Jesus says in many and multiple ways that he “came down from heaven, descended from heaven, I am from above, I am not of this world, and I have come from the Father.” All of these claims imply that Jesus in some way came down from heaven to earth. He didn’t go to heaven as a man before his death and resurrection. He also says in his ministry that he “descended,” past tense. Jesus says that he has not yet ascended to heaven by the end of his ministry (John 20:17) so he must be telling us that he descended from heaven before he was a man. Jesus had some preexistence as some spirit being with the Father before he “became flesh” (John 1:14). Jesus descended from heaven to become flesh, to become a man, and this proves that Jesus had a preexistence and did not “begin to exist as a man.” He descended from heaven when he was conceived in the womb of Mary. The eternal Logos, the Son of God, descended from heaven and hypostatically united with a human nature at conception. This is how and when he descended from heaven, from the Father, and came into the world.
John 3:13: No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man
John 3:31: The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all.
John 6:38: For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.
John 6:41: At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”
John 6:51: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And this bread, which I will give for the life of the world, is My flesh.”
John 6:62: Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before
John 8:23: Then He told them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.
John 16:28: I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.
Jesus is clearly teaching that he came down from heaven, down from the Father, and entered into the world. This is preexistence to incarnation.
A Critical Error
If these verses are read closely, the problem of the Trinitarian assumption is clear even within these verses. The Trinitarian must believe that Jesus was in heaven before he was a man. They must believe that a prehuman being “came down from heaven.” This being came down from heaven to become flesh. Yet, what do we find in these verses?
John 3:13: No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man
John 6:51: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And this bread, which I will give for the life of the world, is My flesh.
John 6:62: Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before
What do we find in all of these verses? That it is a man, flesh, that descended out of heaven. Not a prehuman, prefleshly divine being. It is a human being who came down from heaven. Do Trinitarians believe this? Do they believe human flesh came down from heaven? Do they believe a son of man, a son of Adam, a human, came down from heaven? No. They believe something else came down out of heaven to become a man. “He became flesh.” You should see a problem in how you read John 1:14 at this point as well.
No one has ascended into heaven but the son of man. The living bread that comes down from heaven is my flesh. The son of man ascending to where he was before. In every case we have a man in heaven. Trinitarians do not believe this happened past tense at this point. Each of these verses are temporally prior to John 20:17, “I have not yet ascended.” Trinitarians do not believe the son of man has ascended into heaven before his death and resurrection. Read John 3:13 again. “No one has ascended into heaven but…. the son of man.” Ascended. Past tense. The son of man ascended into heaven in John 3:13 already? A human being ascended into heaven already? Do Trinitarians believe this? “What, then, if you see the Son of man ascending to where he was before?” Do Trinitarians believe that the Son of man was in heaven before? No, they do not believe any of this. Yet, it is exactly what your Bible says.
The Trinitarian Excuses
Trinitarian responses to these facts often trample right over their initial usages of these passages. Typically they begin by trying to prove that these passages mean a prehuman Jesus came down from heaven. After these points are noted, their argument becomes “well, the son of man is what he became. What he was before he became man is what came down from heaven.” They liken this to the following example: I may say “my wife was born in Ohio.” Is it true that she was “my wife” when she was born? No. It is an idiomatic way of speaking about who she is and what she was. Many Trinitarians are reading this in this way. However, this doesn’t work, especially if they hold to a hypostatic union Christology. When Jesus says “my flesh came down from heaven,” this isn’t referring to his prehuman existence which “became flesh.” If that prehuman existence is not mixed or confused with the human nature, and only subsisting, it makes no sense to say his flesh descended. The divine nature which descended never has had flesh. We can only say this idiomatically. Are we really going to rest our Christology on an idiom? Are we prepared to truly say that the Son of man descended from heaven? Why would he not say that the Son of God descended from heaven? This would be a consistent statement with Trinitarianism. Yet, he did not.
