The simple answer to the question Who is God the Son is the typical Sunday school answer, Jesus! Jesus was sent down to earth by the Father to die on the cross and save us from our sins. Because of the sacrifice He made, anyone who believes in Him will have eternal life.
Jesus is the part of the Trinity that we may be tempted to assume is easier to understand. He came to earth and became human in order to save us broken and sinful people. We now have the opportunity to spend eternity in the presence of the Almighty God of the universe. We can often assume that Jesus is easier to understand than the Father and the Holy Spirit because He became human and lived on earth among other people. However, Jesus did not just become human, He also stayed God while He was in human form: 100% God and 100% human. That is mind blowing, right? Jesus lived a perfect life and died for us so that we don’t have to be perfect in order to spend eternity with Him.
Why did Jesus need to come and die for us? How did we get to be in this world of sin when it was created perfectly? In the book I mentioned last week, Delighting in the Trinity, Michael Reeves explains that when Adam and Eve sinned in Genesis 3, they were not just doing the wrong thing physically, but they were shifting the object of their love. This ties in with why it is important that we believe in the Trinity as opposed to a single god of other religions. Other gods would have created people to be their slaves or servants and doing something wrong would have been just that, doing a wrong action. If that were the case, there would have been no need for Jesus to come and sacrifice Himself for us.
Because of the sins of Adam and Eve, they were cast out of the garden of Eden, and therefore cast out of communion with God. This is because they no longer loved God above all else. When we come to faith in Christ and believe that God loves us and sent His Son for us, He welcomes us into communion with Him in the form of reading our Bibles and praying.
The Gospels follow the public ministry of Jesus in the three years before His death as well as after His resurrection and before His ascension. They record many times when He both claimed to be God and claimed to be from God. That was not always taken so well. Many people in those days did not believe Him, and many people today unfortunately do not believe Him either. As they did back then, people often still consider Him just a teacher who was an imperfect human like the rest of us.
When we think about Jesus, let’s remember that He always was and always will be God, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Yes, He was the person of the Trinity who came to earth and lived among sinners like us, but He lived the perfect life that we never could and died on the cross as our perfect sacrifice because He loves us and wants to spend eternity with us. How great is that?
Abbi