What makes Jesus unique among all other sons of God?
He's Yahweh.
The fundamental question is; Jesus is the Son of God.
And that seems like a big deal in the New Testament,
but we've got all these other sons of God in the Old Testament
who are spiritual beings. Like, how can that be? How does that work?
Well, if we go to John 3:16, I get this verse that I'm sure all of us know by heart.
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son."
Return on my paint view again, "his only son."
Now, right here we have the Greek word behind the one I clicked on, is monogenēs.
There was a time in biblical studies, and it's reflected in older translations
like the King James, it'll say "only begotten",
there was a time in biblical studies where monogenēs
was thought to originate from two Greek terms;
monos, which means "one" or "only", and then genaō which is a verb that means "to beget".
And that's where we got the translation "only begotten."
Now, in the late 19th, early to mid 20th centuries, there was more Greek material
from the Koine stage of the Greek language,
which is the language of the New Testament, Koine Greek,
that established the fact that that's really not what's going on with monogenēs.
Instead of monogenēs being formed from monos and genaō.
It's really formed from monos and the noun genḗ.
Monos means "one" or "only", genḗ means "kind", or "type",
(a type of a thing, a kind of thing).
What the term really means is: one of a kind, unique. Okay,
"For God so loved the world that he gave his unique Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."
You said, Well, big deal, Mike. Now, if we did a search,
and I'm going to do a search here on the lemma monogenēs,
and just do a quick search of my Bible. Let's make this a little bigger.
I'm not going to go through all of these.
Because they're all consistent with what I'm going to say. But there's a key one down here
in Hebrews 11:17. "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac,
and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only,
(there's the word), his only, his monogenēs son."
Question; was Isaac, Abraham's only son?
No, he'd already had a boy, Ishmael.
In fact, Isaac wasn't even the firstborn. At least of all Abraham's sons.
He's the firstborn of Sarah. But why would Isaac be called monogenēs?
Why would Isaac be unique?
It's because he was the son of Sarah by supernatural act of God
and he was the inheritor of the covenant.
None of Abraham's other sons could say that.
Okay, what's the point? The point is that the term means unique,
and we can see that in this parallel. This is why Isaac is specifically isolated,
it doesn't mean the only one that exists.
Okay, like the people who want to say that Psalm 82 is just,
you know, Elohim are people okay? None of the other gods exist.
No, no, Jesus is called the monogenēs for a very specific reason;
what makes Jesus unique among all other sons of God?
He's Yahweh.
He has the unique set of attributes of Yahweh.
He was the son who preexisted his birth.
Okay, that one is the one that God sent to be an offering for sin.
None of the other ones, that one. So you can have multiple sons of God
who are supernatural beings, that doesn't impinge on the uniqueness of Jesus
anymore that it impinges on the uniqueness of Yahweh, because Jesus is the Son.
Okay, Trinitarian Godhead thing.
And as we progress through the course, we're going to see, again, we're going to get
into this God as man theology of the Old Testament and how that prepares
and creates a framework for understanding the deity of Jesus.
But for now, I'm just going back to something familiar in your Trinitarian Christian theology
to make the point again, that plural Elohim does not impinge on this at all.
Whether it's God or Jesus