Jesus said to them, “Verily, verily, I say to you, Before Abraham’s coming — I am.” (John 8:58, YLT)

This is a problematic gray area Scripture that is often abused in much the same way as Trinitarians abuse Matthew 28:19 and snake handlers abuse Mark 16:18.

The key to understanding it, once again, is in looking for Scriptures that qualify and actually explain the topic at hand. One of the clearest is 1 Corinthians 15:45–47, which clearly tells us that he who is spiritual is not first…

³⁵But someone will say, “How are the dead raised?” and, “With what kind of body do they come?” ³⁶You foolish one, that which you yourself sow is not made alive unless it dies. ³⁷ That which you sow, you don’t sow the body that will be, but a bare grain, maybe of wheat, or of some other kind… ⁴²So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption… ⁴⁵So also it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living soul.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶However that which is spiritual isn’t first, but that which is natural, then that which is spiritual. ⁴⁷The first man is of the earth, made of dust. The second man is the Lord from heaven. (1 Corinthians 15: 35–37, 42, 45–47)

When Paul wrote, “you don’t sow the body that will be,” he was talking about Christ. It is very revealing to read verse 45 in a word-to-word translation of the Greek. In English, this passage literally says: “And so it is written the first man Adam was made into a living soul; the last Adam into a quickening spirit.” In the Greek it clearly says that Christ was made a life giving spirit using the same word he used to say Adam was made. Adam didn’t just “become” a living soul; God made him that. In the same exact way, Christ didn’t just become a life-giving spirit; God made him that! This whole passage refutes the idea that Jesus actually preexisted his human birth.

Next, Colossians and Romans give us more details…

He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. (Colossians 1:18)

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers . (Romans 8:28–29)

He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence . (Colossians 1:18)

What we learn from these verses, and many others, is the context in which Jesus was talking when he said, “before Abraham comes to be, I am.” That context is the marvelous truth that Jesus is the first-begotten from the dead and all that implies! That is to say, the Bible is very clear that a) Jesus became a life-giving spirit that did not exist before Adam, and b) in regard to the resurrection of the dead, he was the firstborn of that brotherhood, and just importantly, this was God’s plan all along through which he put creation into existence in the first place!

When we see this “master plan” of God’s as the cause, effect, and results of what Jesus accomplished, then we can understand that this was God’s only plan that all this happen. When we see this, then Jesus’ words take on a completely different meaning that is in line with all the other teachings about God and His Anointed One.

That is to say, in John 8:58, Jesus was asserting his superiority (or preeminence) as a human above that of Abraham, or any other man for that matter.

Jesus was not at all unaware or in denial that he was anointed by God his Father to be the savior of the world and was to be given preeminence over the brotherhood of the redeemed.

The hard part for many people to keep in mind is that Jesus “preexisted” before his beginning (genesis) in Bethlehem only in God’s “plan” (or Greek logos). That is to say that in John 1:1–2, 14, we have “it is written again” Scriptures that qualify and describe the way in which the Son of God “existed,” which was, simply, as God’s plan (as we covered in Chapter Sixteen).

In the beginning was the plan, and the plan was with God, and the plan was God… The plan became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 14)

We know that Jesus understood and taught this because he clearly stated the following:

…I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me. (John 6:38)

No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended out of heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. (John 3:13)

So here, first, we have Jesus himself refuting the idea that he was supposedly God in heaven before becoming a human, because he didn’t come “down from heaven to do his own will.” Second, when referring to the one who descended, he describes himself as the son (offspring) of man (humanity) even while he was in heaven. Recall again this Scripture we’ve quoted before:

God is not a man, that he should lie, Neither the son of man… (Numbers 23:19)

So Jesus was not trying to imply that he had been God in heaven, only that he, as a son of man, had been sent from heaven. In that regard, let’s talk about these two phrases:

⁴⁷…The second man is the Lord from heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:45–47)

…I have come down from heaven… (John 6:38)

How are we to understand these phrases? Are these hints from Jesus that he is actually “god come down to earth in the likeness of men” like the pagans believe? No. Once again, the correct way to interpret Jesus is to search the Scriptures for clearer passages like Jesus taught us to do. For example, let us hear what we are taught through the following passages about the bread coming down from heaven.

