The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief
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We will, in this chapter, see how the early Christians called Jesus “God.” Each passage has been attacked in almost every imaginable way; thus, we will have to explain why we believe these passages proclaim the deity of Christ, and why others should accept this truth.
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It seems an appropriate time to settle one of the most important issues regarding the Trinity and the text of Scripture. If all Christians would simply understand the following statement, their task of explaining and defending the Trinity would be much easier.
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Difference in function does not indicate inferiority of nature. Not exactly an earth-shattering concept? It isn’t, but the vast majority of material produced by those who oppose the deity of Christ ignores this basic truth.
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What do I mean? It’s really quite simple. Let’s take a common argument against the deity of Christ: “The Father is the Creator of all things. He creates through Jesus Christ. Therefore, Jesus Christ is not fully God.” Or here’s another argument against the deity of the Spirit: “The Spirit is sent to testify of Jesus Christ and convict the world of sin. Since the Spirit is sent by the Father, the Spirit cannot truly be God.” Both arguments share the same error: they ignore the above cited truth, difference in function does not indicate inferiority of nature. That is, just because the Father, ...more
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Think of it this way: in eternity past[2] the Father, Son, and Spirit voluntarily and freely chose the roles they would take in bringing about the redemption of God’s people. This is wh...
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The large portion of arguments against the deity of Christ and the Trinity make one major unspoken (and false) assumption: that for either the Son or the Spirit to be truly and fully God, they have to do the exact same things as the Father in the exact same way.
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The truth of the matter is, however, that just because the Son takes a different role in the eternal covenant of Redemption, it does not follow that He is inferior in nature to the Father or the Spirit.
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Therefore, we can easily understand that the Father was, during the entire time of the Incarnation, positionally greater than the Son, who voluntarily subjected himself to the Father, taking a subordinate position, doing the Father’s will, all to fulfill the eternal covenant of redemption.
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Paul’s conception of the one God, whom alone he worships, includes, in other words, a recognition that within the unity of His being, there exists such a distinction of Persons as is given us in the “one God, the Father” and the “one Lord, Jesus Christ.”[47]
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He found subtle ways of teaching this truth as well. One method that John presented, that the other Gospel writers did not use, is found in Jesus’ use of the phrase I am.
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Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58).
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In each of these verses a particular Greek phrase appears: ἐγὼ εἰμί (ego eimi). The New American Standard Bible renders this Greek phrase as “I am He.”
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The fact that the word “He” is italicized is very important, for this means the word itself is not found in the Greek[1] and is being supplied by the translators in an effort to smooth out an awkward English phrase.
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The use of ani hu by Isaiah is a euphemism for the very name of God himself. Some see a connection between ani hu and Yahweh as both referring to being.[12] That it carried great weight with the Jews is seen in 8:59 and their reaction to the Lord’s usage of the phrase.
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It is not hard to understand why there have been many who have not wished to make the connection that John makes between Jesus and Yahweh.
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One cannot make this identification outside of a Trinitarian understanding of the Gospel itself, as one can certainly not identify Jesus as the Father in John’s Gospel. If Jesus is identified as ego eimi in the sense of the Old Testament ani hu, then one is left with two persons sharing the one nature that is God, and this, when it encounters John’s discussion of the Holy Spirit, becomes the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity![17]
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it might be pointed out that he did just that in John 12:39–41 by quoting from Isaiah’s temple vision of Yahweh in Isaiah 6 and then concluding by saying, “These things Isaiah said because he saw His glory and he spoke about Him.” The only “Him” in the context is Jesus; hence, for John, Isaiah, when he saw Yahweh on His throne, was in reality seeing the Lord Jesus. John 1:18 says as much as well.[18]
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The Greek for “was” is quite different from the Greek for “am.” It is as if our Lord said, “Before Abraham was born, I have an existence individual and eternal.”[22]
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The Lord Christ is angry below the surface and says: “Do you want to know who I am? I am God, and that in the fullest sense. Do as you please. If you do not believe that I am He, then you are nothing, and you must die in your sin.” No prophet, apostle, or evangelist may proclaim and say: “Believe in God, and also believe that I am God; otherwise you are damned.[23]
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if Jesus is described as the Creator, another truth is therefore established. He who creates cannot himself be created. Hence, the eternality of Christ is directly related to His being the Maker of all things.
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of this movement, yet, in some senses, we are still threatened by it. Gnosticism was a religious movement that prompted many of the early literary efforts of the early church. Many of the leaders of the church in the second and third centuries wrote blistering denunciations of Gnosticism.
