The God of the Bible Is One Person

The God of the Bible Is One Person

Churchgoers who have grown up believing that the true God is three Persons will be surprised (and we hope enlightened) to find out that Scripture says that God is in fact ONE Person. 

Turn to Galatians 3:20. Paul wrote: “God is one.” This cardinal doctrine originates in the famous creed of Israel: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE LORD” (Deut. 6:4). This is the creed which Jesus taught and believed. He quoted it in Mark 12:29ff. Jesus agreed with his colleague Jew about this, the greatest of all the commandments. So Jesus, as Israel always had, believed that God is one Lord, not two or three. 

An examination of the word “one” in a number of passages reveals that the proposition “God is one” means simply that He is one Person. Take, for example, the sentence: “Abraham was one” (Ezek. 33:24) or “Abraham was one when I called him” (Isa. 51:2). Does anyone have the slightest difficulty in catching the sense of “one”? Translators have recognized that the meaning is “Abraham is one party,” or “one person.” Take another example: In Ecclesiastes 4:9 we read: Two are better than one...If they fall the one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is one [i.e., alone] when he falls. There is not a second [person] to lift him up.” To be “one” and “a second” in these verses means of course to be “one person” and “a second person.” In the Song of Solomon 6:9 the text states that “my dove, my perfect one, is one. She is the ‘the one’ of her mother.” In smooth English, “my dove, my perfect one, is unique. She is her mother’s only daughter” (NASV). In all these cases, and hundreds of others, one (echad) means one, or one single! That is its easy meaning. 

It is surprising that Bible readers sometimes react with perplexity when they encounter the biblical statement that “God is one.” Why should this be a problem? The Amplified Bible in Galatians 3:20 reads: “God is only one person. He was the sole party in giving the promise to Abraham, but the Law was contracted between two, God and Israel.” Only a few verses earlier, similar language describes Jesus as “one seed” as contrasted with many. As The Amplified Bible puts it: “God does not say ‘and to seeds,’ as if referring to many persons, but ‘and to your seed,’ obviously referring to one individual, who is Christ.” “Christ is one” obviously means that he is one person.

Could anything be clearer than 

that Christ is one individual and 

that God is one Person, one individual, one Father? 

“Do we not all have one Father? Has not one God created us?” (Mal. 2:10). “God is only one Person” (Gal. 3:20). “There is one God, the Father” 1 Cor. 8:4- 6). This startling revelation could, if believed, put to rest centuries of wrangling about who God is. But few seem to be able to grasp this truth. Some search for more complicated views of God. They turn to John 10:30 where Jesus stated that he and the Father are “one.” 

Our English translation does not show that the word “one” in that verse is a neuter form of the numeral “one.” It means one thing, one in power and will. The verse does not say that the Father and the Son are one God. And Galatians 3:20 and Deuteronomy 6:4 say that God is one Person. The word in this case (i.e. Gal. 3:20) is not “one thing” (neuter) but “one person” (masculine). Thousands and thousands of singular personal pronouns to designate the One God tell us that He is one individual Divine Person. His personal name is Yahweh and it appears with singular verbs and pronouns 6,700 times.

The Biblical creed is that the Father is “the only one who is truly God” (John 17:3), the “one who one is God” (John 5:44). That, of course, means:
that no one else is God — not even Jesus, who is the Son of God, that is, the Messiah. Psalm 110:1 defines who God and who Jesus is with precision. The God who speaks is “Yahweh” and His Son is addressed as “adoni,” my lord — not Adonai which is another word for God. Check this special word adoni. It will tell you who Jesus is. This form of the word “lord” (adoni) is reserved in the Bible, in all of its 195 occurrences, for human superiors (occasionally an angel may also be addressed as adoni, my lord), as distinct from God Himself.
Jesus is that supreme human Lord, but he is not God. He is a different person from his Father. God, His Father, “is only one person” (Gal. 3:20). Paul summed up this simple truth in 1 Timothy 2:5: 

“There is one God, the Father, 

and one mediator between God and man, 

the man Messiah Jesus.” 