³⁵Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will not be hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty…” ⁴¹The Jews therefore murmured concerning him, because he said, “I am the bread which came down out of heaven.” ⁴² They said, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How then does he say, “I have come down out of heaven?… ⁴⁷Most assuredly, I tell you, he who believes in me has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your fathers ate the mannain the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, that anyone may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I am the living bread which came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. Yes, the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ (John 6:35, 41–42, 47–51)

Here we have Jesus clearly explaining to us how it is that he has “come down out of heaven.” He explains that he is the bread of life that came down out of heaven just like the manna that the Israelites ate in the wilderness. That bread also came down out of heaven.

³¹Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, “He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.” ³²Jesus therefore said to them, “Most assuredly, I tell you, it wasn’t Moses who gave you the bread out of heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread out of heaven. ³³For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.” ³⁴They said therefore to him, “Lord, always give us this bread.” ³⁵Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.” (John 6:31–35; with Psalms 78:24–25)

So then, as we can see, Jesus has plainly taught us exactly in what way he “came down out of heaven.” It was the same way that God fed the Israelites in the desert with manna from heaven. It is simply an idiom meaning that it was ordained and directed to come to pass, and put into motion by God in heaven.

Did the manna actually, physically exist in heaven before coming down out of heaven? Absolutely not. So also with the Son of Man that was in heaven but came down out of heaven, not to do his own will but the will of the Father. Saying that he came down from heaven does not mean, biblically, that he preexisted in the spiritual realm and eventually “came to earth in the likeness of man” in the pagan sense of incarnation. It means that God in heaven directed it to be so; thus, “out of heaven.”

Take, for example, John’s baptism: “The baptism of John, where was it from? From heaven or from men?” (Matthew 21:25). Obviously John’s baptism didn’t preexist in heaven, other than in God’s foreknowledge of His plan. So it is also with the “Son of Man” who came down out of heaven, not to do his own will but the will of Him who sent him. This means it wasn’t man who directed John, or Jesus; it was God in heaven who directed and ordained John’s baptism, just as God also directed Jesus to be the bread of life that came down out of heaven.

Again, keep in mind that Jesus spoke and taught in parables. In Matthew 5:29–30, Jesus said that if your eye or hand offends you, you should cut if off, “for it is more profitable for you that one of your members should perish, than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna” (Matthew 5:29). Was Jesus being literal? Absolutely not, for he who destroys the temple of God, which temple you are, him will God destroy (1 Corinthians 3:17). The point is, we need to look to where the Scriptures explicitly explain these things, rather than jumping to conclusions that make what is explained of no effect. And that is what happens when people insist that Jesus literally preexisted his beginning in Bethlehem: they build their doctrines on the parabolic meanings of texts rather than accepting the literal explanations given throughout Scripture.

The simple fact is that if people weren’t so quick to interpret the Bible after pagan mythology, they would be able to hear Jesus’ explanation of what he meant by saying, “Before Abraham’s coming—I am” (John 8:58 YLT).

With this understood, look how clear Jesus’ words become:

No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended out of heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. (John 3:13)

Jesus didn’t claim to be Yahweh in heaven, or “I am that I am” in heaven, but he did describe himself as something. And that something, explicitly and clearly, was “the offspring of humanity.” How did the offspring of humanity come to be in heaven? Because God always had His Plan that Jesus would be the Son of God and the Son of Man. So Jesus was referring to God’s foreknowledge by the fact that Jesus was God’s “plan.” This is also what the apostles preached!

In Chapter Sixteen we presented the following graphic as a representation of God’s foreknowledge. In the top view we see God’s foreknowledge of Christ dying for the sins of man as expressed in Revelation 13:8: “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” In contrast, on the bottom half, we have the actual scene in which Christ was crucified “once at the end of the world,” according to Hebrews 9:12, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, and 14. That is to say, the bottom event was the actualization and realization of God’s plan, which was always with God, when it came to pass in our world.

This graphic simply illustrates this truth:

In the beginning was the plan, and the plan was with God, and the plan was God… The plan became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 14)

In this way we can see how to use John 1 as a qualifying passage. We saw that, when viewed alone in John 1 as an excuse for adopting pagan ideas of incarnations of deity, it was very much a “gray area” Scripture. But now, when we use John 1:1–2, 14 as our qualifying passage for interpreting it, we find that John 1 was very precisely descriptive indeed! John tells us so plainly that what was actually with God before the foundation of the world was God’s logos, His plan, which predominantly contained what Christ was ultimately to become and to fulfill.

