Trinitarianism

The idea that God is three persons in one Godhead is called the “Trinity.” This idea is hinted at throughout the Old Testament: For example, in the first sentence of the Bible (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”), the word for God is a plural form that implies a singularity. For another example, in Daniel 3:25, the fourth man in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego is fairly obviously a pre-incarnate Jesus described as having a form “like the son of God.” In the New Testament, the three persons in the Godhead are clearly laid out as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19).

The idea of the Trinity is thus fundamentally correct. But how does this work? Well let’s return to Genesis 1. The second sentence reads, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

The Hebrew word for “Spirit” is rûaḥ, which literally means “wind” but in this context is an idiomatic term used to refer to someone’s breath (sit quietly in a room for a minute or two, breathing steadily in and out, and you will see how the Hebrews connected the idea of wind to breath, once again illustrating how extremely literal they were).

When referencing the breath of God, as in Genesis 1:2 and Genesis 6:3, the Bible is clearly referring to the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity. However, we should pause before jumping to an abstraction like the idea of a “spirit” too quickly. I would propose instead that God is so complex in His divinity that His very Breath is conscious and divine.

Now, the New Testament, written in a Gentile language (Greek) and directed as much towards members of Gentile nations under the control of Rome as toward Jews, is more abstract in its language. The Greek word for breath is “pneuma,” which is almost always translated “spirit.” Indeed, “pneuma” is often not used for literal breath, instead referring to the innate animating force inside of a person. And this makes sense: whatever is alive inside of us keeps us breathing, and when we stop breathing, we die.

This means that the Holy Spirit is indeed the Breath of God but is also metaphorically the animating life force of God. That is why God breathed on the earth before He began creating: He was breathing life into a world that did not yet have life. Note that there is an unbreakable connection between the literal and the abstract here: The Bible does not intend us to say that God has a figurative spirit but not literal breath. They are intertwined.

Similarly, the second member of the Trinity is the Word of God, by which God in his “speaking” created everything in the beginning (Colossians 1:16; Genesis 1 throughout). Hence, the creation account depicts a God who has a divinely conscious Word and Breath using both to form and populate the earth. Something similar is seen in Luke 1:35, where the Holy Spirit comes upon Mary, enabling God to use His power to form the Son of God (Word) in her womb.

Now, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is often referred to by Christians as “eternally begotten” or “born of the Father before all ages” (as in the Nicene Creed), but Psalm 2:7 (referenced in Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5, and Hebrews 5:5) very clearly says “You are My Son, Today I have begotten you.” I would put forth that prior to the incarnation, the Word of God was not the Son of God (or at least, not in the same sense as after the incarnation). Instead, as the Word of God, He was with God before the beginning of the world (John 17:5), and He appears throughout the Old Testament as “the Angel of the Lord” (not an angel of the Lord), where He takes on the appearance of a man to do work on God’s behalf and also functions as God’s “archangel,” i.e., the leader of God’s angelic armies (Matthew 26:53). Then, when the Word became flesh (John 1:14), He was at that moment begotten of the Father (God) as the Son of God, the man Jesus of Nazareth, who had the role of Messiah for mankind. Once He was begotten, He became a Son and God became a Father.

[If this seems unorthodox, feel free to submit a form letting me know why. I’m happy to adapt this view based on evidence in Scripture.]

Now, John 1:1 makes a very interesting claim: in the beginning, the Word of God was with God, and the Word was God. Christians tend to focus on the latter half, rightly pointing out that the Word (like the Spirit) is divine in nature and origin, an essential component of who God is. However, John 1:1 also states clearly that the Word was “with” God, thus implying a distinction between them.

The reason why is that God the Father is the God of the Bible. When Jesus instructs His followers to worship God, He doesn’t mean Himself, He means His Father. We come to the Father through Jesus (John 14:6), who is indeed God in nature (John 20:28), but He is God because He is the divine Word of God the Father. This is why Jesus is said to do nothing on His own, but only what He sees the Father doing (John 5:19), and why He even admits to not being omniscient (Mark 13:32).

Similarly, the Holy Spirit is shown to have a subservient relationship to the Father (John 16:13). Thus, all three members of the Trinity are God to us (which is why it is natural and appropriate to worship the Son and the Spirit when we worship the Father), but to the Father, the Son and Spirit are the two divine instruments of His will, each with a unique personhood and personality, who serve the Father in perfect love. And to us, God has given each of them as a helper (the same Greek word is used for Jesus in 1 John 2:1 as for the Holy Spirit in John 14:26), that we may thrive in the faith.

Flat Earth

Some Christians think the earth is flat, because the Bible contains references to things like the earth having foundations (Job 38:4) and four corners (Isaiah 11:12). This has even become a bit of a controversy in recent times. To illustrate why these passages are not meant to be taken literally, let’s examine what the Bible says about the human heart.

