(Ver 1.4)  Today’s lesson is “Part 1” in an essential Bible series of truth concerning the revealed triune nature of the Godhead.   This lesson will be focused upon an essential introduction of the subject.  Because there are new Christians all the time,  I realized people are like me and do not know everything.  There are new people choosing to come into God’s family every day that need to learn the fundamentals of Christianity.  Furthermore, this seemingly simple subject can become immensely technical and deep.  So I will occasionally teach on basic Bible concepts that everyone should become intimately familiar with.  By building a strong foundation on the Word of God, you are better able to defend your faith to others who may raise questions to why you have chosen to place your hope in and believe in the Bible (1 Peter 3:15).  If you do not know anything the Bible says you are not able to share with others to help them enter into His truth.  So today I want to introduce another basic foundational Bible concept.  How can one God be viewed in three different ways?  It is really not too difficult to understand these three personalities of God, if you research them in your Bible.  They are easily seen, frequently named and usually only ignored by  people who do not want to accept them.  God is called first and foremost a Spirit (John 4:24).  Therefore every other manifestation of God must originate from His Spirit.  You see one manifestation of God is accomplished by Him giving Himself a new titled description for His Spirit.  God the Father is a title or a name for the Spirit of God who procreates and has covenants, a family and children.  God is the Father of all spiritual beings (Heb 12:9).  If you have a spirit (and you do), it came from only God’s Spirit given to you in your mother’s womb at conception.  This truth delegates the responsibility of all human spirits to acknowledge God to be the original Father of their spirit.

Then there is God the Son.  This manifestation of God occurred when the Spirit of God came upon Mary the virgin and she conceived a male child named Jesus (Luke 1:35).   The body of Jesus came about as a union of the Seed(Word) of the Father God and the egg in Mary’s womb.  The combination of these two (physical egg and Spoken Spirit Word) produced a child that was not God, but yet had the Spirit of God in Him.  It might seem rather confusing at first, if you have never been taught this way.  You see the Bible says that “No Man” has ever seen God (1 Jn 4:12).  But we know many men and women saw physical Jesus Christ when He was here on earth.  But they all technically just saw the body that contained the Spirit of God and they never actually saw God who is a Spirit as we learned from John 4:24.

The plot thickens however, because Jesus did say “when you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (Jn 14:7).  So Jesus did not separate Himself from the Father at any time.  Jesus repeatedly said that He and His Father were One (Jn 10:30, Jn 17:11).  So when Jesus walked the face of the earth and spoke to the people, whatever He said was God speaking, because Jesus was God in the flesh (Mat 1:23).  Or we could also say that the Spirit of God was in the flesh of Jesus.

BIBLE FACT 1: ONLY ONE GOD

I think I will begin this lesson by establishing Bible verses that clearly declares that there is only one true God who created everything.  There can be a potential problem when studying the trinity because of these three titles, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  These three titled manifestations of the God can easily lead some to believe we have 3 different Gods.  But this not true.  Only One God created everything we see and God gives credit to the operation of all three divine descriptions to have participated in creating us.  Let us start with a basic law from God in the Old Testament:

Deu 6:4  Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:

This is a classic verse written in the Law of Moses.  God declares that He is One Lord!  The children of Israel widely accepted this verse and believe in this One True Lord!  However, when He visited them personally in the flesh, they put Him to death on a cross.  Why didn’t they recognize their God?  That is an obviously good question to consider and answer.  It seems the Nation of Israel is still stumbling over the same things as they did back then.  I have talked to Jews and they hate Christians and put them down as a false religion.  Little do they know that they are the ones now in the false religion of works that will not save them.

Mar 12:29  And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one  Lord:

Jesus, who was God in the flesh did not contradict the Old Testament law, but further confirmed that there was only one Lord God.  Many times people have a tendency to limit what God can do and put God in their very small and limited religious box.  God can do something so very radically different that the things we can think of with our simple natural minds.

In fact God has already done some very radical things that we are just now discovering in the Bible.  But, these people in Jesus’ day did not recognize their God, because they did not expect Him to be standing in front of them in this humble form.  Perhaps they had read about God in the burning bush speaking to Moses, or in the cloud on top of the mountain meeting again with Moses and they think that this is the way God always talks to men.  So heaven forbid if God does something so new or radically different to come in person in the flesh and stand before them and speak!  That just doesn’t make any natural sense for an omnipotent God to do, does it?  Of course the Jews were not privy to all of the facts either.  They did not know that the angel Gabriel had visited Mary when she was a virgin and said she would conceive a child by the Spirit of God.  They were not privileged to know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David and the prophesied birth place of their Messiah.