Since Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s plan made flesh, Jesus was correct in that sense to claim to exist before Abraham. The key to understanding this is context: grammatical, historical and theological.

When Does Abraham Come to Be?

The real issue, which many English translations hide and obscure, is the grammatical fact that in the Greek Jesus did not speak of Abraham in the past tense. Jesus was talking about the truth that Jesus was to come before Abraham who is yet to come in the resurrection of the dead!

To explain this, I will refer my readers to an article found online and easily verifiable.

What is happening in John 8:56–59 is about establishing Jesus’ rights as firstborn over Abraham and the patriarchs.
John 8:58 Before Abraham becomes, I exist.
John 14:6 Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one (including even Abraham) comes to the Father except through me.’
Heb 11:13 ‘These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.’
So this is the day that Abraham rejoiced to see, but which we have seen and Abraham has not yet. Hence Jesus is before Abraham. Not that Jesus “was” before Abraham became, but Jesus “is” before Abraham becomes.
–Steven, What did Jesus mean when he said “before Abraham was, I am”?, accessed 9/12/2016, http://bibleq.net/answer/447/

What the cited writer is referring to, for one thing, is the fact that the Greek grammar in John 8:58 does not at all support the idea that Jesus was referring to Abraham in the past tense. Where John 8:58 says (according to versions like the KJV) “Before Abraham was,” it really says, and means, “before Abraham’s [future] coming…” What we are dealing with in the verb regarding Abraham in John 8:58 is not the aorist indicative, but the aorist infinitive! Therefore, Young’s Literal Translation renders it correctly, as such:

Before Abraham’s coming—I am. (John 8:58 YLT)

Thus Jesus was not claiming to have “literally preexisted” Abraham; rather, he was simply reiterating his preeminence even regarding father Abraham. The Jews who listened to Jesus, just as many do today, apparently misunderstood Jesus (as they did in many other places) and jumped to false conclusions about his meaning.

As we see, if and when we truly let the Scriptures speak, then, and only then, do we see one truth emerge dominant over all other theories and jumped-to conclusions. The simple fact remains that there are no verses that either Onenessians or Trinitarians can turn to that actually “explain” in detail that Jesus preexisted as God (or as a literal separate person from God) and in the process of time became incarnate as a human. Rather, when we look to the Scriptures for actual explanations, we find Jesus described in completely different terms. Furthermore, we find that the passages typically relied upon to support the incarnation theories are far from being clear, explanatory, or conclusive. Rather, such conclusions are built on human interpretation and predicated upon personal biases or preconceptions, rather than what the Scriptures actually state and elsewhere clearly explain.

This explains what the Incarnationists do in order to make John 8:58 appear to support their theories. In order to have one God in three persons, Trinitarians adopt the “same substance” (homoousios) doctrine of the Gnostics and pagans, and then interpret John 8:58 as if Jesus was referring to his eternal sonship, which is a concept Onenessians obviously reject. As for Onenessians, in order to deny the two persons of God the Father and His Son, Jesus the Anointed One, they adopt the Gnostic and pagan idea of speaking of the persons as dual natures instead of two persons, and in this way, they interpret John 8:58 to mean that Jesus was speaking of his deific nature. Thus, they make void the word of God through their tradition (Mark 7:13), because Jesus was clearly speaking of his “self.” This is how Onenessians reveal the anti-christian nature of their position: at its root, Onenessianism is a rejection of Christ’s true and full humanity. Onenessians have Christ arbitrarily switching from being human and personally separate from God one minute, to being God the next, simply depending on his manner of speech.

Arriving at their respective conclusions, both groups use their preconceived ideas to interpret other passages that seem to them to fit their theory. And then they make of no effect, or explain away, the passages that clearly contradict their contrabiblical idea that Jesus is an incarnation of deity. This leaves it in their hands to interpret which nature is doing the talking at any given point in the narrative, regardless of the context that Jesus had provided up to that point! This is contrary to Jesus’ words:

They said therefore to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning.” (John 8:25)

What he had been saying all along are things like the following, that absolutely contradict the false notion that he was claiming to be an incarnation of the person of God:

Most assuredly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing of himself… (John 5:19)

I can of myself do nothing. (John 5:30)

What he never said, nor did the apostles, was that only a select few would be able to understand him based on hidden meanings in clues that he dropped. This is completely different than speaking in parables; the parables were actually pretty clear, especially since quite often he gave the meaning of them to his disciples, who then wrote them down for us. The problem with the theories of both Trinity and Oneness is that their particular teachings are not anywhere spelled out in the Bible and were never preached on for salvation, and they go against particular explanations that are made in the Bible. The simple fact remains that the details of the Son of God doctrine are spelled out all over the place in the Bible!

