Alfred Smith’s Reviews > The Nicene Creed: An Introduction > Status Update

Likeness is, as it were, hierarchical: the lower can be like the higher, but the higher is not like the lower—just as your image in a mirror is your likeness, but you are not its likeness. It resembles you, but you don’t resemble it.

"As one medieval church council put it (Lateran IV, in 1215): in every likeness to God there is a greater unlikeness."
"Thomas Aquinas helps explain this by pointing out that any likeness to God is asymmetrical. Creatures can be like God, as Genesis 1:26 says, but the reverse is not true: God is not like anything in creation. "

Therefore nothing mediates between God and the creation except the one who is both Creator and creature, the man Jesus, who is the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5). As God incarnate, he is not a third kind of being but rather a both/and—both Creator and creature—for he is both God and man in one person

The Nicene teaching is that the Son has the same essence as the Father, in the sense that everything essentially divine is the same in God the Son as in God the Father: the Son has the same eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience as God the Father, and he is to be honored with the same worship.

So “Jesus is Lord” means that Jesus is the LORD. The sacred Name of the God of Israel rightly belongs to him. That is the heart of Christian faith and is therefore the heart of the Creed.

My next creedal devotional :-)