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The Deity of the Son of God is, to me, not proved merely in propositions. I believe that he who believes in the Godhead of Jesus Christ has all history, all etymology, all philosophy, and all true reading of the case entirely on his side. But I do not look to propositions, to logical formulae, to any bare statements, however exact, for the proof and confirmation that this claim is founded in righteousness. Do you think that I build my hopes of eternity upon some little etymological technicality? Do you suppose that my dependence is founded altogether upon the construction of a phrase or the mood and tense of a verb? We have nothing to fear from that side of the argument, so far as I have been able to collate the testimonies of competent men. But I do not rely upon it in preaching the Deity of the Son of God, and in committing myself to the great claim which Jesus makes on behalf of His own nature. What do I trust then? The moral reach, the spiritual compass, the indefinable and inexpressible sympathy of the Man. When he touched my heart into life, I did not say, "Hand me down the Greek grammar and the Hebrew lexicon, and three volumes of the encyclopaedia, to see how this really stands." I knew it to be a fact. Nobody ever did for me what He has done. Once I was blind; now I see. I go to other men — writers, speakers, teachers — hear what they have to say, and, behold, they are broken cisterns that can hold no water. I go to the Son of God, whose teaching is written in the New Testament, and it gets into the deep places of my life; it redeems me; it goes further than any other influence, and does more for me than any other attempt that ever was made to recover and bless nay life. It is, therefore, in this great sweep of His, in this reply to every demand that is made upon His resources, this infinite sufficiency of His grace, that I find the exposition and the defence of His Godhead. Some things must be felt; some things must be laid hold of by sympathy, affection, sensibility. The heart is in some cases a greater interpreter than the understanding. There is a time when logic has to say, "I can do no more for you; do the best you can for yourself!" Then love goes forward, and necessity feels it; and it is in that further insight and penetration that the Godhead of the Nazarene, as it appears to me, is vindicated and glorified...As I looked upon the sun this November morning, shining through some beautiful blue clouds, a man called upon me to prove that that sun was, in his judgment, as far as he could make out by "the tables," about sufficient to light the world. He turned over long pages of logarithms, and tables of various kinds, fractions and decimals, and long processions of figures; he asked me for a slate and a pencil, and he was going to make it out to any satisfaction that the sun was just about sufficient to enlighten a hemisphere at a time. I ordered him off! Why? I saw it; I felt it; the whole thing was before me, and if that man had never been born, and the slate had never been made, I should have known that this great sun poured light upon the earth until there was not room enough to receive it, and that the splendour ran off at the edges and flamed upon other stars! And yet sometimes men call upon us with slates, pencils, sponges, for the purpose of showing us by their calculations that Jesus Christ cannot be God the Son. I have lived long enough to know that He is God enough for me. What more can I want? He raises the dead; He redeems my life from destruction; He fills the mouth with good things; He numbers the hairs of my head; He carries me up hill many a time when I am weary and the wind is bleak; He visits me in my distress and my affliction. My Lord! my God! I will not receive Thee merely through grammars and technical discussions. I will receive Them because when Thou dost come into my heart, I know that all the heaven that I can contain is already within me when Thou art near. My Lord! and my God!

(Joseph Parker, D. D.)

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KJV: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;

WEB: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.