The Heart of Father and Son--by Linden Malki

God is all about relationships.  God IS a relationship: as John put it, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.  And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."  (John 1:1-5 ) As the story continues, we find that the Word of God, a part of God Himself, relates to God the Father as His Son. 
 He created the world to have people to love, and we are told that mankind was "created in the image of God." So we have souls and spirits like that of God, and when God arranged for His Son to live on Earth with us, the Son was one whose physical body was the one of which we are the image.  However, He was perfect and sinless, and came to enable us to resemble Him more perfectly.

When His impending birth was announced in dream to a Jewish man named Joseph, whose betrothed wife was found to be pregnant, an angel said "Joseph, son of David, have no fear about taking Mary as your wife. It is by the Holy Spirit that she has conceived this child. She will have a son and your are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."(Matthew 1:20-21) The name "Jesus"  used in the English New Testament comes from the Latin form of the Greek name Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous), a rendition of the Hebrew Yeshua (ישוע), related to the name Joshua. The other name that became associated with this Son is "Christ", from the Greek word  Χριστός, Christós, meaning "the anointed one", in Hebrew Messiah  מָשִׁיחַ‎‎,(māšîaḥ‎, sometimes spelled Moshiach), is the one chosen to lead the world and save it,  which we find in Old Testament prophecies such as Isaiah 9:6 "For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." 

I occasionally hear or read someone say that Jesus himself never claimed to be the Son of God in a Messianic sense. Actually, in the Gospels, there are 7 verses in John's Gospel where he refers to himself as the Son of God, and  in Luke, at his trial: "Then they all said, “Are You then the Son of God?” So He said to them, “You rightly say that I am.”(Luke 22:70).  There are also  22 verses in the four Gospels where other people, including demons, enemies and friends, call him the Son of God. There are also 51 verses in the Gospels (mostly Matthew and John) where Jesus clearly refers to God as "My Father", such as John 10:30: "I and My Father are one.”

The church has struggled for centuries to explain logically what this means;  churches have split and wars fought over attempts to reduce this relationship to human words. We are not called on to understand beyond what we see in Scripture; it is enough to know for now on this earth, in our heart of hearts, what Jesus told Nicodemus: "that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." (John 3:15-18) There is enough here to give us a lifetime of study, prayer, growth, service, and learning what God the Father and Son had in mind for us when we were created.