Section VI—THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST
LESSON SIXTEEN The Pre-Existence of Christ
1. Moses knew Christ and wrote of him. Hebrews 11:24-26; John 5:46.TDOC 43.1
2. The prophets testified of Christ. Acts 10:43; 3:18; 1 Peter 1:10, 11.TDOC 43.2
3. A new being was not brought into existence at the birth of Christ, but a change was made in the order of his being. John 1:14, ARV; Philippians 2:5-7; 2 Corinthians 8:9.TDOC 43.3
4. Christ himself recognized that he had been with the Father before he appeared in this world. John 17:5, 24.TDOC 43.4
5. Christ declared that he came down from heaven. John 6:38, 51; 3:13.TDOC 43.5
6. Christ repeatedly speaks of himself as one who came from another place to this world. John 16:28-30; 8:42; 17:8; 8:14; 8:37; 9:39; 12:46; Hebrews 10:5-7.TDOC 43.6
7. Further testimony is borne to the same fact. 1 Timothy 1:15.TDOC 43.7
8. The Son of God existed before the world was created. John 1:3; Hebrews 1:1, 2; Colossians 1:12-16; Proverbs 8:22-26.TDOC 43.8
NOTES: Christ’s tremendous claim
“Nothing is more plain than that over and over again, in all sorts of ways, by implication and by direct statement, to all sorts of audiences, friends and foes, He reiterated this tremendous claim to have dwelt in the bosom of the Father long before he lay on the breast of Mary.”TDOC 43.9
Co-eternal with the father
“From the days of eternity the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the Father; he was ‘the image of God,’ the image of his greatness and majesty, ‘the outshining of his glory.’ It was to manifest this glory that he came to our world.”-The Desire of Ages, 19.TDOC 43.10
Christ and creation
“It was Christ that spread the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth. It was his hands that hung the worlds in space, and fashioned the flowers of the field.... it was he that filled the earth with beauty and the air with song. And upon all things in earth, and air, and sky, he wrote the message of the Father’s love.”-Id., 20.TDOC 43.11
Christ’s humiliation
“Jesus might have remained at the Father’s side. He might have retained the glory of heaven and the homage of the angels. But he chose to give back the scepter into the Father’s hands, and to step down from the throne of the universe, that he might bring light to the benighted and life to the perishing.”-Id., 23.TDOC 44.1
The I AM came in the likeness of men
“It was Christ who from the bush on Mount Horeb spoke to Moses saying, ‘AM THAT I AM.... Thus shall thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM bath sent me unto you.’ This was, the pledge of Israel’s deliverance. So when he came ‘in the likeness of men,’ he declared himself the I AM. The child of Bethlehem, the meek and lowly Savior, is God ‘manifest in the flesh.’ And to us he says, ‘I AM the good shepherd.’ ‘I AM the living bread.’ ‘I AM the way, the truth, and the life.’ ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.’ ‘I AM the assurance of every promise.’ ‘I AM; be not afraid.’ ‘God with us’ is the surety of our deliverance from sin, the assurance of our power to obey the law of heaven.”-Id., 24, 25.TDOC 44.2
In eternal light
“He had dwelt in eternal light, as one with God, but his life on earth must be spent in solitude.”-Id., 111.TDOC 44.3
The eternal Son
“The writers of the New Testament believed that in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth lived one who existed from eternity as a person distinct from the Father yet in closest relation to him, the eternal Son of God. This implies that at the birth of Jesus the eternal Son, already the creator of man, entered into a new and very intimate relation to our race.”TDOC 44.4
“Our Lord’s earthly life is, as it were, a jewel unclosed within the flashing gold of his eternal dwelling with God.”TDOC 44.5
A former real existence
“Certainly I cannot believe that the real teaching of such passages as these [already quoted by the author], and of the Old Testament facts alluded to in them, is exhausted by the hypothesis of a merely typical ‘prophetic reference to Christ and his work for or his gracious gifts to the Christian church; as if he as well as they were as yet wholly future; as if he had not then a real existence in active, though hidden, relation to the then dispensation and to those who were his people under that dispensation.”TDOC 44.6
The Son in olden times
“God the Father, as he at first framed and created the world through his Son, so through the same Son did he afterward manifest himself to the world. Therefore the Son of God, although in the last times of his incarnation he has at length held familiar intercourse with mankind, still always from the very earliest period of its existence presided over the church; and even under the Old Testament, though by a hidden and secret dispensation, showed himself to holy men.”TDOC 45.1
“We understand the divine person, the Lord God, who thus first preached the gospel in the hearing of our first parents, and revealed the great central truth that the triumph over evil should be achieved by One in our nature, to have been himself the Son of God, thus entering on a new phrase of his inherent mediator ship, and beginning to manifest himself as the Savior and champion of man against the evil one, man’s seducer and oppressor, and his own envious adversary and rival.”TDOC 45.2