From Focus on the Kingdom Newsletter Vol. 23 No. 1 / October 2020
God Knows Who He Is
When you introduce yourself you regularly say, “My name is…” Everyone knows that “my” here refers to one single person. Or you say “I am…” Not the slightest confusion is imaginable. But when it comes to the Bible, sacred Scripture, and who God is, all has become mired in frightful confusion and chaos! According to your Trinitarian friends (Dr. James White in his The Forgotten Trinity is typical), you are required to think of God and define Him as “One WHAT and three WHO’s.” Yes, you heard that right! The one God, says Dr. James White, is “One WHAT and three WHO’s.” White then says we must never muddle up the Who’s and the What (see p. 27 of The Forgotten Trinity).
I invite you to think about that with care and attention. I invite you to think of the matter of defining the true GOD as an issue of supreme importance. Who is the God of the Bible? Who is the sole Creator of the vast, marvelous creation and universe? Is He really a “WHAT”? If you supply another pronoun for WHAT, it would be “IT”! An “it” is a thing and not a person. So please reflect on this astonishing situation. You may attend a church whose umbrella, non-negotiable faith statement, is that God exists as three Persons and is also a single WHAT, an “essence.”
Now you probably don’t get too many sermons on this, but you should take full responsibility for what you and your Church affirms, i.e. that GOD is one WHAT in three WHO’s — that is “one Essence and three Persons.” That is the official doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus did not believe in such a God, but churches do! Jesus recited and confirmed the Shema (Mk 12:28), the unitary monotheistic creed of Israel. Are you willing to follow Jesus on the definition of the true God? You should want to sound like Jesus!
If you are reading Scripture to your children, they might very reasonably say that the GOD you are reading about in the Bible definitely does not sound like three of anything! The common sense and simplicity of children, in this case, are a great blessing! The one lesson we all need to know about and be warned about is found not only constantly in the teaching of Jesus, but repeated by two Apostles, Paul and John.
In 1 Timothy 6:3, nearing the end of his Apostolic career, Paul issued a marvelously impressive warning! He wrote that “If anyone comes to you and does not bring the health-giving, sound words of the teaching of Jesus,” beware! You are being scammed! False teaching is a dangerous poison to be rejected and avoided at all costs, because “in order to be saved, you must have a love of the truth.” Paul made that point exactly in 2 Thessalonians 2:10. Look it up in various translations. Paul was talking here about the spirit and teaching of the Antichrist. He was sounding the alarm! To avoid being fatally deceived, he cautioned his people to develop a passion for truth “in order to be saved.” Nothing could be more pressingly important for us all than this.
Paul said that people are on the way to ruin, because of a failure to love and embrace the Truth. Here are Paul’ words about the extreme danger of not embracing the truth, and above all the truth about defining God and the Messiah correctly:
2 Thessalonians 2:10 “And with every deceit of wrongdoing among those whose fate is destruction; because they were quite without that love of the true faith by which they might have salvation” (BBE).
“God will enable him [the Antichrist] to deceive, in all kinds of wicked ways, those who are headed for destruction, because they would not receive the love of the truth that could have saved them” (CJB).
“And with every unrighteous deception among those who are perishing. They perish because they did not accept the love of the truth in order to be saved” (CSB).
“And in all deceit of unrighteousness to them that perish, because they have not received the love of the truth that they might be saved” (DBY).
You see then that one thing you must never, ever neglect is the “Love of the Truth.”
Both Paul in 1 Timothy 6:3 and John in 2 John 7-9 insist on this dramatically serious warning:
2 John 1:9 “Everyone who goes ahead and does not remain true to what the Messiah has taught does not have God. Those who remain true to his teaching have both the Father and the Son” (CJB).
“Anyone who does not remain in Christ's teaching but goes beyond it, does not have God. The one who remains in that teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son” (CSB).
So the ultimate question for us all is this: What did Jesus teach about who GOD is? What indeed did Jesus teach on all the basic Christian issues? Did Jesus ever say that he, Jesus, was God? Let us go for our answer to the obvious passage. Let us consult Jesus in Mark 12:29: Jesus is found here in conversation with, in this case, a friendly Jew, who wanted to check Jesus out on the most important and primary question of all questions, the identity and definition of the One God. This conversation happened at the end of the ministry of Jesus, in the same week as Jesus died, on the Friday. The account goes like this: One of the scribes hearing Jesus dialoguing, disputing, and seeing that Jesus had answered them beautifully, he asked Jesus, “What is the most important of all the commandments?”
Here is Jesus’ answer: “The most important is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Person [one Lord]. And you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this: You are to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. And the scribe said to him, ‘Well said, teacher! You speak the truth when you say that He is one Person, and there is no one else beside Him. And to love Him with all our heart, and all our understanding, and all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves is greater than all burned offerings and sacrifices’” (Mark 12:28-33).
