But, Jesus is also the Messiah and as the Messiah, he was a person and he came to do the work of the Messiah (to redeem us from our sins).
So, when we read in God’s Word, especially when the Apostle Paul’s writes that “Jesus is Lord” what exactly does Paul mean in using “Lord” in this phrase?
Typically, Lord is rendered as Master or someone that holds the power to decide over you and his disciples often called Jesus Master or Rabbi (Teacher).
In the Old Testament, the word “Lord” appears some 6000+ times in reference to God. However, in the Hebrew bible, Lord is actually written in the text as Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh or in English we would pronounce that as Yahweh or Jehovah. Because of a Jewish superstition against saying God’s
name out loud (or even writing it) that began around 300 B.C. Jews started saying God or Lord when they came to the word for God’s formal name in Scripture. In the Greek version of the Old Testament though, all references to God’s formal name in the text were replaced with the word “Lord”.
So, when Paul uses the word Lord to identify Jesus, he means that Jesus “shares the name and the nature, holiness, the authority, power, majesty and eternity of the one and only true God (the Father)”. It is Paul’s way of emphasizing the divine essence of Jesus who is not the Father but shares the attributes of the Father.
God’s Word doesn’t spell out the exact manner in which the Son is begotten of the Father, but we know from Scripture that the Son (Jesus in the flesh) is “God of God”, and he identified himself as the “I AM” that spoke to Moses out of the burning bush when he said in the Gospels “Before Moses was I AM”.
And just as He said to Moses that He has come down to deliver His people from slavery in Egypt and part of that deliverance was from the last plague of the death of the firstborn in which a lamb without blemish was slain and its blood placed on the cross that the door post and lentil formed. Now, in the last days, He came again in the form of Jesus to again save us spiritually by dying on a cross on the Passover day of Preparation as the “Lamb without blemish” to take away our sins to which we are slaves.
The Old Testament is indeed about Jesus and Oh what a Wonderful God we worship. The symmetry between the Old and New Testaments is something to behold.
The Son came forth in a completely incomprehensible expression out of the Father and shares the same essence or constitution as the Father so that the Son takes on the express image of the Father and shines with the brightness of His Glory. In another amazing and incomprehensible way, the Son is a person and has a will apart from the Father and they both can expire and breathe forth the Holy Spirit who himself is a person, but He only speaks what He hears.
It is written that the Holy Spirit knows the thoughts or mind of God just as our own spirits know our thoughts and minds.
We know that God the Father calls the Son God and has commanded everyone, even the Angels to bow their knee and worship him as God because He is God but He is not the Father.
The Son though acknowledges that his Father is greater than himself and after the Son has subdued all things to himself that He himself would be subject again to his father again so that God the Father is all in all in this order: Father, Son, Holy Spirit and then the rest of us children.
AMEN