The Hebrew word for “heart” is lēḇ. We know from passages like Exodus 28:29-30 that this refers to the literal heart, but it is also used many times in Scripture to refer to a place of feeling emotions or to a source of desires and certain types of thoughts.

The reason it is used this way is because many types of emotions are felt in or around the heart. A painful loss is called a “heartache” for a reason: it really feels like your heart is aching in your chest. When you get extremely good news, you can feel a swelling in your chest. Certain hidden desires can cause your heart to race, while disappointment can make your heart feel heavy.

It does not matter that these emotions, desires, and thoughts are generated and managed in the brain. Your experience of them centers around the heart, which is how God designed this part of your connection to your “being” (mind, soul, heart, body, etc.). In these instances, you can discern your emotional state by paying more attention to your chest than your skull.

This distinction rather easily settles the debate over the flatness of the earth in the Bible. The earth is described as having foundations and four corners because this is how we perceive the earth, not because it is how the earth actually works. It’s as simple as that. Like with emotions and the heart, sometimes our experience of something does not reflect the mechanics at play.

Demon Possession

Demon possession is seen frequently throughout the New Testament. But how does demon possession work? Is it the cause of maladies such as mental illness, meaning that exorcism is the correct treatment? Is demon possession something Christians need to worry about nowadays?

Demon Possession Then

First, let’s clear up what was happening during the Last Days, and then we can turn to the current situation. Something that struck me as odd once I noticed it is that in Jesus’ day, there were lots of faithful Jews who loved and worshipped God but who were suffering demonic affliction. We know this because Jesus healed via exorcism lots of people who came to Him in faith. But how was their suffering possible in the first place?

Well (H/T James B Jordan), after the Exile, God made new rules for priests. In Ezekiel 44:10-16, He specified that only descendants of Zadok the priest would be allowed to serve as priest or High Priest anymore. All other Levites, even other sons of Aaron, would only be allowed to perform support duties for the Zadokite priests.

However, when Antiochus Epiphanes removed Jason (a Zadokite) as High Priest and replaced him with Menelaus (not a Zadokite), God’s requirement was violated. Of course, the Maccabees eventually restored proper temple worship after they recaptured Jerusalem from Antiochus’ forces, but they afterward established themselves as High Priests. Even though they were priestly, they were not Zadokites, which meant this action was sinful and the office of High Priest was now illegitimate.

This was highly significant, because only the High Priest could perform the ceremony known as the “Day of Atonement,” during which all the elements of the sacrificial system were cleansed and all leftover sins that hadn’t been addressed through a specific sacrifice were wiped out each year (Leviticus 16). Because of the illegitimacy of the High Priest, by the time Jesus came around, Judah had been teeming with unaddressed sin, and the worship system itself was spiritually dirty.

This spiritual filthiness that built and built over time gave demons purchase over the faithful of Israel. That is why so many believers were suffering a variety of illness and maladies. However, because Jesus was the High Priest of the New Covenant (Hebrews 2:17), He had the authority to apply the power of the imminent substitutionary atonement of His death upon the cross to believers and bring them under the purview of the kingdom of heaven. Thus, He could heal people by removing the spiritual purchase demons had in their lives, driving out the demons and eliminating the illnesses.

Demon Possession Now

Nowadays, the faithful are under the power of the New Covenant that is better than the Old Covenant (Hebrews 7:22), which means the spiritual system put in place by Jesus will forever be clean and holy, and His atonement will forever be effective. Therefore, we Christians are generally protected from the power of demons. However, if we yield to sin, we can open portals to Satan and his demons in our lives, as Judas did (John 13:27). We must then repent and realign ourselves with God’s will to drive demons out of our lives.

As far as illnesses go, the world is in the bondage of corruption (Romans 8:21). This means creation is broken, and bad things like natural disasters and medical problems now occur. Our susceptibility to them is based on two factors: our individual relationship with God and the relationship with God of the collectives we belong to. For example, if we live in a wicked nation, we can suffer the way that others in our nation suffer, because we lack the protective covering that God puts over a faithful nation (Deuteronomy 7:12-15). 

This is hard for us as Americans to accept, because we are very individualistic and don’t like the idea that the course of our lives can be determined by factors outside of our control. Still, there are positive aspects to this: for example, there are many wicked people in America who have plentiful access to food and medical care because of the ways our forefathers served God and tried to set up society in a way that was pleasing to Him. Thus, you can experience blessing because of the faithfulness of others, regardless of your own behavior.

Therefore, people nowadays can suffer because of their own wickedness or because of the wickedness of some collective they belong to (nation, state, city, church, company, etc.), weakening or forfeiting God’s protection from the hostility of creation and experiencing illnesses as a result. The extent to which these sufferings represent “demonic affliction” or just the brokenness of nature is debatable. I will simply point out that demonic possession was responsible in the New Testament for illnesses that we regularly treat today with medicine, such as epilepsy (Matthew 17:14-18).

