#796 Which Divine Person Speaks in the Old Testament?

Dr. craig’s response

In writing the section on the Trinity for volume II of my projected systematic philosophical theology, my attention was drawn to John 12.41, where John, commenting upon the refusal of Jesus’ contemporaries to believe in Jesus, cites the words of the Lord given to Isaiah at the time of Isaiah’s vision in the Temple (Isaiah 6.10). Then John makes this stunning remark:

Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke of him (John 12.41).

What?! John believes that the vision of the Lord of hosts described in Isaiah 6 was in actuality a vision of the pre-incarnate Christ! We have here not merely the application of an Old Testament proof text about Yahweh to Jesus, but rather the actual retrojection of Christ into a prior historical circumstance. It was not a vision of God the Father that Isaiah saw, as customarily believed, but of God the Son. Christ is here clearly equated with God. This is a dagger in the heart of Unitarianism, for it shows that Christ, like the Father, is fully divine.

On the basis of John 1.18,

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1.18),

Anthony Hanson generalizes this retrojection of Christ to encompass in the mind of the Fourth Evangelist all theophanies in the Old Testament: John’s belief was certainly that “whenever in the OT God is described as appearing or being heard it is in fact Jesus, the pre-existent Word, who was seen or heard.”[1]

However that may be, we have at least one indisputable example where the words of the Lord in the Old Testament are attributed, not to God the Father, but to God the Son.