“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth.”
Proverbs 8:22-23
Was Jesus Christ a created being? The Jehovah Witness believe He was created from the beginning of the known universe. One of the verses they use leading up to this conclusion is the one above in Proverbs 8. Along with Colossians 1:15 and Revelation 3:14, they deduce that Jesus was one of many created gods essentially making Him equivalent to an angel.
How do they draw this conclusion? There’s two answers:
1) They misinterpret Scripture
2) They create false Scripture to fit their paradigm. (i.e. the addition of the word “a” in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was a god …”)
In this article, I’ll only address the first item, misinterpretation of Scripture. There are three very important points that must be considered when interpreting Proverbs 8: the literary style, genre, and word gender.
Literary Style
The literary style used in most of Proverbs (especially in chapter 8) is that of personification. That is when something other than a person is given human-like character. Wisdom is certainly the topic here, but it is NOT A PERSON (and certainly NOT Jesus Christ!), but rather an abstract concept with anthropological appeal. This poem, therefore, cannot be interpreted literally which leads me to point number two.
Genre
The genre is poetic, more specifically, it is what the theological world calls an encomium. 1 Corinthians 13 and Hebrews 11 are other good examples of encomiums used to emphasize a thought (love and faith). It is a beautiful and exalted type of literature used by many authors in the Bible to drive an essential point home. Because Proverbs 8 is an encomium it is improper to make wisdom anything more than what it is, wisdom!
Word Structure
Finally, in the Hebrew (and Greek!) language many nouns carry with them a gender assignment. It’s not so much a sexual intent than it is an attempt to apportion a type of “softness” or “hardness” into the noun. In this case, the Hebrew word for wisdom so happens to be in the feminine gender (thus the usage of pronoun “she”). With knowledge of this gender assignment, it would be difficult to defend the false interpretation of wisdom being Jesus in Proverbs 8.
In this passage of Scripture, Solomon was simply trying to express to the reader the important role wisdom played in the creation of the cosmos. That wisdom can only come from an omniscient and omnipotent God.
Was Jesus Christ Created?
Jesus is not a created being like humans, or even like angels. He is the eternal God who has always existed and will always exist!
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. … And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” – John 1:1-3, 14
Related Articles:
The Word – Reason for our Existence
Jesus – God in the Flesh
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