Another stunt Trinitarians will pull is to try to argue against the statement “son of man is a title which means he is a man.” They most often say, “if son of man means he’s a man, then son of God means he’s God.” I have heard this argument too many times to count, as it is quite common. Even if I granted this and said they were correct, this still doesn’t solve their problem. They say that when he’s saying “son of man,” he’s referring to being man. When he says “Son of God,” he’s referring to being God/his divine nature. Yet, in these passages, he’s saying that a man came down from and ascended to heaven. Their argument is flawed. “God” is a title for a person. “Man” is not. It’s a general category. When someone is a son of God, it means they’re the son of the Father. When someone is a son of man, it means they are a human. Jesus asked the Pharisees whose son the Messiah would be. They correctly answered “David’s.” The Messiah is the son of David. Does that mean the Messiah is David? Jesus is the son of Mary. Does that mean he is Mary? This doesn’t work with particulars, such as “God,” the Father. Trinitarians want to act as if “God” refers to a general category of kind, similar to how “man” refers to the category “human.” But Jesus doesn’t claim to be the Son of “the divine nature.” As if the divine nature produced him and now he is divine. He points specifically to the Father as the one having bore him. When we say we are children of God, we don’t mean we are children of the whole Trinity, or anything with the divine nature. Are we children of Jesus? Is the Holy Spirit our Father, in Trinitarianism? No and no. Sometimes they will say, “in the OT, a son of the builders was another way of saying someone was a builder.” In other words, he was like a child and learned the trade of the builders from those who taught him like parents. A son of the builders was a builder. So the son of God means he’s God. Yet, we are children of God. Does that make us Gods? The term “builder” is a category. Not a particularly. Just as “man” is a category. Being a son of Adam means you have Adam’s humanity. That’s what Adam produces. Being the son of God doesn’t mean you are God. God doesn’t make other Gods as humans make other humans.
Some Trinitarians will try and say “well yes, Jesus was the son of man in his prehuman state, because Daniel 7 says that he was the son of man in heaven before coming to earth.” This is, in fact, not what Daniel 7 says. I believe people have read that Jesus is called the Son of man in Daniel, which is correct, and they reason that since the book of Daniel is temporally prior to the incarnation, he must be the son of man in his prehuman state. This argument makes it clear that they haven’t read or understood Daniel’s prophecy. First, it is a prophecy. It is a future vision which occurs after the resurrection of the Son of man. Compare Daniel 7:13-14 with Matthew 28:18. Second, Daniel says that he sees one coming before God who looks like “a son of man.” This is revolutionary because in visions, no one ever sees humans in heaven in the OT. “One who looks like a man in heaven” is in contrast to the way Seraphim and Cherubim are described. The point of the prophecy is that a man will ascend into heaven and receive glory and power from God. This is fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus (see Acts 2). Son of man isn’t a prehuman title of the preincarnate Jesus. It is the title given to someone who will come before God and receive what God grants.
As we can see, the Trinitarian excuses are simply just attempts to avoid the obvious facts. That a human being ascended and descended from heaven. “Son of man” is a man. Men have flesh. When the son of man and his flesh “descend out of heaven,” we need to just accept the facts. Not come up with contrivances to make it fit our theology.
Trinitarian Double Standards
Trinitarians understand what basic terms mean in the Bible perfectly. Yet, when the same thing is said of Jesus, a double standard appears and a massive veil comes over their eyes to where they are blind to what he’s saying. Some examples:
- When Jesus asks if the baptism of John is “from heaven or from men,” the Pharisees themselves know the answer is that his baptism is from heaven. They fear the crowds so they do not say it is from men, because the crowd would react negatively. They did not want to say his baptism was from heaven, because they feared Jesus’ response if he said “then why didn’t you believe him?” What does it mean for the baptism of John to be “from heaven?” We all understand that this means that it is of heavenly origin, man didn’t formulate the idea themselves, but God gave it to him from heaven. (see Luke 20:4)
- When we are told that every good gift comes down from the Father, we know that this means that all of our blessings, everything “good,” does not originate with man but with God. If a man is blessed with a wife, she has come from God. If a starving family is blessed with food, this good gift comes from the Father from heaven. Not from the world. No one is good but God alone. (see James 1:17)
- When we read that John the Baptist was, “a man sent from God,” where was he sent to? We know he was sent out into the world to preach. He began teaching the gospel, the good news, that “God’s kingdom is near.” We know that John was sent from God, the Father, into the world. John was a man of God and sent from him. (see John 1:6)
- When Jesus tells his apostles that he is sending them “into the world,” we know that he means that they are going down into the spiritually darkened and unbelieving world to teach them the gospel message and express God to them. (see John 20:21-22)
- When Jesus says you are “no part of this world,” how does he expect you to do that? You know he means that you are not to become attached to the things this world values, which will fade in the kingdom. Think of the rich man who kept all of the law but couldn’t let go of his wealth. Money is part of this world. If you are no part of the world, you do not love the things in the world. (see John 15:19)
- When Paul says that we are “in Christ,” what does he mean? He means that we are in Christ in the Spirit. We share that Spirit of Christ which he imparts to us, which renews us, gives us the mind of Christ, and makes us partakers in the divine nature. This is why we are new creations. We understand what it means to be in Christ, when Christ is in heaven. (see 2 Corinthians 5:17)
- When John says that the Father will abide in us, we know what he means. We are born of his Spirit and he becomes our Father. His Spirit is in us, and we are in him. He has “made his home in us.” Our bodies are the temple of God, because his presence resides in us. We know what it means for God to be “in us.” (see 1 John 4:12-14)
Nothing I’ve said is particularly controversial in this section. In leading Trinitarian commentaries and textbooks, they will give generally the same explanation. However, when Jesus says the same things about himself, everyone seems to forget what these things mean.
