SECTION 4.—­HIS ONLY SON

God is love.  Love must have an object, and from eternity the Father was not alone.  The only-begotten and well-beloved Son was with Him, dwelt in His bosom, and shared His glory.  The Filiation or Sonship of our Lord follows the statement of His proper name and the declaration of His Messiahship.  It is expressed in the designation, “Only Son,” which is His divine name, peculiar to Himself, incommunicable to any other being.  He is the Son of the Father, and is His only Son inasmuch as He alone partakes of His Divine nature, and in this nature is the Son.  The Old Testament Scriptures foretold that Christ should be the Son of God.  “I will declare the decree:  the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee."[048] Isaiah wrote of Him, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:  and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace."[049] The New Testament in various passages bears the same testimony.  “In the beginning,” says John, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; and “the Word,” he goes on to say, “became flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father,) full of grace and truth."[050] The writer to the Hebrews makes a similar declaration:  “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who is the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person."[051] It has been noted that Christ, in speaking to His disciples, never says our Father, but either My Father, or your Father, or both conjoined, never leaving it to be inferred that God is in the same sense His Father and our Father.  It appears from various passages in the New Testament, that when He came the Jews identified Messiah with the Son of God, as when Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel";[052] and when Martha said, “I believe that thou art the Son of God, which should come into the world."[053] He did not first become the Son of God when He took upon Him the nature of man.  The Divine Sonship existed in the beginning before He was the child of Mary, the seed of the woman.  He was the Son of God before the birth of Abraham:  “before Abraham was I am."[054] Though John the Baptist was older than Jesus, and preceded Him in His ministry, Jesus was yet preferred in honour before him, “for he was before him.”  “The Lord possessed him in the beginning of his way, before his works of old."[055] In the relation of the Son to the Father, there is a mystery which we cannot solve.  “Who shall declare his generation?” Earthly figures fail to set forth Divine realities,