01 – The Heart of It All: The Trinity (part 1)
The Heart of It All
Peter Amsterdam
2011-05-17
(For an introduction and explanation regarding this series overall, please see The Heart of It All: Introduction.)
In the first two articles of The Heart of It All series we saw that the New Testament reveals the deity of Jesus, that Jesus is God.
In reading the verses quoted in those sections, it’s clear that besides Jesus—God the Son—there is also the Father who is God, as Jesus prays to the Father, does the Father’s will, etc. The Bible also speaks of the Holy Spirit, who is God as well.
One God, three Persons
For the uninitiated, the impression could be that Christianity believes in three Gods—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But that’s not the case. Christians believe that there is only one God. The doctrine that explains the concept of how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God is called the doctrine of the Trinity.
This doctrine explains that God has always existed as three persons in one being. This is very different from humans, as we exist as one person in one being—we are uni-personal. God exists as a tri-personal being—three persons, each distinct from the other, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and yet is one being. While God is tri-personal, each of the persons is fully God, having all of the attributes and the complete essence of God. (For more on the attributes of God, see The Heart of It All series “The Nature and Character of God.”)
Theologian Louis Berkhof wrote that the word “person” is an imperfect expression of the idea, because today it denotes a separate rational and moral individual. Christian philosopher Kenneth Samples concurs. “The three persons of the Trinity should not be understood as three ‘parts’ or ‘fractions’ of God. Each person is fully divine and equally possesses all of God’s being … the term ‘person’ in reference to the Trinity is used in a unique sense and should not be understood to refer to a separate entity or being, for this would divide the divine essence.”[1]
Our experience as human beings is that where you have a person, you also have a distinct individual essence. Every person we know is a distinct and separate entity, in whom human nature is individualized. But in God there aren’t three individuals alongside of, and separate from, one another. Rather, there is one divine being, one essence, with three personal self-distinctions.
Another way to put it is that in the being of God, the three distinct Persons have an interpersonal relationship. They communicate and have interaction with one another. In Scripture you have the Father addressing the Son as You:
You are My beloved Son; with You I am well pleased.[2]
You also have the Son referring to the Father as He, and showing communication between them:
For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all that He Himself is doing.[3]
You have an example of the Son calling Himself I, and differentiating Himself from both the Father and the Holy Spirit:
But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me.[4]
Thus God, who is tri-personal, has interaction and a personal relationship between the different Persons within the being of God.
I particularly like how Christian philosopher and author William Lane Craig describes the Trinity in one of his lectures:
Just like I, as a being, support one center of self-consciousness, which I call I or me, God is a being that supports three centers of self-consciousness. God is a being with three centers of self-consciousness, three I’s or selves. Thus God’s being supports three persons.[5]
The concept of three persons in one God was not something that was explicitly expressed in the Old Testament, though there are Old Testament verses which infer that there is more than one person in God. The understanding of the three persons in one God became clearer in the New Testament because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the believers. The followers of Jesus came to understand that He was God, but was distinct from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit was also God, but was distinct from the Father and the Son. So it was in New Testament times that the truth of the Trinity unfolded and was revealed.
Developing and articulating the understanding of this doctrine was done progressively in early church history, and that will be more thoroughly explained in the next article on this topic. Although the word Trinity doesn’t appear within the biblical text, Scripture reveals the doctrine, and the word Trinity conveys the concept.
Concept of the Trinity in the Old Testament
While the Old Testament does not reveal that God is a triune being, some Old Testament passages do speak in a manner that suggests that God is more than one Person.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”[6]
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.”[7]
“Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”[8]
And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”[9]
In these next verses, also from the Old Testament, the speaker is either God the Father or God the Son, and they make reference to each other or to the Spirit, again inferring different persons in the Godhead.
Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in His fists? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and what is His Son’s name? Surely you know![10]
Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him![11]
“Draw near to Me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there.” And now the Lord God has sent Me, and His Spirit.[12]
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.[13]
One of the great scriptures from Torah—the five books of Moses, corresponding to the first five books of the Christian Old Testament—which is fundamental to Judaism is:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.[14]
Judaism is a monotheistic religion which believes there is only one God. This belief was by and large unique to Israel in the time of the Old Testament, as virtually all cultures in the region were polytheistic, including all of Israel’s neighbors throughout history until the time of Christ.