The Jews only knew that Jesus was a man from Samaria and a city of Nazareth.  They understood how, He had grown up like every other child in the region and nothing appeared to be different or unique about him.  They assumed Jesus was just like the other children in the family of Joseph and Mary and no different than His natural half-brothers or His natural half-sisters.  The Jews made wrong assumptions and never attempted to find out the truth by asking relevant questions.  They were deceived by Satan and they killed the God who came to save them.  Thank God, they did because we now are saved because of it.  Obviously, God foreknew how they would react and what they would do, since He purposely chose this specific time in human history to be born into the world.

Mar 12:32  And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he:

Here is a verse of scripture that confirms what the Jews believed.  They knew that the Bible said there was only One True God!  This scribe declares that there are no other true gods except Him.  But, yet he was talking to Him personally and never realized it either.  That to me is a very sad story.

Jas 2:19  Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

The devils and Satan know there is only one True God!   They are extremely fearful of Him.  In fact they are doing everything they can legally and illegally do to try to keep the plan of God against them from coming to pass.   It is interesting to see how many men and women in the world are so passive toward God.  So many could care less if there is a God, they are consumed with their own agendas.  People’s priorities sure need to change, don’t you think?

Mal 2:10  Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?

Here is an interesting verse of scripture.  It tells us that there is one true Father God.  Then it also says there is only One True God who created us!  The Bible is a very complex book and tells us many things that are difficult to wrap our human thinking minds around.  The trinity of God is one of these concepts that is difficult to fully grasp for human thinkers not thinking in a higher spiritual God kind of way.  How can one God be manifested in various ways using different names and titles?  You see this verse calls God the One Father, but yet Jesus in John 8, in talking to the Jews said “ye are of your father the devil”.  So obviously Jesus did not see them as his true spiritual brothers.  Jesus clearly said that He had a different spiritual Father than they did.  This partly demonstrates an ongoing problem of many religions in the world today.  The Jews thought that God was their father, but Jesus declared something that was completely different than what they thought.  So they were wrong and Jesus was right.  Many people today want to be all inclusive and say every religion is just another path to the same god.  But, they are also wrong.  Let us look at another verse from 1 Timothy:

1Ti 2:5  For there is one  God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;

You see the Bible declares something very different than what people think.  That is why Christians are many times accused of being hateful and narrow minded.  Those who see the truth, know that there are not many paths that lead us to the True God.  For example, this verse in 1 Timothy declares the opposite.  God says there is only one path way to God and that is only through the man Christ Jesus.  The Messiah Jesus was God in the flesh!  God came to the earth personally to accomplish everything that He needed to accomplish and He did it personally to insure that it was done correctly at the right time in the precise way.  The term “mediator” is an interesting Greek word so let’s look up the definition and see what it reveals:

From G3319; a go between, that is, (simply) an internunciator, or (by implication) a reconciler (intercessor): – mediator.

The word “internunciator” carries a meaning of someone who speaks on the behalf of someone else.  “Inter” can mean between and “nunciator” is someone who speaks.  So Jesus became the one in between man and God who is authorized to legally speak to each opposing party.   So a “mediator” is someone who is also a go between of the two parties often times in a legal battle.  Both of these titles fit the situation the human race was in.  We needed someone to be our legal attorney to plead our case for us, because we did not have a legitimate case without this help.  God provided Himself an intercessor, a spokesman for the human race when we had no chance of salvation.  Because God became a man, every man and woman now has a chance to talk with God personally.  Humans were incapable of saving themselves and we were in dire straits without a hope of any future.  God provided the way out of our dilemma, before we ever understood what a dilemma we were in.

You cannot be narrow minded when you read the Bible, if you are you will not be able to accept some of the radical concepts that God introduces you to.   God is One God, but comes to us in different ways for different purposes.

Remember that the Bible says that “No Man” has ever seen God, but that doesn’t mean we cannot come to know Him.  God being a Spirit, makes it difficult for natural men and women to grasp all of the hidden qualities of His nature and personalities.   What we must do is become spiritually open to what God wants to do and realize that whatever He does will probably be different than anything we could have imagined.  Learn the lesson of the Jews who did not recognize their God when He chose to walk in their presence in the flesh.  You see the Bible says God is not a Man (Num 23:19)!  That was a completely factual truth when these words were recorded in the Old Testament.  But that does not mean that God could not become a man if He choses to do so.  Jesus Christ was the Word (God) made to be a flesh body (Jn 1:14) and it was this human body that contained the Holy Spirit of God.  But I do not believe that this manifested physical body containing God limited God in His spiritually manifested form to only be in the body of Jesus.  In fact the Bible clearly tells us that every Believer who has accepted Jesus as their Lord now has the Spirit of God living on the inside of them.  So obviously God’s Spirit is bigger than the individual body of Jesus Christ alone.  Part of the Spirit of God is in me right now!  If you are a real believer, then a part of the Spirit of God is also in you!  Because the Jews put limits upon God and would not let Him out of their small mental box, they were unable to see Him clearly.  Do not be guilty of putting God in your small box and miss Him either!

