Only the Father is the One True God. We can be sure about that. Yet when someone speaks, others can say they hear that person. Literally it is not that person they are hearing. It is their voice. “I hear you”, we say. Yet literally we do not hear them, we hear their voice. It is only in a certain sense that we identify a person’s words with that person. With the One True God speaking, Jesus is that word, that voice. Hearing Jesus is effectively hearing God. Furthermore, Jesus is not only the word of the One True God in what he says, but in his very existence. The Word became flesh. It is really pushing it if we say “I hear you, and your word is actually you”. That is confusing if we mean it too literally. Someone creating a video, I might say, “I saw you the other day” meaning I saw their video. But it is not that literally the video is that person. If that person says something illegal, imprisonable, in the video, do we put the video in jail? Of course not. That is too literal, hyper-literal. Jesus has the divinity involved in being the Word of God, but we confuse and maybe we are confused if we insist he is the One True God. It is too literal. It needs qualification or else it is plainly untrue. Yet if we love God, we would also love the one He sent as His word. If we see Jesus and hear him, it is true that in a real sense we hear God and see God, God the Father who sent him, whose word Jesus is. Yet it is not a good idea to say simply and without explanation that Jesus is God. Yet if we are sensible, as scripture writers were, and spell it all out a bit better, we get rebuked for alegedly ”denying the divinity of Christ”. No, we just need to properly understand it and wisely relate it to others.
