Two ideas presented to me yesterday rang false. After researching them using God’s Word, I understood how both of them contradicted Scripture. One was a method of Bible study that was obviously relying on speculation and imagination rather than accurate interpretation. The other was a conspiracy theory also based on conjecture that contradicted the Bible’s description of God’s nature and His purposes.
Today’s word about God is BEGOTTEN, a word that can be interpreted two ways. One is “to father, to become the male agent responsible for the conception of a child and its eventual entry into the world.” This word is used in biblical genealogies with an emphasis on being born physically. This OT use of begotten makes it clear that God is the author of life and the only one who ultimately provides the barren with children, such as Abraham and Sarah.
The other definition is “to give rise to; bring about” and is used to describe how Jesus came into this world and how God raised Him from the dead. For instance, Psalm 2:7 says, “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’” in a context that predicts how earthly leaders would lash out at Him thinking they had won until God the Father would raise Him from the dead. Having "begotten" Jesus or bringing Him forth from the grave, this prophetic psalm says the resurrection of Jesus proves that He is God, and that God won over those who mocked Him.
Begotten is repeated in the NT pointing to Jesus as a unique person. For example, Hebrews 1:5 says: “For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’?”
The NT word translated begotten can concern the birth of an attitude as in 2 Timothy 2:23: “Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.” Paul even uses it to describe how he is the spiritual father of the believers in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 4:15: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
Another NT word has the same dual idea of giving birth in a physical sense, but also causing something “to come into being, bring forth, produce” such as sinful desires that result in spiritual death:
James 1:15. “Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
The danger of false teaching comes in when these dual meanings are mixed up. Some cults use the idea of human physical birth to explain that Jesus was God’s begotten Son in the sense that He was a created being. By doing this, they are forced to re-write other portions of Scripture that say Jesus always existed. Instead, they claim He was only a god and not God in human flesh. By changing their definition, the identity of Jesus Christ is changed and the plain Bible teaching of the virgin birth and His resurrection is dismissed. This takes away His redemptive power as the One who died for our sin and whom God raised from the dead. As a result, these cults decide they must earn their salvation by doing as their leaders prescribe. This adds up to false teaching.
GAZE INTO HIS GLORY. John 1:1–2 and 14 describe the glory of God in His begotten Son . . . “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God . . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” When God revealed this to me, His glory changed my life. He has shown me that messing around with the full scope of Bible teaching is not only dangerous to my spiritual well-being, it can lead others away from God’s salvation by grace through faith — into a system of trying to do it without relying fully on the Son begotten by the Father, a ‘faith’ that the Word of God exposes as being useless. For this reason, I am continually fact-checking, willing to see errors in my Bible interpretation, and always wanting to glorify my Savior and Lord.
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