John 20:17 "Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God." (KJV)

     The question raised by Jehovah's Witnesses is why did Jesus call the Father "my God"? Does this imply that Jesus Himself is not God?   NO!

     Why didn't Jesus say, "I am ascending to ‘our' Father and ‘our' God"?  The reason is that Jesus was always careful to distinguish His relationship with the Father from the relationship humans had to the Father. Jesus was careful to distinguish between the two because He was God's Son by nature, wheras Christians are God's sons by adoption.
Similary, the Father was Jesus' God because Jesus humbled himself to become a man (Phil.2:7), wheras the Father is our God because we are by nature creatures.

     It is significant that nowhere in the Scripture did Jesus ever Speak of God to His disciples as "our God."  Throughout His ministry He consistently spoke of the Father as "the Father" or "my Father," but never as "our Father."  (The "our Father" of the so-called Lord's Prayer is not an exception to this inasmuch as there Jesus is instructing His disciples on how they should corporately address God in prayer.) Here in John 20:17, in keeping with His established pattern of speech, He avoided the obviously shorter form of expression ("our") and chose to remain with the longer form ("My" and "your").  Obviously his concern here was to maintain the distinction between the sense in which He is God's Son by nature and by right and the sense in which His disciples
are God's sons by grace and by adoption.

By Roger Griffith

Published by
Berean Christian Ministries
P.O. Box 1091
Webster, NY 14580

E-mail:   bcmmin@frontiernet.net
Web pages:
Mormonism: http://www.bcmmin.org
Jehovah's Witnesses:  http://www.bcmmin.org/jwstd.html

jw/john2017
5-29-98