Alone Immortal

Hello everyone. I’ve had a fun evening. I do still ask your prayers. There’s a lot going on and I’m having to come to grips with a lot and it’s a lot of emotional upheaval especially. I don’t want to go into the details, but I do seek your prayers.

I now wish to move on to our Trinitarian commentary and tonight, we are going to finish up 1 Timothy and we’ll be in chapter 6. We will be looking at verses 15-16 with mainly starting at verse 11. Let’s go to the text.

¹¹But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. ¹²Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. ¹³In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you ¹⁴to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵which God will bring about in his own time—God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, ¹⁶who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.

I was quite surprised when I had Jehovah’s Witnesses at my apartment recently and they quoted verses 15-16 and they said that that was a description of Jesus. I’m not convinced that it is. I think this could be praise to God the Father, but let us consider what it says.

Note how he is described as immortal. This has shown up in 1 Tim. 1:17

¹⁷Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen

Note also how he is called the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. If this is referring to the Father, then this is interesting as this would be an ascription of deity then and this is what Jesus is called in the book of Revelation.

Yet what gets me to thinking it is God the Father the most is that this is one who is described as one who no one has seen or can see. This is the same terminology that is used of God the Father in John 1:18. Obviously, people saw Jesus and it is the hopes of Christians that we will see Jesus.

Now of course, I don’t hold to a modalistic concept and if the Witnesses want to say this is Jesus, then I think they will be in trouble with the concept of him possessing immortality, particularly in light of 1 Timothy 1:17 which is clearly talking about God the Father as it is in contrast to Christ. However, even if this is about the Father, we again have the carry over of Jesus being included in the divine identity which also makes him the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. In either case, we have an affirmation of who Jesus is and who the Father is.