God the Son is not merely the Son because of a title or a name. He is the Son because He is begotten of the Father from eternity past. This is who He is. Likewise, God the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit because He eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. This goes to the heart of who God the Trinity is. This is why it is so important.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the greatest mystery revealed in Holy Scripture. This is the teaching that there is one God who exists in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a profound and wonderful mystery. But where do these names come from, and why does each Person have them? Where do we get the names “Father,” and “Son,” and “Holy Spirit?” The answer to these questions lies in the divine processions.

By the term “processions,” theologians mean the eternal “going forth” (Micah 5:2) of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the other divine Persons. The Son is of the Father. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son. These processions reveal profound truths about the divine Persons. The Son of God is not simply the Son because He became man. He was the divine Son from eternity. The Holy Spirit did not begin to be the Spirit of the Father and the Son at creation. He was the Spirit of the Father and the Son from eternity. These names are true of each Person eternally.

The key point that the processions seek to explain is how one divine Person is “from” another. To put it another way, how is God the Son a Son if He never had a beginning? Well, the answer is that He was eternally the Son of God the Father. He never began to be the Son of God the Father, He always was the Son of the Father. The same is true of the Holy Spirit. He was always the Spirit of the Father and the Son. The Son comes from the Father eternally, and the Spirit comes from the Father and the Son eternally. The Father is from no other.

Thus, there are two processions that we see in Scripture: the eternal generation of the Son, and the procession of the Holy Spirit.

First, there is the eternal generation of the Son. When we speak of the eternal generation of the Son, we note that God the Son is “eternally begotten.” This is clearly taught in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (KJV) The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. This means that God the Son is eternally the Son of God the Father. He has never begun to be the Son of the Father. He has always been the Son of the Father. There was no time when God the Son did not exist. And there was no time when God the Son was not the Son of God the Father. He eternally comes from the Father as His Son. As Micah 5:2 states, His “goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”

And so we must understand that God the Son is eternally begotten, revealing the nature and the character of God fully. Just as earthly sons reflect the nature of their fathers, so also does God the Son reflect the divine nature of God the Father from eternity. His Sonship is the eternal going forth and mirroring of the Father’s divine nature.

One aspect of this that is helpful to understand is that the Son always reflects the glory of the Father as an image reflects the glory of the original. We read in Genesis 5:3 that Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, after his image.”  Human sons bear the image of their fathers, reflecting who they are in many ways. But Jesus is called the Image of God (Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Hebrews 1:3). This means that He eternally reflects the glory of God the Father perfectly. There is no time in which He did not reflect the glory of the Father. Nor is there any way that the Son fails to communicate the Father’s divine nature truly and perfectly.

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