QUESTION:

I have a question regarding the Messiah and his purpose. It seems to me that the Bible is clear that the Hebrews are never to worship any thing or anyone but God Himself and that He is ‘One’ and that there is no other besides Him.

When did He change His mind and tell them that He would be the one to come to earth as a man, and call himself the messiah, and that they were were to believe that the messiah was God? This seems to be the point of difference between Jews and Christians.

Am I wrong in assuming that Christianity believes that Jesus is a part of God himself and that it is necessary to believe that Jesus and God are one in the same? God is God and Jesus was Jesus. How is it that the world turned the Messiah into a divine being?

Answer:

This is a good question. The Old Testament is very clear that there is only one God. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God.” is the beginning of the Ten Commandments.

You are asking, of course, about the trinity. The trinity is a difficult teaching. It is not “logical” according to basic human thinking. John 1:1 has, “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. In this simple statement we have that God is two, yet one. If you add passages about the Holy Spirit, you get the Christian teaching that God is one, yet he is three distinct “persons.” Now, this teaching is either true or it is not true, but it is what is taught in the Bible, and most specifically in the New Testament. However, there are hints that the one God has more than one person in it in the Old Testament. For example, God uses “us” to describe himself in Genesis 1:26, for example. The word for God in Genesis 1 is elohim, which is plural. Another hint that Jesus is God, but distinct from the Father is found in Zechariah 11:10-13 which is clearly a messianic passage. God says “And the Lord said to me, “throw it to the potter:–the handsome price at which they priced me. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter.”

Here God is talking about himself and he says of what happened to Jesus that it happened to “me.” So, Jesus is God. So, too, the Father is God, as Jesus addresses his Father as God. Is this hard to understand and accept? Yes it is! But it is what the Bible says, both in the Old and in the New Testament, although I will admit that it is more clear in the New Testament.

The answer is that God did not change his mind. There is plenty of Old Testament evidence that the Messiah is God, including Zechariah 11 and Isaiah 9:1-6. The world did not turn the Messiah into a divine being. Jesus claimed to be God (John 10:33 for example and many more as well). God told us that the Messiah is God. There is not changing of mind going on here, although I can definitely understand that this can be confusing for us when we consider the mystery of the three-in-one God.

John Oakes