I arrived at this topic of preexistence by following a rabbit trail from someplace else. Prior to looking into it here, I had not realized that the preexistence of Jesus Christ is a major area of debate in some factions of Christianity.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. […] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John 1:1, 2, 14.To me, it was clear cut. The Word existed in the beginning; when He was "incarnated," i.e. made into human form, He was given a new name. This is theology so deep that a four-year-old could understand it! The idea of renaming is easily found in scripture.
Jerusalem gets a new name—
Isaiah 62:2 — you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will bestow.
The overcomers get a new name—
Revelation 2:17 — I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.
Jesus uses His new name—
Revelation 3:12 — and I will write upon him my new name.
Renaming a person or an object does not mean that its prior existence has been sent into oblivion. Before He had a human body named Jesus, He preexisted as the Word.
In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus slowly reveals information about who He is and where He has been. (Link by clicking HERE if you wish to review) He discloses that He knows Abraham and even knows how Abraham reacted to seeing Jesus' day. The Jews are indignant as Jesus concludes with this stunner, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am," John 8:58. Jesus claimed His present tense prior to Abraham. Jesus had existence before He had a body of flesh; you can call that preexistence.
I wondered why preexistence would even be a point of argument…
I discovered that the intellectual-types who debate the preexistence of Christ are often motivated by their desire to prove or disprove the Doctrine of the Trinity. Simply stated, the Doctrine of the Trinity is that one God eternally exists as three distinct Persons. The three persons are named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each with a different function, but still perfectly unified as One.
Oddly, the best way that I have ever seen to conceptualize this was in a totally science fiction, futuristic, space movie. One of the Alien entities wanted to communicate a complex concept to a human. Rather than take the time to teach him the equivalent of years of study at the post-doctoral level, he asked the human to step into him. When the human stepped inside the entity, they were perfectly melded; each knew everything about the other. And then the human stepped out again to perform the task that he had been assigned.
Take that as a metaphor, but the science fiction did a pretty good job portraying a spiritual concept: they became one for the purpose of perfect communication with no information loss, but they separated to perform the necessary task.
Trinitarian Doctrine is an attempt to explain how a timeless Spirit functions in our space-mass-time dimension, and it requires that Jesus always existed in some form, otherwise God would have been missing part of Himself!
…and that touches on what is perhaps most critical of all to our understanding of preexistence. As a child, I was taught that God exists in eternity. That was backwards. God did not "happen" in eternity; eternity exists in Him.
Time exists because of God; it is His invention. God does not exist in time. He is "I am." That "time exists in God" is a profound difference from God existing in eternity. I don't want to go all astrophysics and E=mc² in this blog, but we need to at least be aware that any pre-, ante-, trans-, or post-time values are seen through a lens of a created Earth with a sequence of nights and days.
In the next few posts I will be working toward answering the question "Can a belief in the preexistence of the human soul before conception be compatible with scripture?" I'll take it slow. I have to because I am digging this out for myself. I cannot just blindly accept what is a denominational dogma or what some guy wrote in a commentary.
Today I have established my starting point: Eternity is inside God; it is not a time that He inhabits but rather time was invented by Him, and time is measured by movement through space.
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