📖 Cults & World Religions — Unit 2: The Trinity and the Deity of Christ

Anchor: John 1:1; 8:58; 20:28; Colossians 2:9; Matthew 28:19 (NKJV)

A Word Before We Begin

This unit stands at the center of the whole course, for the doctrine we take up here is the great dividing line between the true faith and nearly every cult. Perhaps the single most misunderstood doctrine regarding the nature of God is the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is no accident that this is exactly where the cults break away. The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter-day Saints deny the Trinity and the full deity of Christ; Islam and the Bahá'í Faith honor Jesus as a prophet but deny that He is God the Son. If we grasp what Scripture teaches about the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and above all about the deity of Christ — we will hold the key that tests them all. We do not take up this doctrine to win debates, but because the true God has revealed Himself in this way, and because only the true Christ can save.

One God: The Foundation

We begin where Scripture begins: there is only one God. The Jews were given, and the church has always held, the great truth of monotheism — that there is one God and not many. The Hebrew boys grew up reciting the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The nations around them — the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans — worshiped many gods; the glory of Israel was that they knew the one true God. "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:3). Whatever we say about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we may never say that there are three gods. There is one God, eternally existing. Hold this fast, for the cults stumble here in two opposite directions: some make three gods, and some collapse the three into a single bare person.

Three Who Are Called God

Yet within the pages of that same Bible a wonderful thing appears: the one God is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and each is called God. The Bible speaks of the Father as God (Philippians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:3). It speaks of the Son as God — "the Word was God" (John 1:1), "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). And it speaks of the Holy Spirit as God: when Ananias lied to the Holy Spirit, Peter said, "You have not lied to men but to God" (Acts 5:3-4). Are these merely three roles that one God plays, or three names for the same person? Scripture will not allow that, as we shall see. The vast majority of Christians through the ages have confessed it simply: there are three Persons and one God. When a skeptic mocked Daniel Webster, saying, "So you have been to church, where they teach that three times one is one," Webster answered, "My friend, you and I do not understand the arithmetic of Heaven."

The Deity of Christ

Now we come to the heart of the matter, and to the very point on which the cults most often fail: the deity of Christ. Scripture does not present Jesus as a created being, a great angel, or a mere prophet, but as God Himself. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Jesus took to Himself the very name of God: "Before Abraham was, I AM" (John 8:58). He said, "I and My Father are one" (John 10:30), and, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Matthew calls Him Emmanuel, "God with us" (Matthew 1:23). He is the Creator of all things: "For by Him all things were created... All things were created through Him and for Him... and in Him all things consist" (Colossians 1:16-17). "For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Colossians 2:9). And when doubting Thomas saw the risen Lord, he fell down and said, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28) — and Jesus received the worship. The Son is the eternal God, and there is no way to the Father except through Him (John 14:6).

The Deity and Personhood of the Spirit

The same Scriptures that reveal the deity of the Son also reveal the Holy Spirit to be God — and to be a Person, not a mere force. To lie to the Holy Spirit is to lie to God (Acts 5:3-4). The Spirit does what only God does: He was present at creation (Genesis 1:2), and He raises the dead (Romans 8:11). And He is a Person, not an impersonal power: He speaks (Acts 13:2), He wills and distributes gifts (1 Corinthians 12:11), He teaches and testifies (John 15:26), and He can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30). This matters greatly, for one of the cults we will study, the Jehovah's Witnesses, reduces the Spirit to "God's active force," an impersonal energy. But the Spirit is the third Person of the Godhead, fully God, whom Jesus named together with the Father and Himself.

One God in Three Persons

How then shall we put these truths together? Not by making three gods, and not by collapsing the three into one. The historic and biblical confession is this: within the one Being that is God there exist eternally three coequal Persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is one what (the one Being of God) and three whos (the three Persons). To turn the three Persons into three gods is the error of tritheism, into which the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter-day Saints fall. To turn the one God into a single person who merely appears now as Father, now as Son, now as Spirit — as if wearing three masks — is the ancient heresy of modalism, or Oneness, which arose in the third century. Both must be refused. And Scripture itself shows us all three Persons together, distinct and yet one God. At the baptism of Jesus, the Son came up from the water, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, and the voice of the Father was heard from heaven: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:16-17). And in His last command, Jesus joined the three in a single name: "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19) — one name, three Persons.

The Humility of the Son

But someone will ask: if Jesus is truly God, why was He hungry and weary, why did He not know the day of His return, why did He pray to the Father, and why did He die? The cults press these questions hard. The answer is found in what Paul calls the self-emptying of Christ. Though He existed "in the form of God," He "did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation" — He emptied Himself — "taking the form of a bondservant... and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:6-8). In becoming truly man, the Son voluntarily laid aside the independent exercise of His divine powers, living and working as a man in dependence on the Father and the Spirit. This is why He could say of His return, "of that day and hour no one knows, not even the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32); why He grew tired and hungry; why He prayed. He did not cease to be God; He was fully God, and He became fully man, to accomplish our redemption. The One who was rich became poor, that we through His poverty might become rich.

Why This Is the Dividing Line

So we return to where we began. The Trinity and the deity of Christ are the great dividing line, the first test we will apply to every group in this course. Deny the deity of the Son, and you have a different Christ; and a different Christ is the root of a different gospel. This is why the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Latter-day Saints, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith, for all their differences from one another, fail at the same point. Do we understand it fully? No. We do not even understand how all the thoughts and loves and powers of a single human soul are one; how much less the being of the infinite God. There will always remain something of holy mystery here. Augustine said long ago that it is love that binds the three Persons in one, and that is very near the truth. We bow before what we cannot fully measure, and we confess with the whole church: one God, eternally existing in three Persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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