The Snake-Handler Factor:The whole point of introducing the snake-handler factor is that the snake handlers actually believe that their Scriptures are very clear and irrefutable. The Bible says believers will take up serpents, which won’t hurt them. Therefore, snake handlers feel they are being totally scriptural in purposely taking up venomous snakes to prove their faith is genuine. The problem isn’t that such Scriptures don’t speak of protection. The problem is that the snake handlers must ignore and negate other Scriptures, which are just as authoritative, that speak against the practice of tempting God.

The same holds true for the way Christian Incarnationists interpret John 8:58. First they completely ignore the context in which Jesus made this statement, wherein he had already made it clear that he could do nothing of himself, that he was not alone, and that he was only claiming to be the Son of God, not God himself. Then Incarnationists further disregard and negate the Scriptures that clearly teach that Jesus had his beginning (genesis) when he was born in Bethlehem, that he was the second Adam who did not come first, but that he was made a quickening spirit, and, as Romans says, that justification to life came by the obedience of one man. Third, they change the Greek grammar and interpret the passage rather than simply translate it. All of these tactics are extremely dishonest.

Following, then, are the Scriptures that explicitly teach that Jesus was made in the process of time and did not actually preexist his human conception and birth other than in the plan of God. These Scriptures are not compatible with the interpretation of John 8:58 that claims he personally and actually preexisted Abraham in his life as recorded in the Book of Genesis.

¹²When your days are fulfilled, and you shall sleep with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you, who shall proceed out of your bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. ¹³He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. ¹⁴I will be his father, and he shall be my son… (2 Samuel 7:12–14)

Here, during the time of King David, God explicitly speaks of His Son in the future tense. This same truth is reiterated in these next two passages:

I will tell of the decree. Yahweh said to me, “You are my son. Today I have become your father.” (Psalms 2:7)

For to which of the angels did He say at any time, ‘You are my Son, Today have I become your father?’ and again, “ I will be to him a Father, And he will be to me a Son?” (Hebrews 1:5)

Here in Hebrews 1:5, both 2 Samuel 7:12–14 and Psalms 2:7 are interpreted for us as the same event: the timing of Christ becoming as a son to the Father, which was after the time of King David. Thus the NT opens with the beginning of Jesus:

The book of the generation [Gr. genesis= beginning] of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham… (Matthew 1:1)

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law (Galatians 4:4)

Galatians explicitly tells us that God’s Son was made in the fullness of time and made of a woman. Then 1 Corinthians 15 explains why this was so:

²¹For since death came by man, the resurrection of the dead also came by man. ²²For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive…

⁴⁵So also it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living soul.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit</ . ⁴⁶However that which is spiritual isn’t first, but that which is natural, then that which is spiritual. ⁴⁷The first man is of the earth, made of dust. The second man is the Lord from heaven. (1 Corinthians 15: 21–22; 45–47)

These are “it is written again” Scriptures that explicitly refute the false interpretation of John 8:58 claiming Jesus literally preexisted. Either Onenessians are mistaken or lying about Jesus’ identity, or Jesus was lying and what the Bible explains Jesus to be is also misleading and untruthful. There simply is no middle ground. The reason people come to such false conclusions is because they neglect the biblical rules of interpretation; that is, they don’t let Scripture explain Scripture. They use their own reasoning and claim their reasoning for their authority! That is humanism, not faith that comes from hearing the word of God! But worst of all, they go to pagan ideas (such as incarnation) to get the words and concepts by which to view and describe Christ. That is idolatry.

References:

Following are some sites that will explain the grammatical meaning of the Greek aorist and Infinitive verbs. These will help support the idea that in John 8:58 Jesus was not speaking about Abraham in the past tense, but was referring to what he is to be in the future. These grammatical definitions show that this verse should read, “before Abraham comes to be, I am” and not, “Before Abraham was, I am.”

http://ntgreek.org/learn_nt_greek/verbs1.htm

http://greek-language.com/grammar/14.html

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