Both Called God Here

There is no reason for us to confuse God with Jesus. People treat the Bible as if it were confusing, but it’s simply not. They think that the Bible makes it hard to discern God from Jesus and Jesus from God but there’s only one passage in the New Testament where both Jesus and the Father are together called God.

When we talk about discerning who is who, one passage is always the first challenge to overcome. Let's break it down. You know it well. Here it is:

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This One was in the beginning with God (John 1:1-2).

This passage--famously known as John’s Prologue--has stood at the heart of the debate on monotheism for hundreds of years, since the fourth century AD. Some say that it’s ambiguous. Some say that it's evidence for Trinitarianism. Others say that it’s confusing. We disagree. It's none of those.

The Scriptures are inspired by God, and God is a God of order. 'God is light. In him there is no darkness' (1 John 1:5). He inspired the prophets and apostles with the express purpose of enlightening us. There is no passage in the Bible that was penned to confuse us because God’s Word is a revelation.

God's Word opens the mind. It doesn't conceal, but reveal. It shows you truth. In the case of John's Prologue, it shows you the truth of who Jesus was at Creation, and what his relationship to the Father was.

Called God, Not The One God

Certain things you absolutely must notice about John’s Prologue before you build upon it. Trinitarians don't really build upon it; they build upon their erroneous interpretation of it. They take a good thing, twist it, and then that good thing becomes a weapon of wrong.

It's like taking a machete, which is a very helpful tool for a farmer, and then running out on the streets to attack people with it.

What most people notice first about John 1:1-2 is that Jesus is called God. Amen. He is called God, but he is not called the God. Only the Father is called the God--and that means the One God. He's called by that unique name in other verses too!

... the End, when he [Jesus] hands over the Kingdom to the God and Father... (1 Corinthians 15:24; LEB).

What does it mean to call Jesus God in the same sentence we call the Father the God? The thrust of the passage is not to introduce the mystery of "three-in-one," but to take away the mystery of Jesus’ association with the One God. What is that mystery?

Let's uncover it. How does Jesus relate to his Father?

Double Emphasis on Association

People who jump to the conclusion that this is a passage that teaches that Jesus is the One God fail to notice the double emphasis on Jesus as the one who ‘was with God.’ The key word John repeats is with. So, what does with denote? Association. If I am with you, you are an associate of mine.

Twice in two verses the Scriptures tell us that Jesus got his glory from his association with the One God. That’s what you call “emphasis.” The Holy Spirit is making it emphatic that Jesus’ status as God is directly related to his having been with the One True God. As John writes:

... the Word was with God... This One was in the Beginning with God (John 1:1-2).

Readers of John 1 should conclude that Jesus’ identity as Divine depends on his nearness to the One God. You could also put it this way: Jesus wouldn’t be divine if it weren’t for his relationship with God. That shouldn’t be a surprise to us since Jesus often declared that without God he could do nothing.

Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself (John 5:19).

By myself I can do nothing (John 5:30).

I do nothing on my own… (John 8:28)

Analogy of Faith

Not surprisingly, the same apostle John composed a statement similar to his gospel Prologue. This is very helpful because with it we can be certain that our interpretation of John 1:1-2 is right. If John penned a parallel passage with the same idea, then we can verify our interpretation of John's Prologue.

This is a tried-and-true interpretive method called the analogy of faith (analogia fidei).

Here’s the reasoning behind analogia fidei: Scripture cannot contradict Scripture because God doesn’t lie. He will not say in one place anything which is inconsistent with what he says in another. Scriptures explain Scripture.

If a passage seems to have two or three different interpretations, the true interpretation will be the one which agrees with what the Bible teaches elsewhere on the same subject.

Look at what John said elsewhere:

That which was from the Beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life.

The Life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the Eternal Life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us (1 John 1:1-2).

John has helped us greatly here by means of this second text. From it, we see that the Word (also called the Word of Life) is Jesus. And just like in John’s Prologue, John focuses on Jesus’ physical presence at the Beginning, which is the Creation event.

John also refers to Jesus as the Life or the Eternal Life—and those are some of John's nicknames for this much longer title he gave to Jesus: the Word of Life. These titles for Jesus shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you because they are reminiscent of what Jesus said about himself. Do you remember when he declared: ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…’ (John 14:6)? There it is!

The Meaning is with With

Easy enough. Jesus is the Life. But did you notice how the crux of the passage is that the Life was with the Father? The whole passage drives hard at this point. It drives so hard at it that you could say that the word with carries the weight of the meaning of the passage.

You could say that the meaning is with with!

So again we learn that Jesus’ association with God is what makes him special. It’s what makes Jesus divine. It’s what makes him worthy of the title Life or Word of Life.

Jesus’ nearness to God is what he himself boasted about when he said:

No one has seen the Father except the One who is from God; only he has seen the Father (John 6:46).

The Word of Life

So, one of Jesus’ names is the Life or the Word of Life. Those are nice names. They are very similar to what he is called in another Scripture passage. He is called a life-giving spirit. Here it is:

The first man Adam became a living being; the Last Adam [that’s Jesus], a life-giving spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Still another passage makes this quality of giving life clearer. It tells us that Jesus can bring to life whomever he wants to bring to life. Guess why? It's because the Father has authorized Jesus to have life in himself.

Here it is in Jesus’ own words:

… just as the Father raises the Dead and makes them alive, thus also the Son makes alive whomever he wishes… just as the Father has life in himself, thus also he has granted to the Son to have life in himself (John 5:21).