Do you believe this?                                                  

The above article is taken from
The God of the Bible Is One Person

Meet a Man Called Messiah Jesus

Meet a Man Called Messiah Jesus

We Christians should be very clear about the identity of the one to whom we claim loyalty.
Our textbook, the Bible, introduces him with delight, simplicity, and meticulous care. Before you have completed reading the first chapter of Matthew and Luke, you will have learned that Jesus is the Messiah (Christ), the King of Israel, the King of the Jews, the Son of God (which is a synonym for the King of Israel: John 1:49).
You will have learned that Jesus is the biological son of Mary, the legal son of Joseph, and of course the Son of God, by creative miracle. The reason for him being the Son of God is spelled out with matchless clarity and simplicity in Luke 1:35: It is “because of” — “precisely for this reason” (dio kai) — that God became his Father by miracle in Mary. That seems to be so reasonable and just what we expect for the origin of the second Adam, the head of the new creation.

Luke 1:35 is the definitive and decisive, lifechanging text for defining how, why and when Jesus originates as the Son of God. To miss this angelic definition of Jesus is to miss the core of the whole NT, indeed the whole Bible. It wasn’t long after Bible times that the Son of God of Luke and the NT was transformed into a figure barely recognizable as the Jesus of history. He was lifted out of history and given a new and confusing identity.

Scholars have conducted a never-ending “quest for the historical Jesus,” implying that he was lost! But the quest had been successfully undertaken by Matthew and Luke and the rest of the NT writers! No need to look further. Jesus is there in the opening chapters of the NT. He is the Messiah and the supernaturally procreated Son of God.

Jesus is also the descendant of Judah (Heb. 7:14). He is of the tribe of Judah. He is also ... of Adam, and of Eve (as the seed of the woman). Move two chapters ahead in Luke to find that Jesus is the son of Adam who was the son of God (Luke 3:38). As a child from the womb of Mary Jesus is the uniquely begotten man, the Son of Man, the Messiah, King of Israel. He is also of course the walking embodiment of God’s preplanned wisdom and word (John 1:1, 14).

But Jesus is not “God the Son,” making two Gods. A 17th-century orthodox bishop and theologian, Thomas Ken, was rightly puzzled by the amazing definition which the Church by then had long held as traditional —the idea that Jesus was the “eternally generated Son.” He mused: “Strange generation this! Father and Son co-eternal. Two distinct and yet but one.”

Matthew and Luke, and especially Mary, would have been aghast at such non-biblical, philosophical jargon and, one might ask, ought we not to be asking questions about how and where our church got its creed and its definition of Jesus? Is all that language about “essence” and “Persons” really intelligible by scriptural standards? ...

A wonderful title for Jesus can be discovered before you have completed Luke 1. According to Elizabeth, Jesus is “my lord.” Elizabeth hailed Mary as “the mother of my lord” (Luke 1:43). She is not “the mother of my GOD” (!) as later misdescribed in post-biblical theology. And “my lord” is derived from the most interesting of all titles, the one found in Psalm 110:1 where God (the YHVH of the Hebrew Bible) addressed an inspired oracle through David to “my lord” (adoni). His instructions were that this descendant of David was to sit at the right hand of the One God, until his enemies are subdued under his feet. This text provides the golden key to the constitution and plot for the whole Bible!
That is why it is quoted more often than any OT text in the NT.
That “my lord” of Psalm 110:1 is the very same “man of My right hand” of Psalm 80:17, “the man whom God has made strong for Himself.”

The one at the right hand of God
is the supremely exalted man Messiah,
not a second God! 

Psalm 110:1 was the subject of Jesus’ master-question. With this verse he stumped all his opponents.

Another stellar text describing who the real Jesus is is found in Deuteronomy 18:15-18. This verse is cited by Peter (Acts 3:22) and Stephen (Acts 7:37, as he died at the hands of hostile Jews): God promised to produce from the ranks of Israel a prophet like Moses. He was to be God’s final word to the world, and any who did not yield to him and his teachings would be rooted out from among the people. God would hold them accountable for refusing the words of His final agent, the Son of God, Jesus.

This is the biblical identity of Jesus as Messiah. With this list of titles for the great central personage of the biblical drama, you can move forward from Matthew 1 to an intelligent reading of the great biblical drama. Your destiny is bound up with the Messiah, who died for the sins of the world, and you are invited to rule on earth with him in his coming Kingdom. It will be wise to drop titles like “God the Son” (making a second God) and omit from your thinking any myths about “going to heaven when you die.” That will prove to be a disastrous diversion from the plot of the real and only biblical story.

The Messiah Jesus is going to return from heaven to the earth, which will be renewed and become the scene of the very first successful world government, the Kingdom of God, with headquarters in Jerusalem. “May His Kingdom come!”

The above article is taken from
Meet a Man Called Messiah Jesus