Our Triune God
When we think of the Trinity, two points clearly come to mind: the Three (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and the One. In this post, as the title would clearly indicate, we are looking at the One. When we speak of God in general, we are referring to the One or what is called by theologians, the Godhead or Divine-being (Acts 17:29). The term Trinity is a reference not only to the doctrine of the Three in One but also a reference to the One True God. The One is foundational to understanding God and the doctrine of the Trinity. If we lose site of the One, we can easily end up with not three members of the Trinity but a tritheism: three gods. Therefore, before moving on to looking at this one God existing as three persons, we will spend the next two posts nailing down the truth that God is One.
After having spent over 400 years in a pagan, polytheistic culture in Egypt—as well as the ancient world at large having a polytheistic bent—the Jewish people needed a refresher course about the monotheist God of their fathers. This seems especially true for Moses. According to the online encyclopedia Britannica, “Egypt had one of the largest and most complex pantheons of gods of any civilization in the ancient world. Over the course of Egyptian history, hundreds of gods and goddesses were worshipped.” Osiris was the god of the underworld. He symbolized the cycle of floods of the Nile which was vital to the agricultural life of Egypt. Isis, the most important goddess in the pantheon, was responsible for the resurrection of Osiris after his murder and rearing their son, Horus. Horus was a sky god represented as a falcon or a man with a falcon’s head. He was connected to hunting and war. Several gods were associated with the sun; one of the most significant was Re. Re was usually depicted as a man with the head of a hawk. This is just a sample of the many gods of Egypt.
This is the world which God was delivering His people from. In the account of the burning bush (Ex 3:1-4:17), God gives Moses a crash course in monotheism. He reveals His name as Yahweh, which is derived from a Hebrew word indicating being, existence, and eternality (see our post Yahweh: The Name to learn more about this name). He also indicates His oneness by stating twice He is “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex 3:15, 16). He is the one and only God of the patriarchs of Israel.
In the first commandment, He also makes the point that He is the only God. “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.’“(Ex 20:1–3). Then, in Deut 6:4-5, God gives an even more explicit statement of His monotheistic nature which is foundational to the Jewish faith and understanding God. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. The passage is known as the Shema (comes from the first word in the passage in Hebrew: hear). The Jewish people would recite this prayer each morning and evening. It served as both a pledge of loyalty to the Lord and a praise for Him.
Before the Children of God were to learn anything else or move on to the Promised Land, they had to get this fundamental truth down: “The LORD is one!” This was the purpose of the ten plagues of the Exodus. Each plague was a defeat for one of the many gods of Egypt proving only Yahweh was God. There should be no place for other gods in the Israelites’ hearts; a truth they spent their whole history trying to learn. The Jewish faith is to be a monotheistic faith, a one God faith!
This lesson would be taught to them throughout their history from the Exodus and the wilderness wonderings (Deut 4:35; 32:39), to the time of the Kings and to the return from exile (1 Kings 8:60; 2 Kings 19:15; 1 Chron 17:20; Neh 9:6; Ps 86:10). Isaiah exemplifies the call of the prophets in proclaiming the oneness of God (Is 43:11; 44:6; 46:9; Hosea 13:4; Joel 2:27).
There are three aspects to oneness of God. First, He is the only God as we have covered above. Second, He is simple (an ironically somewhat difficult concept to understand; we will cover it in the next post in this series). Third, He is unique from all other gods. The third aspect of His uniqueness is also covered in many of the verses we pointed to above. It is clearly stated in Exodus 8:10 “Be it as you say, so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God” (emphasis added).
One unique God! Paul makes it clear that the other entities which were claimed to be gods and were being worshiped as gods—even scarified to—were no gods at all but demons. “No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” (1 Cor 10:20–21). There is only one true God; all others are fake, false, counterfeit, and demonic. God is also other, different, unique, and transcendent from all (for more on the transcendence of God, look back at our last post in this series, The No ).
The Jews’ continual problem of idolatry—of following after the false gods—is the reason the triune nature of God was not explicitly revealed to the ancient Israelites. If told of the three persons of the Godhead, they would have immediately instituted the worship of three gods. They would have felt even more justified in adding the false gods of the nations around them to their worship creating their own Israelite pantheon. As it were, their history is full of their failure to hold to only the One True God.
To be fair, there was a seismic change after the Jews return from exile in the 5th century BC. In the period between the OT and the NT, they learned their lesson. They were never to worship idols or false gods again. Truly they learned there was only the One True God. This is what we see in the Jewish people in the NT. While they lost their way in understanding their God and His expectations for His people, they did not go to false gods again.
Therefore, just like these later children of God, we must hold fast to the truth of monotheism. On the surface this may not seem to be an issue, but there have been times in the history of the Church when heresies have risen seeking to divide the Godhead into separate gods. In the 6th century, a false doctrine was promoted which taught that the members of the Trinity consisted of independent natures; as a result, the members of the Trinity were seen as three separate gods. This teaching was condemned as tritheism (worship of three gods) at a synod in Alexandrea in 616 and again at the third council of Constantinople in 680-81. Other groups arose who were equally condemned, such as the Anomoeans and Nestorians. Even today groups such as the Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists have a tritheistic or polytheistic nature to their teachings.
Like the Children of God in Egypt, we live in a culture which validates all beliefs, all religions, and “spiritual” views. From atheism to polytheism, all views today are credited as being of equal validity and worthiness of our respect. Within the Church is the heresy of the progressive movement which teaches a different God than the God of the Bible. We must dare to be “intolerant” by the world’s standards. We stand for the One True God, or we fall with the lie. Even in the Church, we must always be watchful for this error!
Take some time to think about God being one. We tend to think more often about the individual members of the Trinity. We think about the Father and we spend a great deal of time on the Son (which is not bad in and of itself), then even less time on the Holy Spirt. But we rarely think about the Godhead. What does the oneness of God add to your understanding of Him? What would be different if we had three gods instead of one unified God? He is a Big God, so don’t be afraid of doing some Big Thinking.
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg