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.