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Two main ideas will help us to get a handle on Gnostic belief. First, the very term “gnosticism” comes from the Greek term gnosis,[2] meaning “knowledge.” Devotees of Gnostic thinking believed that salvation was primarily a matter of obtaining certain knowledge (normally available only through their particular group, often disseminated by secret rituals). This knowledge, in turn, allowed a person to “escape” from the corruption of the world and their physical bodies. Second, Gnostic belief was marked by dualism. Dualism is the idea that what is material (matter, flesh, the world) is inherently ...more
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Salvation was found through “escaping” the body, for it was believed that man is basically a good spirit trapped inside an evil body.
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The acceptance of dualism led to two extremes of behavior. Some became ascetics, depriving the body through fasts and monastic living, often demanding that followers abstain from sexual conduct, even to the point of forbidding marriage.
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On the other extreme, you had the hedonists who reasoned that since the goal of salvation was to be rid of your physical body, and since your spirit really wasn’t impacted by what your body did, why not just have fun, eat, drink, and be merry? These folks would engage in extremes of immorality, figuring that what the physical body did was irrelevant to the pure, immortal “soul.”
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Docetism. The Docetics were individuals who denied that Jesus had a real physical body. They were called Docetics because the Greek term dokein[4] means “to seem.”
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1. Those who deny the deity of Christ will insist that the term indicates origination, creation—a beginning in time.
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2. Those who believe this refers to some kind of relationship between the Father and the Son that indicates an inferiority on the Son’s part.
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That firstborn came to be a title that referred to a position rather than a mere notion of being the first one born is seen in numerous passages in the Old Testament. For example, in Exodus 4:22 God says that Israel is “My son, My firstborn.”
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Obviously Israel was not the first nation God “created,” but is instead the nation He has chosen to have a special relationship with Him.
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He says, “For I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn.” Such language speaks of Israel’s relationship to God and Ephraim’s special status in God’s sight.
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Psalm 89:27: “I also shall make him My firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.”
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Again, the emphasis is plainly upon the relationship between God and David, not David’s “creation.”
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When we come to the New Testament,[8] we find that the emphasis is placed not on the idea of birth but instead upon the first part of the word—protos, the “first.” The word stresses superiority and priority rather than origin or birth.
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“Here the idea of preeminence is obvious, as all of God’s angels are instructed to worship Him, a privilege rightly reserved only for God (Luke 4:8). The term “prototokos” is used here as a title, and no idea of birth or origin is seen.
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The Greek word implied two things, priority to all creation and sovereignty over all creation.
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Since our Lord existed before all created things, He must be uncreated. Since He is uncreated, He is eternal. Since He is eternal, He is God. Since He is God, He cannot be one of the emanations from deity of which the Gnostic speaks. . . . In the second meaning we see that He is the natural ruler, the acknowledged head of God’s household. . . . He is Lord of creation.[10]
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He discusses both the aspects of priority to all creation as well as sovereignty over all creation. This understanding of the term is echoed by many other scholarly sources.
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So what can we conclude? Most importantly, we see that it is simply impossible to assume that the term “firstborn” means “first created.”
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“Image of the invisible God” is not a phrase to be used of a creature.
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And when we read the phrase “firstborn of all creation,” we should hear the emphasis upon all creation.
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He who had eternally been served by cherubim and seraphim now takes on the form of a slave so as to serve others!
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We have enough of the puzzle now to go back and ask the most basic question: is this passage identifying Jesus Christ as God or not?
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In light of this, look again at Paul’s example from the Lord Jesus. He tells us to “have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” So here we have the ultimate example of humility. But which of the two understandings of the passage give us true humility? Let’s look at each and find out. The first viewpoint says that the Lord Jesus was not equal with the Father and did not attempt to become so. Yet, is this an example of humility?
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Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW,
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Such a statement flows from a misunderstanding of the Trinity and the simple fact that normally Paul speaks of the Father simply as “God,” and the Son simply as “Lord.”
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Both are titles of deity, and since we are not in any way trying to confuse the Father and the Son, we can fully understand Paul’s language.
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In context, this passage is specifically about Yahweh, the God of Israel (see Isaiah 45:21).
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Yet Paul quotes from this passage and says that it is to Jesus that every knee shall bow (when in Isaiah it is to Yahweh), to the glory of God the Father!
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How can Paul say this? Does he believe in more than one God? Certainly not! But he realizes that both the Father and the Son are worthy of the name Yahweh! To bow the k...
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