It is a universally accepted historical fact that the Jewish people were unitary monotheists, meaning that they believed with a passion and were willing to die for the truth that God is one divine Person. Ask any informed Jewish person and he will confirm this. The fact is established beyond any dispute:
“There is in the OT no indication of interior distinctions in the Godhead. It is an anachronism to find either the doctrine of Incarnation or that of the Trinity in its pages. But the God of the OT is emphatically a self-communicating God, as opposed to a metaphysical abstraction, or a solitary, remote Deity.”[1]
“It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine, formed no part of the original message. St. Paul did not know it, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed.”[2]
“Now the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that in Christ the place of a human personality is replaced by the Divine Personality of God the Son, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Christ possesses a complete human nature without a human personality. Uncreated and eternal Divine Personality replaces a created human personality in Him. The Incarnation, if it is a reality, if it really means the Word-made-flesh, cannot mean anything else. The Eternal Word of God has joined to Himself a human body and a human soul, and is henceforth both God and man.”[3]
The church fathers “landed themselves into a dilemma so soon as they sought to prove…[a] clear-cut Biblical doctrine concerning the agreement of the dogma of the divinity [Deity] of the Father and of the Son with monotheism. For, according to the New Testament witnesses, in the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, relative to the monotheism of the Old Testament and Judaism, there had been no element of change whatsoever. Mark 12:29 recorded the confirmation by Jesus himself, without any reservation, of the supreme monotheistic confession of faith of Israelite religion in its complete form…The means by which [the church fathers] sought to demonstrate…the agreement of their dogma of two divine persons with monotheism, remained seriously uncertain and contradictory.”[4]
“What is most embarrassing for the Church is the difficulty of proving any of these statements of dogma from the New Testament documents. You simply cannot find the doctrine of the Trinity set out anywhere in the Bible. St. Paul has the highest view of Jesus’ role and person, but nowhere does he call him God. Nor does Jesus himself anywhere explicitly claim to be the Second Person of the Trinity, wholly equal to his heavenly Father. As a pious Jew, he would have been shocked and offended by such an idea.”[5]
“Early Christianity consciously adopts from Judaism (Deut. 6:4) the monotheistic formula ‘God is one.’…According to Mark 12:29, 32, Jesus explicitly approves the Jewish monotheistic formula.”[6]
“Room for the Master of Nazareth within the structure of Jewish thought is only possible on the condition of a clear distinction between the Christ of the Christian dogma and Jesus the Jew…The Christian perception of Jesus in terms of the Holy Trinity to them [Jews] rests upon a tragic misunderstanding…The essence of Judaism is the doctrine of the absolute and unmodified unity of God. Prof. Moore’s masterly definition of the Jewish conception of that unity can hardly be surpassed. He calls it, ‘the numerically exclusive and uncompromisingly personal monotheism.’ With it, Judaism stands and falls. Indeed, the absolute unity of the God of Israel together with the Torah, i.e., the revelation of this one and only God, form the heart and essence of Judaism. The rest of Jewish thought and practice is of secondary importance when compared with these two fundamental truths…This most vital tenet, as conceived by orthodox and liberal Judaism alike, stands thus in direct opposition to the Trinitarian doctrine of the Christian Church.”[7]
Dr. Hodgson lecturing on the Trinity at Oxford: “Christianity, as I said last week, began as a trinitarian religion with a unitarian theology. It arose within Judaism, and the monotheism of Judaism was then, as it is still, unitarian…Could the monotheism be revised so as to include the new revelation without ceasing to be monotheistic?...I shall now try to show that the upshot of this development was a revision both of the theological idea of monotheism [the unitarian Jewish idea, as he just said, held by Jesus] and of the philosophical idea of unity.”[8]
So then Jesus was revised! Jesus was censored. Many churches give you a revised version of Jesus!
Please sound like Jesus, and define God as Jesus defined God — one Divine Person, not three!
[1] Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 6, p. 254-255.
[2] Matthews, God in Christian Thought and Experience, p. 180.
[3] Leslie Simmonds, What Think Ye of Christ? 1938, p. 45.
[4] Dr. Martin Werner, Formation of Christian Dogma, 1957, p. 241.
[5] Tom Harpur, For Christ’s Sake, 1986, p. 11.
[6] Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 1, p. 399.
[7] Jakob Jocz, The Jewish People and Jesus Christ, 1979, p. 262-265.
[8] Leonard Hodgson, D.D, Regius Prof of Divinity, Christian Faith and Practice, 1950, p. 72.