The emphasis of all these passages is that God is the source of Jesus’ power.

Jesus will resurrect us—that’s true. But he will resurrect us with God’s authorization. Jesus will bring us back from the Dead because the One God has empowered Jesus to do so. As John tells us in still another passage, Jesus ‘is in closest relationship with the Father,’ and John tells us that in the same breath he describes that Jesus is God.

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known (John 1:18).

So, again, the reason why Jesus has the divine nature is his nearness to the One God. Being with God is the factor in Jesus’ life that empowers him. With the divine nature God has granted him, Jesus can do whatever God does--including resurrect people from Hades!

God Who is With the One God

Let's dig deeper into a point which is essential for us to notice about John’s Prologue (John 1:1-2). We mentioned it before: When Jesus is called God in the passage, there is no direct article (the) before the word God. In other words, speaking of the One God, the original Greek states that Jesus was with the God.

But when it says that Jesus was God, there is no the. It doesn't say that Jesus was the God. If it did, it would mean that he is the One God, but he's not.

Now, many Evangelicals discard this argument altogether since the Jehovah’s Witnesses use it to prove that Jesus is what the JWs call “a god”—but that is not our argument here.

Solid Biblical scholars will recognize that the grammatical structure of not having an article before the word God means that Jesus has the divine nature or the qualities of deity—and that is our argument in this post!

The apostle John, therefore is not saying that Jesus is the same God with whom Jesus was. That would not only be bad theology, but completely illogical—like saying “Joe was with Joe, and Joe was Joe. This one was with Joe in the beginning”). No! Nobody would ever speak such gibberish.

Rather, the absence of the article (the) before God in the expression ‘the Word was God’ indicates that what John means is for the word God to indicate Christ’s divine nature. This is an indisputable fact.

When John makes reference to the One God in the same passage (and he does it twice), John always puts the article the before God. By doing that, John differentiates between the Word who was God, and the One God who is always God.

The Best Translation

The best translations should help the reader to see that it’s the One God who is given the greatest importance in John’s Prologue. That’s not easy to do, but if I were to be assigned the task of translating the passage literally, it would say:

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the One God, and the Word was Divine.

This one was in the Beginning with the One God.

Now, although I have seminary studies in basic Greek, I am no Bible translator. What you see above is the humble effort of someone who, in the fear of God, would never add or to subtract from the Scriptures. The words in italics are my suggestions, but keep using your own Bible!

A lot of my confidence comes from a man named Daniel Wallace, one of the top New Testament Greek scholars of our generation. He agrees in his book Greek Grammar, Beyond the Basics (1996, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, p. 269) that the word God in the end of John 1:1 (‘… and the Word was God’) is qualitative.

In other words, the word God in John 1:1c stresses the “God quality” of the Word. That’s exactly what we mean when we translate John 1:2 as ‘… the Word was Divine.’ The quality of God is known as his divinity. And someone with divinity as their nature can rightly be called God. In fact, that's exactly why the Word is called God in John 1!

Dependent on the One God

The issue boils down to this: Jesus is Divine, but the deity of Christ is a doctrine which is never presented outside of the context of Jesus' relationship to the One True God. This is such an important rule of Christian truth that I’ll restate it: Jesus’ deity is a reality which should never presented out of the framework of his relationship to God. Follow that rule, and you’ll move within the Biblical model.

What we learn from John’s Prologue and the other passages where Jesus is called God is that we should never think of Jesus as independent but as dependent on the One True God. An illustration of Jesus’ dependence on God would be how 6-year old John Doe Jr., a minor, would be dependent on John Doe Sr., the 34-year old head of household, and John Junior’s father.

Both of them are legitimately John Doe; in fact, they have the same genetics (that means they have the same nature), being of the same family. Each one deserves respect as an individual capable of making his own decisions—and that's why they would be offended if you confused one with the other.

One John Doe clearly is dependent on the other, even though they are both truly Does and each of them has real autonomy. We should understand this kind of relationship of dependence as the one that Jesus, the Son of God, has with his Father.

"God From God"

Like the Nicene Creed of 325 AD affirms, Jesus is “... God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God...” The part about Jesus being “very God” can be contrasted with the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who say that Jesus is “a god” in their translation of the Bible in John 1:1—and they dare to use lower-case g for god.

But we can also agree with the Nicene fathers that Jesus is the “very God” who is “from very God.” We can say that because Jesus came from God and got his divine nature from God. "God from God" is a nice way to phrase who Jesus is--sounds just like a Son, doesn't it?

But notice that we could never say the same thing about the Father. He is not "God from God." The Father is the One God, meaning he comes from no one. He does not derive his divine nature from anyone else. As Justin Martyr wrote in his First Apology (150 AD), he is “the Unbegotten God." And yes, that's actually a Biblical expression!*

Job’s wise friend Elihu knew about this aspect of the One God. He knew that no one appointed God. That's why Elihu asked the question:

Who appointed him over the Earth? Who put him in charge of the whole World? (Job 34:30)

The answer: no one! And that's what makes him the One God!

• Although few versions translate it the way it appears in the Greek, Jesus is called the "Only Begotten God" in John 1:18. See the excellent translations in the following versions of the Bible: NASB 1995, NASB 1977, Amplified Bible, Legacy Standard Bible, Berean Literal Bible, Literal Standard Version, Aramaic Bible in Plain English, Literal Emphasis Translation.