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WHEN WAS JESUS BORN THE FIRST TIME?

I, Lonnie Melashenko, am not a dad. But I certainly HAVE a dad - and there was a time when my dad, Joe Melashenko, was here and I wasn’t. If you go back in time far enough, could you come to a moment in the dark past when God the Father was around, but Jesus, His Son, hadn’t come on the scene yet?

Perhaps you recall, about two decades ago now, how a “Doc Brown” was showing off his time-travel DeLorean to a young Michael J. Fox. The space-age car had a time circuitry the driver could set, just by punching the numbers. “How would you like to go back and witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence?” he asked Marty, going zap zap zap with the controls. Instantly the readout panel flashed: “July 4, 1776.” And then he said: “Or witness the birth of Christ.” And he flashed up on the dashboard: “December 25, 0000.” Of course, the theologians and historians are quick to accurately point out that Jesus almost certainly was not born on the 25th of December, and perhaps also not in the year zero. 4 B.C. is probably more accurate, and the dead of winter wasn’t usually a time when shepherds were out in the fields with their flocks by night.

But setting that aside, imagine with me going back in your time machine to BEFORE the birth of Christ. Back to when a young girl named Mary is five or six or seven months pregnant. The very Son of God, King of the universe, is in the womb, but not yet among us.

That takes us tiptoeing — oh so carefully — to a harder time-travel question, and we arrived there yesterday as we studied the first chapter of Ephesians. We had just read where the apostle Paul, after his greeting, said this about Jesus:

“Praise be to the God and Father OF our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Which got us to thinking about how God the Father is also, according to the Bible, the God of Jesus. Is Jesus not just God’s Son, but also God’s subject? In other words, is God . . . God . . . to Jesus?

And now to the discussion for today. Yes, if you traveled back in a DeLorean to the Old Testament side of the bridge, you would come to a point where Jesus Christ is not on this planet. If you pass the Bethlehem offramp on the freeway, and go into Old Testament times, then Jesus Christ, citizen of Nazareth, would not be here. Of course, as most Christians accept, you would then be in the time of the pre-incarnate Christ. The same Jesus who was born of a virgin, in a stable, in a manger, with the cows and goats, on Planet Earth, in 4 B.C. or thereabouts, used to exist previous to that up in heaven. He was with God, the Bible says in John chapter one, and He WAS God. That’s a hallmark belief of the Christian Church.

But now, assuming that we still have some plutonium for the flux capacitor in our time machine, shall we go further into the past? Past the time of the Old Testament prophets and kings. Past the Exodus and the story of Joseph. Past the lives of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Past the flood and the Garden of Eden and the six creation days of Genesis 1. Friend, could we keep going on beyond all that, centuries and millennia beyond all that, and arrive at a time when God the Father was here but not Jesus? Was Jesus, the Son of God, ever not there? We posed the question reverently yesterday: was there ever a time when God went to the hospital — in a sense — and where Jesus “started” at that point?

Such a view is sometimes called “Arian” or “Arianism.” And often Bible scholars and theologians are referred to as “semi-Arian” if they break away — but only partially — from the belief that Jesus Christ was created or “began” at some specific point, and that He did not exist before that.

Interestingly, as we study — and, of course, my own Adventist denomination is a fairly new Christian body — some of our own pioneers struggled within the camps of being Arian. “Full-blown” Arianism, as Dr. Woodrow Whidden, a professor of religion at Andrews University, our Adventist seminary in Michigan, puts it, would claim that:

“Christ was a created ‘god’ and it was clearly said that there was a time when He did not exist.”

A W. W. Prescott, one of our early leaders, actually wrote in the official church paper about Christ as:

“. . . Twice born, once in eternity, the only begotten of the Father, and once in the flesh.”

And Pastor E. J. Waggoner, a man whose name is familiar to most Bible students in my church, could not get beyond “semi-Arianism.”

“There was a time,” he wrote, “when Christ proceeded forth and came from God, from the bosom of the Father, but that time was so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension it is PRACTICALLY without beginning.”

In other words, yes, there was a time when God “begat” or “started” Jesus, and before that time, God was all by Himself . . . but it was so long ago that our time machines or our imaginations cannot take us there.

Well, friend, thank God our loving Father and eternal Savior and loving Teacher, the Holy Spirit, are all three such patient Tutors as we slowly learn and explore the divine mysteries. I’m grateful that God is long-suffering as we laboriously shed our erroneous concepts. No one here on earth knows everything, do we? In my own Adventist Church, I’m glad that these good people kept on digging through the Word, kept on their knees, kept on seeking truth. Let me read for you the official belief we hold about Jesus now . . . and thank the Lord all traces whatsoever of Arian error are gone.

“Christ is one with the Eternal Father — one in nature, equal in power and authority, God in the highest sense, eternal and self-existent, with life original, unborrowed, underived. Christ existed from ALL eternity, distinct from, but united with, the Father, possessing the same glory, and all the divine attributes.”

Isn’t that powerful? Friend, there has never been a time when Jesus was not there. You can go back, and back, and back, and back . . . at the speed of light, or fifty centuries per second, and when you park and get out, God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are, all three of them, there. The Athanasius Creed, written specifically to rebut the heresy of the Arians, puts it this way:

“The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.”

But let’s address here one more thorny question. Why does the Bible refer to Jesus as God’s “only begotten” Son? What does that mean? Everywhere else in this same Bible, if a man “begets” a son, it means his wife goes to the hospital and has a baby. What does it mean here? Webster’s tells us that beget means “to generate offspring, or to produce as an effect: ‘a belief that power begets power,’” for example. Certainly with that first definition, “to generate offspring,” we think right away of Lamaze classes and a long wait outside the delivery room. What is the teaching of the Bible on how Jesus is “begotten” of God the Father?

A number of years ago, in his excellent book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis took a noble stab at describing how Jesus could be the “Son” . . . and still always be in existence. It’s rather lengthy, but join me in thinking about this:

“Imagine two books,” he writes, “lying on a table one on top of the other. Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one up — supporting it. It is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is causing the position of B.”

Are you with us so far? Two books, “A” on the bottom, and “B” right on top of it. All right. Lewis continues:

“Now let us imagine — it could not happen, of course, but it will do for the illustration — let us imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B’s position would always have been resulting from A’s position. But all the same, A’s position would not have EXISTED before B’s position. . . . As soon as I begin trying to explain how these Persons are connected I have to use words which make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the second; we call it begetting, not making, because what He produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only word to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first — just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after about it. . . . We must think of the Son ALWAYS, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father — what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.”

Isn’t that marvelous? Friend, I’m so thankful that Jesus, our eternal Savior and King, is our Friend forever. In both directions.