Christ has many titles and names: A few of them are the Savior, the King of kings, the Lamb of God, the Son of God, and the Everlasting…Father? The Son shall be called the Father? How can that be? Let’s all hold on a minute and let the Spirit explain.
Every December hundreds of millions of Christians all over the world quote from Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit through him is announcing the coming of the Christ child: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…” The “child” here is universally believed to be the Son of God. Most stop there. They see that it is talking about the babe in the manger. But some go on reading: “…and the government shall be upon his shoulder…” Here they see a grown-up Christ becoming the King of the kingdom of God during the Thousand Year Reign of Christ! All but a few will stop there. But the overcomers will read on to the end of the verse. Speaking of Christ: “…And his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).
In one verse, the Spirit shows us a vision of the incarnation of Christ, from His birth to His death. We see His Resurrection and His ascension to the throne. And finally, we are given this nugget of golden knowledge: The Son’s “name shall be called the “Everlasting Father.” That bit of information is revelatory truth hidden in a mystery.
And it is here that a chosen few will scratch their heads and ponder what they have just read.
How can the Son of God be the Everlasting Father?
Those who dig deep will immediately desire to know other scriptures that back this up. Christ’s own words bring up this idea of oneness. “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30; 17:11). Philip asked to be shown the Father. Christ replied, “He that has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “He that sees me sees him that sent Me” (John 12:45). And we know the Father Yahweh sent the Son. Christ’s most fervent prayer is “that they [His followers] may be one, as we are…That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us (John 17:11, 21-22). Christ is praying for us, that we can become one with Him and the Father that dwells inside of the Son.
To know Christ as the Everlasting Father is to really know Him. And it is the key to the second part of this verse: “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection…” (Phil. 3:10). Knowing Him through the lens of Oneness opens the door into becoming responsible stewards of His resurrection power. In other words, believing in Oneness comes before channeling the power of God.
We are talking about the power that Christ and His apostles wielded—the power to speak words that transforms a drug addict into a disciple. It is the power to heal people trapped in the prison of cerebral palsy, to regenerate their nervous system with the resurrection power of God. It is the power to raise the dead. He promised us this: “Whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it to you…Ask and you shall receive” (John 16:24). It is a wide-open promise with no limitations for those in that level of spiritual growth.
Solving the Mystery
So how do we become one with the Father and the Son? How do we obtain the same understanding that Christ had about oneness? It starts with His word about the Father. First, the Father is the invisible Spirit Yahweh. The Spirit through the apostle Paul said that the Son of God “is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:l 5). The Son is the vessel that contains the Father. The Son is now comprised of several beings, not just “the man from Galilee.” Christ is the head, and we Christians are part of His body, His spiritual body. The Son is the body, the church; the fulness of Him that fills all in all…” (Eph. 1:23).
It was the Father that did the miracles through the Son. The Son said as much. “The Father that dwells in Me, He does the works” (Jn 14:19). The “works” are the miracles that the Son performed.
So then, when we see the Son, we are seeing both the Son and the Father, who is an invisible Spirit dwelling in the Son. And through God’s great grace and mercy, He has delivered on His promise to include us in being a part of the corporate body of the Son, the true church (ecclesia). This all happens by believing what He believes about each of us. It is all by faith. It is all about believing the tenets He has given to us about the oneness of the Godhead. When we believe His word on this, then His promises are activated, enabling us to walk through the door into “the power of the resurrection.”
That is how important these words are. For those who reject all of this will fade back to their theory-cluttered lives. And they will be like the archaeologist who stands on a Honduran jungle mound, dismissing it as an ancient dump site. Yet three meters below his feet, the bones of a Mayan prince begin to turn over in a gold laden grave. Kenneth Wayne Hancock