Within the Bible’s covenantal storyline, which Jesus knows well, he can confidently center his disciples’ faith in him precisely because he knows he is the divine Son. No doubt, the New Testament presents Jesus as a model of faith for us, but before we can model our faith after Jesus, Scripture commands us to trust him as the object of our faith, as the God of our salvation.

Jesus’s Identity

The Bible’s covenantal storyline serves as the metanarrative to identify who Jesus is and as the background to the New Testament’s presentation of him.1 Who is Jesus? According to Scripture, he is the one who inaugurates God’s kingdom and the new covenant age. In him, the full forgiveness of sin is achieved, the eschatological Spirit is poured out, the new creation dawns, and all God’s promises reach their fulfillment. But this raises an important question: Who can do this? Scripture answers: the only one who can do it is both Yahweh (Lord) and the obedient human Son, and the New Testament presents Jesus in precisely this way.

But did Jesus know himself to be God the Son incarnate? Did Jesus self-identify as the eternal Son of the Father, the promised human Messiah, who came to reveal the Father, do the works of God, and by so doing, demonstrate that he is God the Son? These are not easy questions to answer. On the one hand, Scripture teaches that Jesus was born, “increased in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:52), and did not know certain things (Matt. 24:36). This reality reveals that Jesus is fully human, the promised “seed” of the woman (Gen. 3:15 ESV mg.), and thus able to act as our covenant head and Redeemer. On the other hand, Jesus’s self-understanding is that he is more than merely a human image-son; he is also the divine Son. Our focus here is on the latter point, without minimizing the former. Let us look at the explicit witness of Jesus to his own identity, set within the Bible’s storyline and interpretive framework.

The Explicit Witness of Christ

Jesus’s entire life testified to who he thought he was. There are important aspects of his earthly life that implicitly reveal his self-identity to be the divine Son. But in addition to Jesus’s implicit witness regarding himself, we also have explicit statements that reveal his self-identity as the divine Son, who is also the human son, in relation to his Father.

Use of Abba

Jesus addresses God by the Aramaic term Abba, which reveals how he perceives his relationship to the Father: it is singular and unique (Matt. 6:9; 11:25–26).2 When Jesus teaches his disciples how to address God, he teaches them to pray, “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; John 20:17). But Jesus views his relationship to his Father as unique. We call God Abba as adopted sons because of Jesus’s work and our covenant union with him (see Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). Jesus’s use of the term, however, is due to his unique relationship to his Father—he is the eternal Son (John 1:1; 5:19–30; 17:5).

Son of God

Jesus as the eternal Son is reinforced by the title—indeed, name—Son of God. The title appears in the Synoptic Gospels and occupies a central place in John’s Gospel (John 3:16; 5:19– 23). It is applied to Jesus at his baptism (Mark 1:11), temptation (Luke 4:9), and transfiguration (Mark 9:7). In John, the title is so central to Christ’s identity that John writes the Gospel “so that [his readers] may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

Once again, to grasp the significance of what Jesus means by self-identifying as God’s Son, we must think in terms of the Old Testament. First, son is closely identified with image of God, and as such, it is applied to key typological figures: Adam (Luke 3:38), Israel (Ex. 4:22–23), and the Davidic king (2 Sam. 7:14), who are to represent God. Building on this pattern, Jesus is the true son, namely, the human son, who fulfills the role of previous sons but who is greater (Rom. 1:3–4; Phil. 2:6–11).

Jesus’s incarnational sonship, however, is not the whole story. Already in the Old Testament we learn that David’s greater Son takes on the identity of Yahweh. From this we discover that Jesus’s sonship is more than being a mere human; he is also the eternal Son, the true image and exact representation of the Father (Col. 1:15–17; Heb. 1:2–3), and thus united as one with the Father and disclosing in time something of God’s eternal, intra-Trinitarian divine life.

This truth is underscored by Jesus himself. As noted, Jesus regularly addresses God as Abba, or “Father” (Matt. 11:25; 16:17; Luke 23:46). These expressions go beyond a mere human relationship. As a child, Jesus tells his earthly parents of his unique Son-Father relationship (Luke 2:49). Before his death, Jesus speaks of his eternal sonship: “And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5). Not only does Jesus know that he is appointed to be the Son in his incarnate life, he also knows that he has always been the eternal Son. John 5:16–20 and Matthew 11:25–27 prove this point.

In John 5, after healing a crippled man, Jesus responds to those who criticize him for working on the Sabbath: “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). In so doing, Jesus not only calls God his own Father, he also makes himself equal with God by claiming the same authority as God to work on the Sabbath. And in the following verses, Jesus explains that the validity of his Sabbath work is based on the divine nature of all his works (specifically judgment and resurrection), the divine worship warranted by these works (John 5:22–23), and the divine aseity (John 5:26) of the one who performs these works.

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