Christ is equal to the Father by nature, not by decree
Ellen White describes the Father decreeing the Son's equality before the angels. The Bible answers: the Word was God from the beginning and never needed an appointment.
By Rodrigo Custódio ·
The moment
The sentence is on page 12 of História da Redenção (The Story of Redemption), an Ellen G. White book that begins the biblical story at a point the Bible does not narrate: heaven before the creation of the earth. The work is a posthumous compilation, organized from accounts the author had been publishing since 1858, when she released the first volume of Spiritual Gifts. There, and later in the expanded versions, she describes heavenly scenes she claimed to have seen in vision. The Adventist reader receives the book as the framework of the great conflict between Christ and Satan.
The scene is an assembly. "The great Creator assembled the heavenly host," the text says, so that, before all the angels, He might "confer special honor upon His Son." The Son is seated on the throne with the Father, and the multitude of angels is gathered around. It is in this setting, with an audience in place, that the Father makes the announcement that matters here.
Immediately afterward come the practical consequences of the announcement. The Son's word "was to be obeyed as readily as the word of the Father." The Father "had invested" the Son "with authority to command the heavenly host." And the Son was to work in union with Him in the creation of the earth, which was yet to come. In the book's plot, it is this ceremony that awakens Lucifer's envy and opens the rebellion in heaven.
What the passage sustains, therefore, is a script: there was a day, within the history of heaven, when the Father determined that the Son would be equal to Him, and the angels were summoned to take note. Equality enters the narrative as an announcement, and authority enters as an investiture. This fits the way many of the Adventist pioneers thought, who saw the Son as one who received from the Father the honor he had. The sentence preserves that vocabulary even when it appears to exalt Christ.
The absurdity
The eternal Son appears here as an appointee. The throne becomes an installation chamber, the angels form the audience, and the Father reads the act that elevates the Son to equality with Himself. It is Christ's divinity treated as a title handed over in a ceremony, with witnesses present so that no one can claim ignorance of the appointment. Anyone who needs a decree to be equal to God was not yet equal before the decree. Here are the exact words:
"The Father then made known that it was ordained by Himself that Christ, His Son, should be equal with Himself; so that wherever was the presence of His Son, it was as His own presence."
Source: Ellen G. White, The Story of Redemption, p. 12.
Marked excerpt from the printed page with the quoted passage, The Story of Redemption, p. 12.
Why this is serious
The first blow falls on the verb. What is "ordained" was conferred, and what is conferred does not belong to the nature of the one who receives it. A king may order that his ambassador be received as though he were the king himself, but the ambassador remains a subject. Ellen White's sentence confirms this logic by saying that wherever the Son was, it "was as" the presence of the Father. That "as" describes a power of attorney. Equality becomes a post, and a post is given by the decision of one who is above.
The second blow falls on the calendar. If equality was announced at a moment in heavenly history, then there was a before, in which the Son was not yet equal to the Father. Christ comes to have a career, with promotion and ceremony. The distance between Creator and creature, which Scripture keeps absolute, shrinks until it becomes a difference in rank. The Son stands one step from the angels who attend Him and takes one step above them before all. It is precisely that step that Lucifer, in the same book, thinks he can contest.
The third blow strikes the gospel. Only God saves (Isa 43:11). If the Son is God by appointment, the cross becomes the work of an authorized representative, and the sinner is left hanging on the word of a delegate. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" depends on the Son having the same nature as the Father. If He merely represents the Father, then whoever sees Him sees an official image, and the incarnation ceases to be God with us and becomes God sending someone in His place.
The fourth blow strikes the authority of Scripture. The Bible does not describe this assembly, nor this decree, nor this audience of angels. The scene exists only because the author claimed to have seen it. An entire chapter is added to the history of heaven, and it is this chapter, and not the sacred text, that comes to define how the reader understands the relationship between the Father and the Son. The vision fills the silence of the Bible and, in filling it, contradicts what the Bible actually says.
The verdict of the Scriptures
John begins at the same place as Ellen White, before creation, and arrives at the opposite: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1). The verb is "was," not "became" or "was ordained to be." At the farthest point language can reach, the Word already is God. No assembly comes later to complete what was already full.
Paul closes the door on appointment: "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped" (Phil 2:6). Equality is the Son's starting point, it is what He gives up when He empties Himself, and not an honor He receives in order to exercise it. Paul thinks of Christ's humiliation from an equality He already possessed. And Jesus Himself prays looking back, beyond any ceremony: "And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed." (John 17:5). The glory He asks to have back is the glory He had with the Father, and not a glory the Father had assigned to Him.
That is why the honor due the Son is not heavenly protocol. Jesus says "that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him." (John 5:23). The Son is honored as the Father because He is what the Father is. And when Philip asks to see the Father, the answer is identity, not power of attorney: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?" (John 14:9). As for the assembly scene, Scripture has already warned about teachings built this way, with people "taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind" (Col 2:18). What is not written cannot correct what is.
The good news is firmer than any decree. The Christ in whom the sinner trusts was never promoted, and therefore can never be demoted. He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Heb 13:8). Whoever leans on Him leans on God Himself, who came to save in person. There is no assembly of angels between the Father and the Son, and there is no intermediary between the believer and God when the believer is in Christ.