To sign up for the "Focus on the Kingdom" newsletter visit their website here https://focusonthekingdom.org/
God Knows Who He Is
When you introduce yourself you regularly say, “My name is…” Everyone knows that “my” here refers to one single person. Or you say “I am…” Not the slightest confusion is imaginable. But when it comes to the Bible, sacred Scripture, and who God is, all has become mired in frightful confusion and chaos! According to your Trinitarian friends (Dr. James White in his The Forgotten Trinity is typical), you are required to think of God and define Him as “One WHAT and three WHO’s.” Yes, you heard that right! The one God, says Dr. James White, is “One WHAT and three WHO’s.” White then says we must never muddle up the Who’s and the What (see p. 27 of The Forgotten Trinity).
I invite you to think about that with care and attention. I invite you to think of the matter of defining the true GOD as an issue of supreme importance. Who is the God of the Bible? Who is the sole Creator of the vast, marvelous creation and universe? Is He really a “WHAT”? If you supply another pronoun for WHAT, it would be “IT”! An “it” is a thing and not a person. So please reflect on this astonishing situation. You may attend a church whose umbrella, non-negotiable faith statement, is that God exists as three Persons and is also a single WHAT, an “essence.”
Now you probably don’t get too many sermons on this, but you should take full responsibility for what you and your Church affirms, i.e. that GOD is one WHAT in three WHO’s — that is “one Essence and three Persons.” That is the official doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus did not believe in such a God, but churches do! Jesus recited and confirmed the Shema (Mk 12:28), the unitary monotheistic creed of Israel. Are you willing to follow Jesus on the definition of the true God? You should want to sound like Jesus!
If you are reading Scripture to your children, they might very reasonably say that the GOD you are reading about in the Bible definitely does not sound like three of anything! The common sense and simplicity of children, in this case, are a great blessing! The one lesson we all need to know about and be warned about is found not only constantly in the teaching of Jesus, but repeated by two Apostles, Paul and John.
In 1 Timothy 6:3, nearing the end of his Apostolic career, Paul issued a marvelously impressive warning! He wrote that “If anyone comes to you and does not bring the health-giving, sound words of the teaching of Jesus,” beware! You are being scammed! False teaching is a dangerous poison to be rejected and avoided at all costs, because “in order to be saved, you must have a love of the truth.” Paul made that point exactly in 2 Thessalonians 2:10. Look it up in various translations. Paul was talking here about the spirit and teaching of the Antichrist. He was sounding the alarm! To avoid being fatally deceived, he cautioned his people to develop a passion for truth “in order to be saved.” Nothing could be more pressingly important for us all than this.
Paul said that people are on the way to ruin, because of a failure to love and embrace the Truth. Here are Paul’ words about the extreme danger of not embracing the truth, and above all the truth about defining God and the Messiah correctly:
2 Thessalonians 2:10 “And with every deceit of wrongdoing among those whose fate is destruction; because they were quite without that love of the true faith by which they might have salvation” (BBE).
“God will enable him [the Antichrist] to deceive, in all kinds of wicked ways, those who are headed for destruction, because they would not receive the love of the truth that could have saved them” (CJB).
“And with every unrighteous deception among those who are perishing. They perish because they did not accept the love of the truth in order to be saved” (CSB).
“And in all deceit of unrighteousness to them that perish, because they have not received the love of the truth that they might be saved” (DBY).
You see then that one thing you must never, ever neglect is the “Love of the Truth.”
Both Paul in 1 Timothy 6:3 and John in 2 John 7-9 insist on this dramatically serious warning:
2 John 1:9 “Everyone who goes ahead and does not remain true to what the Messiah has taught does not have God. Those who remain true to his teaching have both the Father and the Son” (CJB).
“Anyone who does not remain in Christ's teaching but goes beyond it, does not have God. The one who remains in that teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son” (CSB).
So the ultimate question for us all is this: What did Jesus teach about who GOD is? What indeed did Jesus teach on all the basic Christian issues? Did Jesus ever say that he, Jesus, was God? Let us go for our answer to the obvious passage. Let us consult Jesus in Mark 12:29: Jesus is found here in conversation with, in this case, a friendly Jew, who wanted to check Jesus out on the most important and primary question of all questions, the identity and definition of the One God. This conversation happened at the end of the ministry of Jesus, in the same week as Jesus died, on the Friday. The account goes like this: One of the scribes hearing Jesus dialoguing, disputing, and seeing that Jesus had answered them beautifully, he asked Jesus, “What is the most important of all the commandments?”
Here is Jesus’ answer: “The most important is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Person [one Lord]. And you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this: You are to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. And the scribe said to him, ‘Well said, teacher! You speak the truth when you say that He is one Person, and there is no one else beside Him. And to love Him with all our heart, and all our understanding, and all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves is greater than all burned offerings and sacrifices’” (Mark 12:28-33).
