The relationship of sons is the most blessed relationship in which any can be with God and, as we shall see, God has been pleased to bring some of His creatures into this relationship with Himself; but there is One who is in the relationship of Son to God in a unique way, in a way that no other can be, for it is the eternal relationship of Him of whom the Scriptures say, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God" (John 1:1-2). It is in Him that God has been revealed, even as the same writer tells us, "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18).
"In the bosom of the Father" speaks of the peculiar place of the Only begotten Son. Although every saint of God is loved by the Father, and although the Son has said that the world will yet know that we are loved by the Father with the love that rests on Him (John 17:23), yet this place in the bosom of the Father is His alone, for it tells us of His divine and eternal relationship with His Father, the place that was His before He came into Manhood, and that never could cease to be His. This is not a place or relationship into which He entered, but that which belonged to Him essentially and eternally because of who He was and is. Every mention of the Son as the Only begotten has this eternal relationship in mind, a relationship that was and could never cease to be.
In John 17:5 the Son said, "Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." The Son was with the Father before the world was, and He had glory with the Father before the world was, and now the Son, as Man, having come into the place of dependence on God the Father, desires to have as Man the glory that was His as Son with His Father in eternity. In verse 24 of this same chapter the Son asks the Father that His own might be with Him, in His house, to behold that glory that is His as the Eternal Son.
Paul joins with John in presenting to us the glory of the Eternal Son, where he writes of the Son of the Father's love, saying, "For by Him were all things created … all things were created by Him, and for Him" (Col. 1:13, 16). Here we are left in no doubt that it was as Son the Lord Jesus created all things, just as John records at the beginning of his Gospel that it was the Eternal Word that made all things. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews also tells us that the worlds were created by the Son, saying, "God … has in these last days spoken to us by His Son … by whom also He made the worlds" (Heb. 1:1- 2).