The Father loves the Son

John 5:16-30 is a remarkable passage. It is full of deep theology about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son - too much for a blog, but here's one thought for now:

In v26, Jesus says, "as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself." Now we know that God depends on no-one for his life. He is self-existent. But what about the Son? Because we are good credal Chrsitians, we naturally think and say that the Son is also self-existent - that he too has 'life-in-himself', and therefore depends on no-one for his own life.

And yet, Jesus says that the Father has 'granted' life to the Son - the Son is dependent on the Father granting him life.

But the Son's life is also 'life-in-himself' - it is not dependent on somone else, but inherent! How do we square this circle?

The answer must lie outside of time. The Father grants the Son 'life-in-himself' in eternity. So we can't even say that the Father has always and will always grant the Son life - that's using time to define what is outside time. Instead, we must say that the Son's life proceeds from the Father as part of the Trinity's very being - it's more about who God is than what he does.

If you find all this hard to understand, that's because 1) I'm not good at explaining it, and 2) neither you nor I are like the Son to whom God explains everything, 'For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.'

Don Carson explains all this in a brilliant lecture series entitled 'The Spirituality of the Gospel of John'. Each of the 5 lectures is about an hour long, and is aimed at people with some theological education. But you might want to give it a go - if you're brave!