As I mentioned in my inaugural note on the deity of Christ, concerning first person plural cohortative verbs, I have been intermittently working on a little Jehovah’s Witness apologetic pamphlet. Today I want to post a note in response to the “But Jesus worships the Father!” objection.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are right. Jesus does worship the Father. But then he so closely identifies with the Father that He demands to be worshipped in the exact same way (cf. John 5:23, 20:28–29 [14].). Since that’s the case, and yet there is only one God, we know that Jesus and the Father must be the same Being (even if they are different persons).
Hence the whole thing about the Trinity and such.
Another note on this issue is that while Jesus worships the Father, the Father worships Jesus right back! Even the New World Translation says in 1 Peter 1:17 that Jesus “received from God the Father honor and glory”, and in Hebrews 1:6 [15] it says that when Jehovah “brings his Firstborn into the inhabited earth, he says: ‘And let all God’s angels do obeisance to him.’”. The Watchtower’s older Kingdom Interlinear Translation actually says “worship” instead of “do obeisance”, which is a much better translation and I’ll tell you why.
The Greek lemma here is “προσκυνέω”, and John uses it in Revelation, too: “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship (“προσκυνῆσαι”) at the feet of the angel who showed them to me, but he said to me, ‘You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship (“προσκύνησον”) God.’” (22:8–9, NWT) [16].
So the scriptures explicitly forbid us from προσκυνέω-ing anyone but Jehovah, and they also explicitly teach us to προσκυνέω Jesus. Therefore, Jesus must be the same Being as Jehovah. Regardless of how you translate the Greek.
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