- Jesus is sent from God. Trinitarians take this to mean that Jesus is with God the Father in heaven, and is sent down into planet earth.
But when we are sent from God, it means something else.
- Jesus is said to come from above. Trinitarians assume this means he was in heaven pre-existing, and descended down into earth and became flesh.
But when good gifts, or John’s baptism come from heaven, it means something else.
- Jesus says he is not of this world. Trinitarians think this means he is from heaven because he has eternal prehuman origins from heaven, and his origination didn’t come from earth.
But when he says we are no part of the world “just as” he is no part of the world (just as or even as meaning in “the same way”), it means something else.
- When Jesus he is in the Father and the Father is in him, Trinitarians imagine this means that Jesus and the Father share this particular nature that no one else does, or they share energies, or there’s a perichoretic indwelling of two divine persons in each other.
But when we are said to be in Christ, or in God, or God is in us, it means something else.
- When Jesus is called God’s son, Trinitarians pretend this means that Jesus was eternally generated from God’s nature, which makes him what God is, and he is the only son God has ever had, or will ever have. No other son of God is a son of God as Jesus is.
But when we are commanded to be “begotten again” of God, or when we are called “begotten children” of God, it means something else.
- When Jesus is said to be sent into the world, Trinitarians will say that this means that he was sent down into the physical planet earth, from some other, metaphysical realm.
But when he sends us into the world just as he was sent, it means something else.
Are you beginning to notice a pattern? What’s said of Jesus is assumed to mean something completely different than when the exact same thing is said of anyone else. This is a special pleading fallacy. It is a breakdown in logical reasoning (“fallacy”) when you assume some special instance of something to prove your point. Trinitarians often believe Jesus preexisted because of these texts. They believe he existed with God before because of these texts. And yet, what happens to these passages if these special conditions are not assumed to prove the very point it’s meant to give evidence of?
Re-examining the Trinitarian Argument
It is clear that in order for Trinitarians to make a case for their claims, they must interpret what Jesus says of himself, differently than when he says it of anyone else. This is circular reasoning. 1. You assume Jesus is special because he’s God. 2. You believe he’s God because you believe these passages say he is. 3. But you believe these passages say something special about Jesus to prove he is God, because you already believe he is God. The circle loops back in on itself. The problem is that people begin with a theory and seek to prove it, so by reading the text with this theory in mind (namely in this case, that Jesus preexisted in heaven), you are certain to believe it. It is clear that this kind of double standard will not work, because often, Jesus even says that these things are “just as,” meaning “in the same way,” with us as they are with him. “You are no part of the world just as I am no part of the world.” “Just as you sent me into the world, I now send them.” “I pray that they will be with me where I am.” “I will grant to him to sit on my throne, just as the Father granted to me to sit on his throne.” “That they may be one just as we are one.” We see that the Trinitarian arguments collapse in on themselves from contradictions. They do not believe a man came down from heaven, or flesh came down from heaven, or that this man ascended into heaven, or that he alone ascended into heaven and no one else has. Let us respond in debate format to the steelman argument I presented in the first section.
Counterarguments to the Trinitarian Argument
Jesus says in many and multiple ways that he “came down from heaven, descended from heaven, I am from above, I am not of this world, and I have come from the Father.” All of these claims imply that Jesus in some way came down from heaven to earth.
