Was Jesus speaking literally when he said: "He who has seen me has seen the Father"? (John 14:9)?

"Was Jesus speaking literally when he said: "He who has seen me has seen the Father"? (John 14:9)?"

No. Even Trinitarians admit that the Father is not the Son.

So when John tells us that no man has ever seen God (John 1:18, 1 John 4:12), he meant it in the literal, physical sense: no man has actually seen the very person of God (who is the Father only) with his physical eyes. We can also be confident that, since many men have seen Jesus, Jesus cannot be God.

"The danger of the Christian faith is that we may set up Jesus as a kind of secondary God. But Jesus himself insists that the things he said and the things he did did not come from his own initiative or his own power or his own knowledge but from God. His words were God's voice speaking to men; His deeds were God's power flowing through him to men. He was the *channel* by which God came to men." - The Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel of John, pp. 159, 161, 162, Vol. 2, The Westminster Press, 1975.

So there is no real reason to insist that John 14:7, 9 shows Jesus as being equally God with his Father. The probability is that, in harmony with the usage of the time, Jesus was merely saying that what he spoke came from God, and what he did is what God directed. He meant that understanding what he did and said was like knowing ("seeing") God (as, in a similar sense, those who literally saw angels sent by God and speaking God's words were said to have "seen God"). Jesus is totally in harmony with ("one" with) the Father in purpose so that we can "see" the Father's will in Jesus.

Origen, the greatest and most knowledgeable scholar of the NT Greek explained John 14:9:

"But ... God is invisible .... Whereas, on the contrary, God, the Father of Christ, is said to be seen, because `he who sees the Son,' he says, `sees also the Father.' This certainly would press us hard [to explain], were the expression not understood by us more correctly of understanding, and not of seeing. For he who has understood the Son will understand the Father also." - p. 277, vol. iv, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Eerdmans Publishing.

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Jesus so perfectly reflects the personality of his Father that living with and observing him is, in effect, like actually seeing the Father. Yet, the Father is superior to the Son, as Jesus acknowledges: “The things I say to you men I do not speak of my own originality.” Jesus properly gives all credit for his teachings to his heavenly Father.

Jesus spoke those words because he has the same imagine of his Father (Col 1:15, Heb 1:2) nature and essence (Joh 1:1, Phi 2:5-6)

Jesus is the same expression of the invisible God, the express imagine of his person.

A simple man couldn't say those words, because it would have been blasphemy, but Jesus spoke those words because he is God !!!

Bye

He was saying that they are alike. Haven't you ever heard that old saying, "If you have seen him, you have seen his father"? My son and I are a lot alike, as well as his son. My father and I were a lot alike. Once when walking down the street, I glanced in a store and thought I saw my father, so I turned around and went back to the store to discover, the door was a mirror and I had seen myself.

Once my son asked me when I had made a certain portrait of him and I said, "I didn't shoot that one, that's me". My grandson looks like my son did 21 years ago.

There is nothing spooky or trinitarian about what Jesus said. He just said he is like his father Jehovah.

Check this out;

https://picasaweb.google.com/113469061768012111877...

Well he certainly meant what he said.

But he was not saying that he and his father were the same person but simply that they were of the same mind. He always had the attitude that he came to do not his own will but his father's will. He also perfectly reflected the qualities of his father and why wouldn't he when in his pre-human existence he was the firstborn of all creation with everything else being created through him which is why Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us create man in our image". If this is talking about two (or three in the case of the trinity) persons all being one person then how is it that man is in God's image? The Bible does say that "a man will leave his father and his mother and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh." but who would argue that they are not still two distinct persons? Because the man is head of his wife and because the wife is in submission, they act in unity as one flesh.

"Let wives be in subjection to their husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is head of his wife as the Christ also is head of the congregation, he being a savior of [this] body. In fact, as the congregation is in subjection to the Christ, so let wives also be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, continue loving your wives, just as the Christ also loved the congregation and delivered up himself for it." - Eph. 5:22-25

"But I want you to know that the head of every man is the Christ; in turn the head of a woman is the man; in turn the head of the Christ is God." - 1 Corinthians 11:3

"My food is for me to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work." - John 4:34

No, he was saying He is like the Father.

Well in a way yes because of the holy trinity that makes them one and the same (the father, the son and the holy spirit).