Christianity is monotheistic as well. Christians believe there is only one God, and affirm this same Bible verse, “the Lord our God is one Lord.” However, unlike Judaism, Christians believe in the tri-personal God, three persons in one Being. (To be continued)
01 – The Heart of It All: The God-Man (part 1)
The Heart of It All
Peter Amsterdam
2011-04-19
You’ll want to read “The Heart of It All: Introduction” before reading this article or the rest of this series.
The heart of our faith as Christians rests on the answer to one simple but extremely crucial question: Who is Jesus? In order to understand our faith, to understand the story of Jesus and what His life was about—His teachings, the reason for His coming—it’s necessary to understand who He is.
Jesus is God. He is the second person of the Trinity, which includes God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. (For more on the Trinity, see the Heart of It All series on the Trinity.)
The beauty of this truth is that His being God means that every person from every age who has invited Jesus into their life has received forgiveness for their sins as well as everlasting life. Because we as humans sin, and those sins are an offense against God, there is a need for us to be forgiven by God and reconciled to Him; and the only way for that to happen was for Jesus, who is God, to become human, to live a life without sin, to die for our sins, and to rise from the dead. And this is exactly what happened.
The whys and wherefores of how Jesus’ death brings God’s forgiveness will be the topic of a future article in this series. Suffice it to say for now that Scripture teaches that Christ’s death for the sins of the world is the basis and plan of salvation for humankind. Jesus fulfilled all the necessary requirements in order for humans to be forgiven for their sins by God.
The Logos
Jesus, being a member of the Trinity, along with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, is God the Son. As such, He has all the attributes of God. (For more on the attributes of God, see The Heart of It All series “The Nature and Character of God.”)
God is the creator of all things. God is eternal and existed before anything else was in existence. This being the case, for Jesus to be God, then He must be eternal and He must have also existed before anything else existed. He must have had a part in creating all that is created. According to Scripture, all of those things are true of Jesus.
The first three verses of the Gospel of John make the point well:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made.
When John was speaking of God the Son before He was born on earth, he referred to Him as the Word, not as Jesus. These verses show that the Word/Jesus had a hand in creation, as “all things were made by Him.” The word John used, translated into English as Word, was Logos in the original Greek. The term Logos was first used in the 6th century BC by a Greek philosopher named Heraclitus to designate the divine reason or plan which coordinates a changing universe. As such, to a Greek speaker at the time, Logos meant reason, so they would have understood the verses as “in the beginning was the reason or mind of God.” They would understand that before creation the Logos existed with God eternally. Therefore the Logos, the Word, God the Son, was in existence before any created thing—including time, space, or energy—existed.
As one of the early church fathers, Athanasius, wrote, “There was never a time when He (the Logos) was not.”[1] He is eternal. The Logos, God the Son, was with God the Father, and was God.
John 1:14 goes on to say:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John states clearly that the Logos, the Word, God the Son, became flesh and lived on earth. This means no less than that God the Son lived on earth for a time as a human being. It means that He, an eternal immaterial being, entered into His creation in time and space. This could only happen if God became incarnate, if He became man, which is exactly what happened when Jesus of Nazareth was born. He became the God-man, God in human flesh who dwelt amongst us.
Since this is fundamental to our Christian faith, I thought it good to review what Jesus said about Himself regarding being God.
Jesus’ Claims to Deity
It’s important to note that according to the Laws of Moses, anyone who claims to be God commits blasphemy, and the punishment for blasphemy is death. On more than one occasion the Jews took up stones to kill Jesus, and at His trial before the Jewish religious leaders, they condemned Him to death for His claims to be God. Clearly the Jews of His day understood He was making claims of deity.