It is correct that Jesus says all of these things. However, it is also correct that he says all of these things about us, his followers, as well. He is a model for us to follow, and when he commands us to “be born from heaven above,” or, sends us into the world, or, “be no part of this world,” or, to be “the light of the world,” he is not telling us to come down from heaven and incarnate as he has. He is not telling us to do something he himself hasn’t done, or something we cannot do. It is also true that these statements imply that Jesus came down from heaven and to earth. But in our careful reading, we find that it is “a man,” the Son of man, who came down from heaven. Not a prehuman being who later, after the descent, became flesh. We also must contend with the fact that this human also ascended into heaven sometime in his human life.
He didn’t go to heaven as a man before his death and resurrection.
He did. “The Son of man ascending to where he was before.” The Son of man, the human flesh, ascending to where he was before. “No one has ascended into heaven except… the son of man.” Past tense verbs. We cannot accept that Jesus, past tense, descended from heaven, but not accept that he also past tense ascended into heaven.
Jesus says that he has not yet ascended to heaven by the end of his ministry (John 20:17) so he must be telling us that he descended from heaven before he was a man.
In John 20:17 Jesus does say “do not hold onto me, for I have not yet ascended.” The kind of ascension he’s talking about here is a different kind of ascension than he is talking about in John 3:13 and 6:62. The context of each passage is critical to understand this. John 3:2-13 is all about the new birth. Being “born from above.” In this passage we read that being born from above means that you are no longer born of flesh (“no part of this world” of flesh), and you become Spirit (“that which is born of flesh is flesh, but that which is born of Spirit is Spirit”). If you are born from heaven above, you have ascended into heaven in the spirit. This is why this is baptism of the Spirit, when we receive the Spirit as a down-payment (Ephesians 1:14, Hebrews 6:4). The ascension of Jesus in John 20:17 is bodily, fully, as a new creation. When Jesus says in John 3, “no one has ascended into heaven,” he’s referring to this new birth. No one has been born again from heaven, having ascended into heaven. If Elijah and Enoch were taken into heaven, they didn’t receive their new birth of the Spirit in doing so. This is why Jesus can say this. In John 6:62, the context of this passage is the bread of life discourse, as it is commonly called. Jesus is teaching us how and why we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, which is the bread of God, which came down from heaven. This is considered one of Jesus’ “hard sayings,” and it is quite clear that it still is today, as virtually no one seems to understand what he means. This teaching was offensive, so offensive that many of his disciples and the crowd that followed him from the day before, left him. Even though they received food until they were full, and witnessed an unparalleled miracle, they still left him because of the offense of this saying. When Jesus finishes this teaching, he asks his apostles “if this offends you, would it then also offend you if you see the Son of man ascending to where he was before?” What if you see the baptism of the Spirit that the son received at the Jordan River, which John the Baptist witnessed and attested to (John 1:32)? If this saying is too hard for you to understand, what of the teaching on the new birth? We see that Jesus is referring back to John 3 and being born again. Being born again is how Jesus’ flesh can be the bread of life, and they didn’t understand this at the time. The spirit was not yet given to them (John 7:39). “If you can’t understand earthly things, how can you understand heavenly things” (John 3:12)? Jesus isn’t talking about an ascension before he was born. And the ascension he’s speaking of is not to ascend to the right hand of the Father, which happens at his resurrection and glorification. John 20:17 speaks of a different kind of ascension.
Many people make the argument from John 16:28: “I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father,” that Jesus must be saying that he is going back to the Father in the same way in which he came from the Father. This argument is flawed in several ways, but we can just see from the argument in John 20:17 that this must necessarily not be true. If Jesus is ascending in the same way he was before, then it is not true that he “has not yet ascended.” Another problem with this passage is that the Greek text does not say “going back to the Father.” It simply says, “further/moreover, I am going to the Father.” The final problem is that it is not uncommon for a phrase to be taken both metaphorically in part and literally in part. For example: “let the dead bury their dead.” It isn’t literally true that the dead can bury, but it is literally referring to the man’s dead father. When Jesus “came from the Father,” it is no different from John being “sent from God” in John 1:6. When Jesus is, “in turn, going to the Father,” it is not in the same sense as when.he came from God.
Jesus had some preexistence as some spirit being with the Father before he “became flesh” (John 1:14).
