God the Son

The second Person of the Trinity is God the Son. The Son is eternal - He has always existed. The Son is fully God, yet is a distinct Person from the other members of the Trinity - God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit (see Begotten). Although He has existed eternally in the Godhead, and is present through the Old Testament period (e.g. Psalm 2:7-12, Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5), we see in the New Testament that God the Son takes on human form when He is born as a baby to Mary and given the name Jesus (Luke 1:30-35, John 1:14, Galatians 4:4, Romans 8:3). The writer to the Hebrews says that God the Son is God the Father’s final word to us, that the Son is the One through whom all things were created, the One who sustains all things, and the One through whom sin was dealt with, as He dies a substitutionary sacrifice for human beings (Hebrews 1:1-4, see also 1 John 4:10, Hebrews 2:14-17). Hebrews also says that God the Son ‘is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being’. Colossians says that He is the ‘image of the invisible God’. This means that we can truly know the nature of God the Father through looking at the nature of His Son, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-4, Colossians 1:15-23). It is through the Son that God has chosen to reveal Himself to us and it is only through the Son that human beings can be saved to eternal life. The New Testament makes it clear that faith in Jesus as the Son of God is the only way to be saved (John 14:6, 1 John 5:12, 1 John 5:20, John 3:16, Romans 5:10) (see Jesus).