One of His direct claims is recorded in John chapter 8, which says:
“Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing My day; he saw it and was glad.” “You are not yet fifty years old,” the Jews said to Him, “and You have seen Abraham!” “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone Him, but Jesus hid Himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.[2]
What Jesus said in this passage is significant in two ways. First, though He wasn’t even fifty years old, He was claiming that He was alive before Abraham—who had lived and died two thousand years earlier. Only God has eternal existence, which is what Jesus was claiming. Second, in saying “before Abraham was born, I am,” Jesus was assigning Himself the name of God.
In Exodus 3:14, God reveals to Moses that He is “I am who I am,” and then tells Moses to tell the people of Israel that I AM has sent me to you. God’s name, I AM, is the name YHWH, or Yahweh, from the Old Testament. It is so sacred that from before the time of Jesus until today, devout Jews have avoided saying it. (Since religious Jews don’t say the name YHWH, they instead use the word Adonai, which is translated as “Lord.”) But Jesus used this name of God in reference to Himself. The Jews He was speaking to clearly understood His claim and picked up stones to kill Him for it.
Another occasion on which the Jews understood Jesus to be claiming deity was described in John chapter 10:
At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around Him and said to Him, “How long will You keep us in suspense? If You are the Christ, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in My Father’s name bear witness about Me, but you do not believe because you are not part of My flock. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”
The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone Me?” The Jews answered Him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone You but for blasphemy, because You, being a man, make Yourself God.”
“If I am not doing the works of My Father, then do not believe Me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me and I am in the Father.” Again they sought to arrest Him, but He escaped from their hands.[3]
In these passages Jesus refers to the miracles He has performed, saying the Jews should believe the works He’s done because they show that “the Father is in Me, and I am in the Father.”
Jesus made a number of I am statements which are indirect claims to His deity. He performed miracles which substantiated the statements He made. For example, the day after feeding 5,000 people with fish and bread multiplied from two fish and five barley loaves, Jesus said:
“I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.”[4]
“I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”[5]
Therefore the Jews were grumbling about Him, because He said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, ‘I have come down out of heaven’?”[6]
In John chapter 9 Jesus makes another I am statement followed by a corresponding miracle. As Jesus was leaving the temple, He saw a man who had been blind from birth and said:
“While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.” When He had said this, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes, and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). So he went away and washed, and came back seeing.[7]
When the Pharisees interrogated this man and asked how he was healed from his blindness, he explained that Jesus had healed him. The man was then put out of the temple. The chapter continues with:
Jesus heard that they had put him out, and finding him, He said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?” Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you.” And he said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped Him.[8]
Another I am statement followed by an affirming miracle is related in John chapter 11, when Jesus’ friend Lazarus died. Four days later Jesus traveled to Bethany, where Lazarus was buried. His sister Martha said that if Jesus had been there, her brother wouldn’t have died.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to Him, “Yes, Lord; I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God, even He who comes into the world.”[9]
Jesus then raised Lazarus from the dead, which caused many to believe on Him. The response from the chief priests and the Pharisees was to convene a council, and “from that day on they planned together to kill Him.”[10]
Other I am statements made by Jesus include:
“I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”[11]
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.”[12]
Again the high priest asked Him, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further witnesses do we need? You have heard His blasphemy. What is your decision?” And they all condemned Him as deserving death.[13]
His use of both I am and Son of Man was understood by the Pharisees as Jesus claiming deity, and they deemed it blasphemy and said He deserved death as punishment. (To be continued)
Keep Praying for a Breakthrough
October 2, 2026
By Scott Hubbard
Once, long ago, you prayed for a loved one’s salvation earnestly and often. Now, you still pray sometimes, but you can barely bring yourself to hope for the answer.
Or maybe you once pleaded for grace against a stubborn character flaw or besetting sin. Now, you’ve succumbed to a sort of fatalism about yourself. Some things just don’t change.
Or perhaps you once sought God for a relational breakthrough. Now, though the sorrow stays deep, reconciliation seems all but impossible.
Most of us can think of some desire we once brought before God almost without ceasing. …
(Read or listen to the article here.)
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/keep-praying-for-a-breakthrough
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