1Co 8:6  But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

There are so many verses that declare and name God as being One!  This verse speaks of two parts of the trinity as both being this One God that we are learning about today.  God the Father, is the original spiritual father.  But, Jesus Christ, the Son of God is also this same One Lord God!  Notice that this One Lord Jesus Christ created all things.  So you cannot separate the two manifestations of God and say they are two different Gods or Creators, they are just two personalities of the same One True God.  Now let us shift focus from seeing God as being just Two to see how God claims to actually be Three in One.

TRIUNE = THREE IN ONE

1Jn 5:7  For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

This is one of the greatest scriptures in the Bible directly naming all “three” members of the unified trinity and calling each of them all One!   However, notice that the Son of God is called the Word of God in this verse and that is a revelation that you need to get a hold of.   In John the 1st chapter verse 1, God tells us very Clearly that God and the Word are One in the same.  Then in verse 14, God tells us that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us”.  So we can now begin to understand how God could become a man called His Son in the flesh and still be God Almighty.  I guess I should address the fact that this verse is widely reported to be false because it is not found in every manuscript.  However, this is the ploy of Satan to attempt to delete these words to cause doubts in the minds of people.  You see you can find this basic information in several other verses in the Bible and therefore I am confident in all of these verses of truth.  Check in John 5:37  and see where God the Father is being a witness of God the Son.  Read about Jesus being called the Word of God in Revelation 19:13.  Look at 1 John 4:14 where it speaks of God the Father and God the Son.  Look at John 15:26 where Jesus the Son of God describes the Spirit of God coming forth from the Father God to “testify” of the truth of Jesus.  A witness in the Bible is always someone who can testify in a court of law under an oath, so again we see the trinity in very revealed self-evident terms.  There are many verses in the Bible like this but I’m not going to do all of your Bible study for you today in this introductory lesson, so please make the effort and go and search to find more of them.

CONCLUSION

So this has just been a quick and simple introduction to the subject of the trinity of God.  I concentrated mostly on scriptures that declare that God is One True God.  But, I also introduced you to the fact that God can do things differently than we expect, if He wants to.   It is interesting that God always worked in the Old Testament through a mediator, a go between.  Either Moses, or another prophet would go to God and get the message that He wanted them to hear.  God used this principle and pattern of a go between for literally hundreds of years.  But, when God became the “go between” in the form of the man Jesus Christ, the majority wanted nothing to do with Him.  God did something the same way that He had always done it, but implemented it in a different way and they automatically rejected Him because He was so different than what they thought.  Jesus Christ became the Moses mediator of His day on earth and God’s own people refused to listen to Him.  I guess being “narrow minded” applies to many people in the world.  Everyone thinks they know what they need to know and when God does something different, we like to criticize it and brand it as a false teaching.  What the Jews should have done was to search the scriptures and find out what God was going to do and then verify if what Jesus said went along with it.  Instead of thinking they knew what was right and what was wrong, they should have been open to some new viewpoints of truth.  We as Christians also need to search our Bibles and see what God is going to do and remain open to Him potentially doing something that we did not expect Him to do.

Finally, the Bible says that Satan will do everything that he can to deny the deity of Christ.  The antichrist we are told in 1 John 2:22 will deny that Jesus is the Christ and claim that God had no Son.  God says very specifically that this antichrist will deny the existence of both the Father and the Son.  There is a major reason for this denial of truth, which I cannot get into today in this lesson.  If it were not important God would not have warned you about this.  I will say briefly two major religions of the world deny God had a Son and these are the Jewish and Islamic religions.  That is very important for you to know if you miss the rapture.  It is clear to me that Satan will do everything in his power to deny the trinity of God and will cause many people to fall into deception to believe this lie that there is not a trinity.  You need to understand that this is why it is important to know and study this subject so that even you will not be deceived when this occurs.  Thank you for reading and studying the Bible with us at Agapegeek.com.  God bless you and please share this lesson with everyone you know.  Press “Like” also and all of this will help others find us.  God Bless you until next time.

If you would like to continue reading in this series, please proceed to “Part 2” now.