It is a universally accepted historical fact that the Jewish people were unitary monotheists, meaning that they believed with a passion and were willing to die for the truth that God is one divine Person. Ask any informed Jewish person and he will confirm this. The fact is established beyond any dispute:
“There is in the OT no indication of interior distinctions in the Godhead. It is an anachronism to find either the doctrine of Incarnation or that of the Trinity in its pages. But the God of the OT is emphatically a self-communicating God, as opposed to a metaphysical abstraction, or a solitary, remote Deity.”[1]
“It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine, formed no part of the original message. St. Paul did not know it, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed.”[2]
“Now the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that in Christ the place of a human personality is replaced by the Divine Personality of God the Son, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Christ possesses a complete human nature without a human personality. Uncreated and eternal Divine Personality replaces a created human personality in Him. The Incarnation, if it is a reality, if it really means the Word-made-flesh, cannot mean anything else. The Eternal Word of God has joined to Himself a human body and a human soul, and is henceforth both God and man.”[3]
The church fathers “landed themselves into a dilemma so soon as they sought to prove…[a] clear-cut Biblical doctrine concerning the agreement of the dogma of the divinity [Deity] of the Father and of the Son with monotheism. For, according to the New Testament witnesses, in the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, relative to the monotheism of the Old Testament and Judaism, there had been no element of change whatsoever. Mark 12:29 recorded the confirmation by Jesus himself, without any reservation, of the supreme monotheistic confession of faith of Israelite religion in its complete form…The means by which [the church fathers] sought to demonstrate…the agreement of their dogma of two divine persons with monotheism, remained seriously uncertain and contradictory.”[4]
“What is most embarrassing for the Church is the difficulty of proving any of these statements of dogma from the New Testament documents. You simply cannot find the doctrine of the Trinity set out anywhere in the Bible. St. Paul has the highest view of Jesus’ role and person, but nowhere does he call him God. Nor does Jesus himself anywhere explicitly claim to be the Second Person of the Trinity, wholly equal to his heavenly Father. As a pious Jew, he would have been shocked and offended by such an idea.”[5]
“Early Christianity consciously adopts from Judaism (Deut. 6:4) the monotheistic formula ‘God is one.’…According to Mark 12:29, 32, Jesus explicitly approves the Jewish monotheistic formula.”[6]
“Room for the Master of Nazareth within the structure of Jewish thought is only possible on the condition of a clear distinction between the Christ of the Christian dogma and Jesus the Jew…The Christian perception of Jesus in terms of the Holy Trinity to them [Jews] rests upon a tragic misunderstanding…The essence of Judaism is the doctrine of the absolute and unmodified unity of God. Prof. Moore’s masterly definition of the Jewish conception of that unity can hardly be surpassed. He calls it, ‘the numerically exclusive and uncompromisingly personal monotheism.’ With it, Judaism stands and falls. Indeed, the absolute unity of the God of Israel together with the Torah, i.e., the revelation of this one and only God, form the heart and essence of Judaism. The rest of Jewish thought and practice is of secondary importance when compared with these two fundamental truths…This most vital tenet, as conceived by orthodox and liberal Judaism alike, stands thus in direct opposition to the Trinitarian doctrine of the Christian Church.”[7]
Dr. Hodgson lecturing on the Trinity at Oxford: “Christianity, as I said last week, began as a trinitarian religion with a unitarian theology. It arose within Judaism, and the monotheism of Judaism was then, as it is still, unitarian…Could the monotheism be revised so as to include the new revelation without ceasing to be monotheistic?...I shall now try to show that the upshot of this development was a revision both of the theological idea of monotheism [the unitarian Jewish idea, as he just said, held by Jesus] and of the philosophical idea of unity.”[8]
So then Jesus was revised! Jesus was censored. Many churches give you a revised version of Jesus!
Please sound like Jesus, and define God as Jesus defined God — one Divine Person, not three!
[1] Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 6, p. 254-255.
[2] Matthews, God in Christian Thought and Experience, p. 180.
[3] Leslie Simmonds, What Think Ye of Christ? 1938, p. 45.
[4] Dr. Martin Werner, Formation of Christian Dogma, 1957, p. 241.
[5] Tom Harpur, For Christ’s Sake, 1986, p. 11.
[6] Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 1, p. 399.
[7] Jakob Jocz, The Jewish People and Jesus Christ, 1979, p. 262-265.
[8] Leonard Hodgson, D.D, Regius Prof of Divinity, Christian Faith and Practice, 1950, p. 72.
To sign up for the "Focus on the Kingdom" newsletter visit their website here https://focusonthekingdom.org/