two first shed light upon verse 18. You can't expect things to go backwards overly well, obviously.

So there are three clauses in John 1 .1. So normally they're called 1 .1a, b, and c. Anarche Einhalagus, in the beginning was the word. Now, in the Greek language, you have things called tenses, and tenses refer to aspect and time.

Aspect is first, time is second. Aspect talks about the kind of action. Time talks about the when of action. And it's fascinating, and I will credit my father and beyond him to Kenneth Wiest, longtime professor of Greek at Moody Bible Institute back in the 40s and 50s, under whom my dad studied, for pointing this out to me for the first time.

But when you look at the prologue of John, John will use two forms of the verb of being, are in English, is, was, am, are verbs of being, became, these are being verbs. And it's primarily I, me, and again, it's all in the aorist form in the Greek language.

And so in the Greek language, when speaking of the logos, John uses the word ein, which is the imperfect form of I mean. Why is that relevant to you? The imperfect form refers to continuous action in the past, continuous action in the past, over against an aorist that is an undefined action, normally a point action, but it's undefined.

It's a much more basic means of expressing the aspect of a verb. So when referring to, for example, John in verse six, John the Baptist, John uses the term agenita, he uses the aorist. And so there was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

But when he refers to the logos, he uses the imperfect form of I mean, which simply talks about continuous action in the past. It does not have an emphasis upon, or even contain the element of the beginning of that action.

This is what's very important. Because in John 1 ,1, in the beginning was the word does not mean in the beginning, the word was created. If he used agenita, that would imply that, but he didn't use agenita, he uses ein.

So as far back as you wanna push NRK, the logos is already in existence. This is a mechanism of communicating to us the eternal nature of the logos, the word. The word was already in existence prior to the RK, the beginning.

So what does 1 ,1 ,a tell us?

That the word's eternal.

Then, kai hal logos ein prostan theon, and the word was with God. Again, same word was, now you have the word being in the presence of, having personal relationship with God. God is not defined here. The only consistent way in context to define this is God the Father, but we're not told that yet.

That will basically come, especially in light of verse 18. This is where the bookend really helps us to understand this. And so the word was prostan theon. So the word has eternal relationship and personal existence.

Relationship with the Father and personal existence in of himself. The word's eternal. The word's an eternal relationship with the Father. Third phrase, kai theos ein ha logos. Here, of course, is where you have the argumentation with Jehovah's Witnesses and with some others that follow after them.

And a God was the word. Well, it is a truism amongst everyone who teaches Greek that one of the struggles you have is that the Greek article, the word the, is so much richer and so different than the English article, the.

And the tendency of the English-speaking person is to bring that background in and hence misinterpret the, a, the indefinite article, which leads to how Jehovah's Witnesses argue about John 1. Whether a noun has an article or not, does not determine whether that noun should be translated as a or the.

Names can have articles and we would never, why would a name have an article? We don't even think that way. Sometimes the presence of the article will actually influence the translation of the word and what it's referring to and what it's called.

It's semantic domain, it's range of meaning. In this instance, if the third clause said, chi ha theos, putting the article in front of God, ein ha logos, we would have heresy. If both nouns had the article, then they become interchangeable.

And so everything the theos is, the logos is, everything the logos is, theos is, they become interchangeable. The distinction which was introduced in the previous clause, that the word was with God, is destroyed.

So John couldn't put the article there or communicate the wrong thing. But by placing it before the verb, basically what he's emphasizing is the nature, not the identity of the logos. He's not saying the logos is the God with whom he just said he was.

He's saying the logos is as to his nature deity, the os, and always has been. Because again, he uses that verb that he used before. Then he sort of, in verse two, in essence, what he does here is he restates the primary emphasis of verse one.

This one was in the beginning with God. So this one, the logos, was, again, the imperfect form of I am me, continuous action of the past, in the beginning with God. So really, he summarizes the first two clauses primarily in a repetitious way to emphasize this one was in the beginning, eternally, in relationship with Tantheon, God, with God.

Now, if you've seen the debate that I did about a year and a half ago now, with Representative Iglesia Ni Cristo, a cult group in the Philippines, you know that they think that the form of the os changes the meaning.

They don't read the original languages. They don't have scholars in the original languages. And so, hatheos and tantheon to them would be, there's a great difference between the two. Those who read the languages know that's the difference between the nominative and accusative forms, the exact same word.

And all that tells you is how it's functioning in a sentence. It doesn't change the meaning. It's just simply nominative subject form and accusative, normally, the direct object form. And pros takes the accusative.

And so, in verse two, this one was with God, hence it could be in the accusative. They get all excited about what tantheon is over in John chapter 17, not really knowing anything about the original languages.

Now, keeping in mind what we just learned about verses one and two, let's look at the bookend in verse 18. No one has seen, now, interesting here, at the end of verse two, it's tantheon. Here, it's just simply theon.

No one has seen God at any time. Now, is that true? Well, there are places in the Old Testament. I mean, Abram walked with God. Isaiah saw Yahweh sitting upon his throne, lofty and lifted up. There are a number of places that you could make a fair argument that people saw God.

And yet, John says no one has seen God at any time. Well, I would argue that John 118 would be contradictory with the rest of scripture if you don't interpret John 118 correctly. If you do not have a Trinitarian exegesis of this text, yeah, I would say it would be contradictory.

But it's not, if you really understand what John is saying. And that's what's gonna give you the key to seeing everything else in John in a consistent fashion. Okay, let's say that God, the God who's not been seen is the Father.

Let's keep that in mind and see if John substantiates this. No one has seen God at any time. Then you have this very interesting phrase that has once again become exceptionally controversial in our day again, only over the past year and a half, two years.

It became controversial again because of a interesting perspective on the part of a minority of Christian scholars that promotes what's called the eternal subordination of the Son. It's the idea that there is a definitional element of subordination between the person of the Father and the person of the Son.

And not a voluntary subordination, but an ontological or on the level of being subordination. And what it ended up casting light on is the idea the relationship of the Father and the Son and what those words mean when you take them out of what we might call human language use.

And the term monogamous as a result has come in for some further analysis. It had been generally accepted and I have yet to see a really strong rejection of this. I know what the arguments are, but I don't know that a survey of related forms in patristic literature can overcome the specific Johannine use of this term, the term used in the Gospel of John.

Monogamous theos, monogamous is translated in the King James Version only begotten. It's translated in most modern versions as unique or one of a kind. So what is it? Which is it? Only begotten I find to be a less adequate theological translation for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it is our tendency to hear the phrase begotten and to temporalize it. We put it in time. We don't have any way of really avoiding that because that's how our language works. The problem is when applying it to God and putting outside of temporal categories, outside of time categories, what does it mean to be begotten outside of time?

Because for you and I, begettal is a time category. It's a time event. It's a singular event. Also because the fact that the spelling of monogamous tells us that when you hear that phrase monogamous, generation in our language comes from the Greek and genao to beget and genos, kind or type.

The problem is genao has two nos in it. Kind or type, genos, has one and monogamous has one. So it's drawing from the kind or type aspect, not from the begetting aspect. And so the word itself in its formation, monogamous, one kind, would have more of an emphasis upon uniqueness than monogamous if it had two nos, because that would be monos and then genao, hence more only begotten.

Now monogamous can be used of an only begotten child. So if you put it in a particular context that shoves the meaning to that side of the semantic domain, the range of meanings that the term has, that's fine, but you don't have that here.

Instead you have monogamous the os, how can you have an only begotten God? Is that not a contradiction? Unless you recognize it's talking about the unique God, then you have haon aiston kalpon tu patras, the one being by the side or the bosom of the father.

So here I think you have John identifying the God that he's been talking about, who is, who has never been seen, the God with whom the word was, is the father. And now we have this unique God who is in the bosom of the father, who is the logos.

And this one is the monogamous the os, unique God. So it's important to keep these distinctions in mind and to remember, and we're gonna see this a little bit later on, unless I stop. Well, I need to talk faster, I guess.

But the phrase haon, the one being, monogamous the os, haon, the unique God, the one being in the bosom of the father, that again is a present participle. And so it's emphasizing continuous action. And so it's not the one who came into existence by the father's side or who was created by the father to give him company or something like that.

No, this monogamous the os is the one being. And what's interesting is, again, I mentioned at the beginning of all this, beginning of my rambling, that in the Greek septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, there's a fascinating phrase that you've undoubtedly heard of back in Exodus 3 .14, I am that I am, how Yahweh identifies himself to Moses in the burning bush, I am that I am.

And a lot of people, mistakenly, I think, but honest motives, will grab hold of the use of I am in the gospel of John and just run straight back to Exodus 3 .14 and say, see, I am that I am, Jesus is claiming to be the I am.

That's a pretty weak argument. And Unitarians can tear it apart fairly easily. It is a valid teaching, but a weak argument. You say, how can you have a valid teaching with a weak argument? It misses something.

One of the things that it misses is that in the Greek septuagint, when it says, I am that I am, Anahu, Asher, Anahu, what was the, I don't have the Hebrew in front of me, but the Greek is ego, I, me, ha, own.

Ego, I, me, ha, own. And so I myself am the one being. And so the real strong affirmation part is ha, own. Ego, I, me, is not as strong as ha, own is in that phrase. Now we're gonna see, ego, I, me, is still a divine name.

It's just, you don't go to Exodus 3 to prove that. You go to Isaiah 43 and places like that instead. And so, but it is significant to me, and it should be to all of us, that the same Greek phrase that is used in Exodus 3, 14, ha, own, of the very being of God, is used here, menageres theos, ha, own.

The unique God, the one being in the bosom of the father, this one has made him known. And so what John 1, 18 is telling us is that no one has seen the father in any time, but the unique God, the one who's in the bosom of the father, this one has made him known, has explained him, has exegeted him.

Now, once you put 18 and one and two together, it's a pretty full teaching about the eternal nature of the logos. Logos is not created. What we know of the father, we can have confidence in because the one who has revealed these things about the father has eternally been in the presence of the father, is not just a highly exalted, created being, but has eternally existed in the very presence of the father.