Therefore, despite a popular misunderstanding amongst Christians, mental illness is not special amongst demonic afflictions, and just because exorcism was used to treat it in Mark 5:1-20 doesn’t mean it should still be used today, any more than we use exorcism for epilepsy. In truth, the brain is an organ. It can have medical issues just like the heart or liver or pancreas. We should treat it medically just like we do any other organ.

The brain only gets treated differently because, unlike any other organ, its maladies can affect our personality, which is intimately tied to our identity and therefore comes across as more alarming than a typical physical ailment. When that factor is combined with the stigma and ignorance surrounding mental illness, we get this confusion. Psychiatry and related medical disciplines are currently the best approach we have for treating mental illnesses, even for Christians.

Christian Zionism

A particularly thorny issue in Christian theology is how to think about Jews. Without a balanced and biblically grounded approach, we can veer into either antisemitism or heretical universalism.

The Role of the Jews

First, let’s be very clear that the Jews were not the only humans who could be saved during the Old Covenant. Abraham’s covenant included a provision that those who blessed him would be blessed, and those who cursed him would be cursed (Genesis 12:3). This provision passed through Isaac down to Jacob, such that for the entirety of the time of the Mosaic Law, Gentiles could be saved by choosing to bless God’s people as a recognition of God’s sovereignty (they also had to follow the general principles of righteousness that had been in place since the days of Noah).

In this way, Melchizedek, Joseph’s Pharaoh, the Gibeonites, Hiram of Tyre, the Queen of Sheba, Naaman, the Ninevites, Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, and many others went to the “good” part of Hades, where they are currently awaiting resurrection into the New Jerusalem. Jesus confirms this in Luke 11: 31-32. Thus, what Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob secured for themselves was not the sole path to salvation, but rather a priestly role for the whole world.

The nation of Israel was a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6), which is why God dwelled amongst them. The Levites were the priestly tribe within Israel, so they had a more intimate connection to God’s presence. Within the Levites, the Aaronic priests could enter God’s sanctuary, and within the Aaronic priests, the High Priest could enter the Most Holy Place once a year.

Because of Israel’s history as God’s priestly nation, when Jesus brought salvation to the world, He started with Israel. While He occasionally healed or blessed Gentile believers, His mission field during His earthly ministry was almost exclusively to the Jews or the Samaritans (northern Israel). This continued forward into the early church, which was exclusively for Israelites until the conversion of Cornelius, when it officially spread to Gentiles (although there were precursors, such as the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8).

This is why Paul said in Romans 1:16 that the gospel was for “everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek [i.e., Gentile].” The Jews had a favored status because “to them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2).

The Imminent Judgment

Nonetheless, the favored status of the Jews only gave them early access to Christ’s covenant, not automatic salvation. As John said to the Pharisees and Sadducees right at the beginning of the New Testament:

“Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” (Matthew 3:7-9)

In reality, a great judgment was looming over the Jews for their slide into national wickedness. The very next verse, John warned the Jews:

“And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3:10)

As Jesus Himself said to the Pharisees and scribes:

“Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.” (Matthew 23:33-36)

In addition to all this pent-up judgment from Old Testament martyrdoms, Jesus’ own martyrdom would be poured out on the Jews of His day:

But they cried out all the more, saying, “Let Him be crucified!”

When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it.”

And all the people answered and said, “His blood be on us and on our children.” (Matthew 27:23-25)

After Jesus’ ascension, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church on Pentecost, Peter urged the Jews in Jerusalem to “be saved from this perverse generation” (Acts 2:40), i.e., the generation that would suffer all this judgment. And how could they be saved? “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.” (Acts 2:38)

Note that Peter uses the same word that John did: repent. Both men also mentioned Jesus as critical to salvation. As Peter said later, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name [than Jesus Christ of Nazareth] under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) This all ties back to Jesus’ definitive claim of “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)

Thus, as one would expect from reading virtually any part of the New Testament, Jews cannot be saved without faith in Jesus. As Paul said about the Jews of his day who rejected Jesus:

Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Romans 10:1-4)

Indeed, with His crucifixion, Christ tore down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14-16), such that in Christ, a true Jew is one who has an inward circumcised heart, not outward circumcision of the flesh (Romans 2:28-29). While earthly Jews held a special honor in Christ’s church, the ones who refused to hear the Gospel were children of the flesh, the sons of bondage, who persecuted the sons of promise (Galatians 4:21-31). These faithless Jews were destined to see faithful Gentiles sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while they themselves would be cast out into outer darkness, where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:11-12).