Not one of these passages say that Jesus came down from heaven “before he became flesh.” There’s nothing in any of these passages that say he came down from heaven before he was born. This is all hinged on the assumption that this must have happened before he became flesh, which Jesus tells us is incorrect at John 6:51. None of these passages are speaking of Jesus before his birth, all speak of what happened in his life and ministry. “But flesh and blood cannot enter heaven,” someone might say. That passage (1 Corinthians 15:50) says that flesh and blood cannot enter “the kingdom.” Regardless, “flesh and blood” refers tothe perishable. In other words, Paul is saying that to be in the kingdom, you must be changed to be imperishable. Your body of flesh and blood must be clothed with immortality. Read the context. It isn’t saying that a human being can’t ascend into heaven. We know that humans have ascended into heaven (2 Corinthians 12, Revelation 4:1-2).
Jesus descended from heaven to become flesh, to become a man, and this proves that Jesus had a preexistence and did not “begin to exist as a man.” He descended from heaven when he was conceived in the womb of Mary. The eternal Logos, the Son of God, descended from heaven and hypostatically united with a human nature at conception. This is how and when he descended from heaven, from the Father, and came into the world.
Much of this has already been responded to in the previous comments. But it is important to note that Jesus’ coming down from heaven is not antithetical to the statement that Jesus is a man from among men. It simply means that Jesus ascended into heaven as a man, which we already observed is what Jesus himself says. It is also important to note that nothing in John refers to Jesus’ birth from Mary. In fact, her name is never even used in this gospel. In John 2 he calls her “woman.” John doesn’t give us a birth narrative, a manger story, the conversations with Gabriel about Mary having the spirit overshadow her, the dreams of Joseph which explain this, a genealogy account, none of it. To assume that John is hammering the point that Jesus came down from heaven to earth in the womb of Mary, yet never bothers to mention this account is rather striking. It is also striking that Matthew and Luke, who do mention this conception event, forgot to mention Jesus’ prehuman origins and the incarnation entirely.
What do these verses actually mean?
John 3:13: No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man
See my full post on this verse Here
John 3:31: The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all.
Just as Jesus said earlier in this chapter, flesh is born of flesh and Spirit is born of Spirit. Jesus is born of the Spirit, born from above, and is not of the world. This is what he commanded Nicodemus, and us, to do. “You (plural) must be born again.” As Jesus also said, John is the greatest among men, but yet he is least compared to those of the kingdom. The least in the kingdom is still above the greatest of the earth. Jesus is from above, the kingdom above. As he said at his trial, “my kingdom is not of this world.” This has nothing to do with preexistence, but where the identity of a believer is. That is, from above.
John 6:38: For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.
He who came down from heaven is “the Son of man.” The Son of man came down from heaven to do God’s will, not his own. Many Trinitarians believe in the one will of the Trinity (meaning each person does not have their own individual will apart from the other persons). If Jesus, then, is speaking of not doing “his own” will, this must be the human Jesus, who has his human will in his human nature. Either way we look at it, a human is saying he came down from heaven as a human. As we will see, verse 51 plainly says that the flesh of Jesus came down from heaven. Yes, a man came down from heaven, was “sent into the world,” to teach the gospel, the will of the Father. See Luke 4:18, and 21. In this bread of life discourse, we find that Jesus “doing the will of God” is what makes him that bread of God. And that bread of God is what gives life to the world.
John 6:41: At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”
This is very similar to the misunderstanding question literary device of John. But here, they are not asking a question, it is a narrative comment. To an ancient Jew, “bread from heaven” was the mana that Israel received in the wilderness, and which was placed in the ark of the covenant. Jesus makes reference to mana in this passage. They do not understand him when he calls himself bread from heaven. The fact that this confused the Jews who turned away from Jesus, and this also confuses many Trinitarians today is very troublesome. Trinitarians do not realized they are confused. They believe that the answer is, “the second person of the Trinity came down from heaven, literally, and became flesh. This flesh is the bread of God because it’s united with a divine nature.” How does this even make this flesh the bread of God? The question is never coherently answered. Contradictions flourish in Trinitarian writings. How does this make it proper to say that the flesh came down from heaven? Trinitarians have no answer. Yes, they are confused.
John 6:51: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And this bread, which I will give for the life of the world, is My flesh.
