Many, many passages show that the Lord is called “the God of
Israel,” such as Isaiah 17 : 6 ; 21 : 10 , 17 ; 24 : 15 ; 29 : 23 ; Jeremiah 7 : 3 ; 9 : 15 ; 11 : 3 ;
13 : 12 ; 16 : 9 ; 19 : 3 , 15 ; 23 : 2 ; 24 : 5 ; 25 : 15 , 27 ; 29 : 4 , 8 , 21 , 25 ; 30 : 2 ; 31 : 23 ; 32 : 14 ,
15 , 36 ; 33 : 4 ; 34 : 2 , 13 ; 35 : 13 , 17 , 18 , 19 ; 37 : 7 ; 38 : 17 ; 39 : 16 ; 42 : 9 , 15 , 18 ; 43 : 10 ;
44 : 2 , 7 , 11 , 25 ; 48 : 1 ; 50 : 18 ; 51 : 33 ; Ezekiel 8 : 4 ; 9 : 3 ; 10 : 19 , 20 ; 11 : 22 ; 43 : 2 ;
44 : 2 ; Zephaniah 2 : 9 ; and Psalms 41 : 13 ; 59 : 5 ; 68 : 8.
In the Christian churches of today it is common to call the Lord our 94
Savior “the Son of Mary”; it is rare for people to call him “the Son of
God” unless they mean the eternally begotten Son of God. This is a
result of Roman Catholics putting Mother Mary’s sainthood above the
rest and setting her up as the goddess or queen of all their saints.
Yet in fact, in the process of being glorified the Lord put off every-
thing from his mother and put on everything from his Father, as we will
fully demonstrate later on in this work [§§ 102 – 103 ]. Because the phrase
“the Son of Mary” has become a common expression on everyone’s lips,
many horrendous things have poured into the church. This is especially
true of those who have not taken into consideration things said in the
Word about the Lord—for example, that the Father and he are one, that
he is in the Father and the Father is in him, that all things belonging to
the Father are his, that he called Jehovah his Father, and that Jehovah the
Father called him his Son.
The horrendous things that have poured into the church from our
calling him “the Son of Mary” instead of “the Son of God” are that we
lose the idea of the Lord’s divinity and we lose everything in the Word
that is said about him as the Son of God. Furthermore, this concept lets
in Judaism, Arianism, Socinianism, Calvinism in its original form, and
finally materialist philosophy. Materialist philosophy brings with it the
extreme position that the Son of Mary was Joseph’s child, or that his soul
came from his mother, and as a result he is called “the Son of God,” but
truly he is not. All people, both clergy and laity, should check to see
whether the idea they have spawned and nurtured of the Lord as “the Son
of Mary” is any different from the idea of him as a mere human being.
Already by the third century a concept like this was becoming preva-
lent among Christians, as the Arians were on the rise. To salvage divinity
for the Lord, the Council of Nicaea made up “the eternally begotten Son
of God.” Although it was a fiction, this concept did succeed at the time
in elevating the Lord’s human nature to something divine; and it still
works for many even today. It does not work, however, for those who see
the hypostatic union as a union of two separate entities, one of whom is
superior to the other.
§94 the lord the redeemer & redemption 129