01.04. The Father's Bosom
Dronsfield ESOF: 04 The Father’s Bosom THE FATHER’S BOSOM
John 1:18. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him". This passage has always been taken by orthodox Christians to mean that the Son is eternally in the bosom of the Father, and therefore is able to reveal the inmost secrets of the Father’s heart to His own. Those who deny Eternal Sonship, however, must teach that His dwelling in the Father’s bosom had a beginning when He became a man.
Here we have the present tense used to deduce eternity, as it is in some other places in the Scriptures. The Lord said "Before Abraham was, I AM" and thereby showed that HE was eternal. If He had said "Before Abraham was, I was", it need only have meant that He was older than Abraham, but the present tense gives the sense of eternal existence — no beginning and no end. In John 8:24, the Lord said, "If ye believe not that I AM, ye shall die in your sins". The insertion of the pronoun "he" in the A.V. is quite unwarranted. The context does not show that the Lord had said that He was anybody that the "He" could refer to. It is the assertion of His eternal Godhead. There are other similar passages.
Why then, argue the opposers, did John 1:1, which clearly refers to eternity, use the past tense. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". One feels that the answer to this is that the inspired writing is taking us back to the earliest conceivable beginning of anything at all, and saying that the Word was already there. It is the past eternity here, and the future eternity is not in view. Where the thought of eternity without end as well as without beginning is brought before us, the present tense is used. Of course with God there is no past or future, but that is beyond our comprehension. For our finite minds the Holy Spirit uses words that are within our grasp.
Another objection centres round the preposition "in" which here is the Greek word eis denoting "motion towards", similar to our word "into" or "unto". If I say "I walked in the house" it indicates that I was walking in the house all the time, but if I say "I walked into the house", it indicates that my presence in the house was due to my walking into it. In English, I cannot say, "I am into the house", but in Greek that form of words could be used, and it would indicate that my present position in the house is due to my past moving into it. Consequently (say the objectors), the preposition eis shows that He is in the Father’s bosom as a result of a past act of movement into it. To this objection we answer that "eis" does not necessarily denote physical motion. When one believes in the Son of God (John 3:16), the preposition "in" is eis. It denotes a movement of the heart or will. This eis of "in the Father’s bosom" shows movement of the affections. We have here another example of the way these teachers reason from the finite when they are dealing with the infinite. If there is movement here it is the eternal movement of Divine affections. What could be a more beautiful or profound thought? Let us not dare to doubt that a Father’s bosom has been the blessed portion of the Son for all eternity, His rightful and deserved place. As one has written "How fearful we should be, lest we admit of any confession of faith that would defraud the Divine bosom of its eternal ineffable delights, and which would tell our God He knew not a Father’s joy, and would tell our Lord that He knew not a Son’s joy in that bosom from all eternity" (The Son of God, by J. G. Bellett).