The bread that came down from heaven and gives life to the world is his flesh. His flesh is what gives life to the world, and that which gives life is the bread which came down from heaven. Jesus is plainly telling us that his flesh came down from heaven. The man, Jesus, came down from heaven when he was born again in the Spirit, and that Spirit descended and remained upon him in his ministry (John 1:32). Jesus’ body is the temple of God, as he says in John 2. Paul says that our bodies are the temple of God when the Spirit resides in us. It is the same thing. Heaven was opened to him and he receives the messengers of God (John 1:51). Jesus ascended into heaven in the Spirit, he is in the Father, who is in heaven, and the Father is in him, tabernacling in this flesh (John 1:14) by his Spirit, which is his word (John 6:63). Jesus’ flesh, his body, is exactly what God commanded. “Man must not live on bread alone but on every word from the mouth of God.” Is Jesus not the one who God put his word in his mouth (Compare Deuteronomy 18:15-18 to Acts 3)? What Jesus says and what he does, this man of flesh, is every commandment of God. He does not do his own will, but the will of the Father. He is directed and guided by the Spirit of his Father. This is what it means for his flesh to descend out of heaven. His flesh is every word that comes down from God embodied. It is the Spirit of God in flesh.
John 6:62: Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before
As previously explained, if the teaching on the bread of life is offensive, then is the teaching on being born again, seeing Jesus’ baptism of the Spirit, offensive to them too? If they saw that moment when heaven was opened to Jesus, and he received the Spirit descending out of heaven upon him, and he entered into heaven, would this offend them? Would it offend them to see this man ascending to where he was before, in heaven? The next verse is key. The word which descended on him by the Spirit when he was born again, baptized in John 1, we now see Jesus explain here. “The words I speak are Spirit and life.” Word is “logos,” the same word of John 1:1 and 14. The word is Spirit, that is, Holy Spirit. When Jesus received the Spirit, he received the word of God. Does this teaching offend you?
John 8:23: Then He told them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.
Jesus is talking to the Pharisees. They are of the world and cannot understand the heavenly things of the Spirit. We are to be no part of the world just as he is no part of the world (John 17:16). This verse uses a synonymous parallelism, which means that each statement in this verse is synonymous. He says something, and repeats himself in a parallel, by using different words with the same meaning. “You are from below, I am from above,” means the same thing as “You are of this world, I am not of this world.” When Jesus commands us not to be of this world, he’s telling us that we are to be “from above.” We are to be exactly what Jesus says he is here. In the same way as he is. Born from above, not of this world, from above. Again, Jesus isn’t talking about being preexistent and from heaven before his birth, as if this would support the context of this conversation at all. He’s saying that he understands spiritual things while they only understand earthly things from below.
John 16:28: I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.
As previously explained, if Jesus is saying he is going to the Father in the same way as he came from the Father, he could not say in John 20:17 that he has not yet ascended to the Father. Every time he appeared in some “Christophany” he ascended back to the Father. Interestingly enough, Jesus doesn’t even use the phrase “son of man” in John 20:17. He wouldn’t necessarily be referring to his human nature only here, which a Trinitarian would need for him to do. Secondly, the Greek text doesn’t say he is “going back” to the Father. The word here can mean “again,” as a repeated action, or “further, moreover, in turn, on the other hand,” as in a contrast to. I believe this is how Jesus meant it. And lastly, there’s no reason to assume that Jesus’ coming from the Father means he came in the same way he’s going. It is not controversial to say Jesus did come from the Father. John also was sent from the Father. We come from God. We are even born of him. But as we’ve seen, Jesus came from the Father as a human.
Conclusion
Trinitarians, Arians, JWs, modalists, anyone who believes these passages are proof that Jesus came down from heaven “before his birth to incarnate into flesh” all have horribly mistaken views of these passages and are missing the rather obvious, and the spiritual. Looking at this as a literal “coming down from heaven, floating into the womb of Mary and being formed into human flesh” is missing the fact that the ascension of Jesus was, as a man, and spiritual. It was at his being born again experience. This shouldn’t be so surprising for us to understand. We are also meant to be born again and have the same Spirit in us. This shouldn’t confuse us as much as it has historically. The facts are in front of us if we have eyes to see it. I truly believe that so many people don’t have a concept of the Spirit coming to them, that they can’t understand a spiritual ascension. If you have read this very long post, I leave you with this. Read 2 Corinthians chapter 12 in full and think about how it applies to this topic very carefully. “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell….”