And indeed, as Jesus also foretold when He shared a parable of a fruitless tree that would be cut down (Luke 13:6-9), or when He lamented over Jerusalem and its desolate house (Matthew 23:37-39), the Roman army inflicted a grievous judgment on Judah during the First Jewish-Roman War, sacking Jerusalem and burning the Second Temple to the ground.

Rabbinical Judaism Then

After the First Jewish-Roman War, a second generation of Christian Jews arose. However, about 60 years after the destruction of the temple, a charismatic Jewish leader named Simon bar Koseba, who later went by the Messianic title Simon bar Kokhba, came along and promised to restore the defeated nation of Israel. He pledged to overthrow Roman rule, establish an independent Jewish nation, and rebuild the temple.

Since this was the heretical interpretation of the Old Testament that had flourished in Judea ever since the Romans took over and that had led to the first war with Rome (albeit with very unsuccessful results), some heretical rabbis, including the prominent Rabbi Akiva, proclaimed bar Kokhba to be God’s promised Messiah. Of course, the Christian Jews opposed Bar Kokhba as a false Messiah, to which he and his forces responded with violence and persecution.

It is not commonly understood that this conflict between the new version of non-Christian Judaism that is now called “Rabbinic Judaism” and the Christian version of Judaism that is now called “Messianic Judaism” appears in Scripture. Specifically, bar Kokhba is the beast from the sea in Revelation 13, while Rabbi Akiva is the beast from the earth. They are depicted as antichrist figures, seducing Jews away from Jesus, waging war on the saints (Revelation 13:7), and eventually leading the nation into utter devastation and destruction, as had been promised hundreds of years before in Daniel 12:7. Indeed, the Romans under Emperor Hadrian defeated bar Kokhba’s forces, unleashed an almost genocidal destruction on the Jews across Judea, and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem.

Note: The Daniel verse I just mentioned indicates that this devastation of the Jews during the Third Jewish-Roman War represented the end of God’s judgment upon them. Therefore, the bloodguilt of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets that rested upon the Jews was wiped clean in 136 AD. Jews today only bear guilt for their own rejection of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

Rabbinical Judaism Now

In 1948, in the wake of World War II, Israel was re-established as an official sovereign nation. This has led to a modern religious movement known as Christian Zionism, which proclaims devoted support to the modern nation of Israel to be a mandate for Christians.

Let’s consider some key aspects of the modern state of Israel:

• They follow the principles of Talmudic Judaism, of which the antichrist Rabbi Akiva was a principal founder.
• They deny Messianic (i.e., Christian) Jews the right to emigrate to Israel. This is particularly abhorrent because the re-establishment of Israel was a response to the Holocaust, and Messianic Jews would have been just as eligible for the slaughter of the Holocaust as Rabbinic Jews.
• They seek an earthly Jewish kingdom instead of the spiritual one of which Jesus is king (John 18:36).
• They await a Messiah who has yet to come, who will rule their earthly kingdom.
• They seek to rebuild the temple, even though the Mosaic Law is obsolete and passed away during the First Jewish-Roman War, just as Paul said it would (Hebrews 8:13). The enshrinement of the Wailing Wall is evidence of just how much importance the people of Israel still place upon the temple that Jesus destroyed by the hand of the Roman general Titus.

It is thus clear that the modern state of Israel is following the exact same playbook as the antichrist Jews during the Third Jewish-Roman War. The Bible spoke firmly against that playbook, and Christ led the Roman army against them and devastated them completely, because of their perfidy.

How then can Christians who claim to believe the Bible and follow Jesus support the state of Israel so rabidly? Well, it has to do with twisted eschatology. Because Christians Zionists put the entirety of Revelation in the future, they believe a Great Tribulation of faithless Jews will precede the rapture, which will allow Christians today to escape death. They therefore promote the interests of Israel to bring these events to fruition as soon as possible.

As I have explained in The Enigma of the End Times, however, all of Revelation is in the past except for Revelation 20. We are living in the millennium or shortly after it, and in our future is the final battle with Satan, as described in Revelation 20:7-10. Once that battle is complete, the Great White Throne Judgment of Revelation 20:11-15 will occur, and then the eternal earthly happy state described in Isaiah 65:17-66:24 will come.

Importantly, Revelation 20:9 suggests that the final Satanic battle will only happen once Israel and Jerusalem are converted to Christianity. Therefore, what Christians are actually called to do to bring about peace on earth and perpetual shalom is not to withhold the gospel from the Jews and usher them toward destruction, but, as one would expect from the nature of Jesus Christ, to witness to Jews and call them to the one true faith.

I believe the re-establishment of Israel was part of God’s plan, a lead-in to the total conversion of Israel mentioned in Romans 11:25-27. Nonetheless, we as Christians must not support the nation of Israel in its sinful rejection of Jesus as Lord but rather levy on them the same expectation of conversion to Christianity that we have historically applied to every other nation on earth.