The Triune God: The Son
1 Peter 1:3
Before we get started let’s bow our heads together for
a few moments of silent prayer so we can make sure we are spiritually prepared
to study the Word today. Whenever we stop walking by the Spirit we are under
the control of the sin nature so we need to confess our sin. Then God is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. So let’s go to the Throne of Grace.
“Father, we’re thankful for another day and another
week where we can glorify You. This is another opportunity to study Your Word
so we can advance spiritually. Father we’re so thankful for the opportunities
that You give us each day to apply Your Word and grow spiritually and the
opportunities You give us each day to perhaps communicate the gospel to someone
or to plant a seed or to water a seed that perhaps You can use us in the
process of bringing people to a saving understanding of the gospel of Jesus
Christ. Father, we pray that You would expand our opportunities and that we
would have the sensitivities and the courage to take advantage of those
opportunities and to spend time with people who are in desperate need of
learning about the grace that has been bestowed upon us through the death of
Christ on the Cross. Father we pray for us this evening as we continue our
study of understanding the important concepts related to who You are and how
You eternally exist as a triune God. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
We are studying in 1 Peter 1:3 which starts off with
the phrase, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Slide 3)
As I’ve thought about this and I pointed this out last time as I introduced
this, there are certain phrases in Scripture that as we think about them and as
we mull them over in our minds, they just seem to be pregnant with a lot more
significance and meaning than may first appear to us. As I thought about this,
I thought about what is going on here.
Contextually, this is going to connect to the main
thought in the verse that it’s God the Father who has caused us to be born
again to a living hope. The concept of father is connected to birth and
regeneration contextually but in the immediate phraseology of that verse, what
is it we have connected? We have blessed be the God, which is number one, and
number two, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So if God the Father is mentioned
then the correlative to that, there has to be a son. You’re not a father if you
don’t have a child: if you don’t have a son; if you don’t have a daughter. So
the fact that God is referred to as the Father implies a son or a descendant.
Now last time as we looked at this we looked at the
Trinity specifically in terms of these references to God the Father. I haven’t
even gotten into the New Testament yet because a lot of times people don’t
think of the Old Testament. That’s not your first go-to area of the Bible when
you think about the Trinity. A lot of folks think that the Trinity is just a
New Testament doctrine. What we discover is that it’s throughout the Old
Testament. It may not permeate the Old Testament to the level and specificity
that we have in the New Testament but it’s definitely there, and we need to
understand that.
You never know when you’re going to get an opportunity
to perhaps witness to someone who is Jewish or someone who is Muslim or someone
who comes out of a background where they’re just not really clear on the
concept of the Trinity. While we’re just talking about the general doctrine of
the Trinity, there are a lot of Christians who just have what I call a passing
familiarity with some of the basic doctrines of Scripture, and the Trinity is
one of them. What I mean by passing familiarity is sort of like when you’re at
the grocery store you walk by someone and for the next ten minutes your brain
is whirring because you say, “That person is really familiar to me. I’ve seen
them somewhere before”. Someone down about five aisles later you think, “Oh,
yeah. I remember that person from some place in the past”. But that’s about all
you can remember and maybe as a little time goes by, your brain recovers a few
things off the tired old hard drive and it comes to mind.
There are a lot of Christians who are like that. They
either grow up in denominations or churches where very little is taught, or in
homes where little is taught or little is emphasized. They believe God is a
trinity because they heard that in Sunday School, but why is that important?
They don’t know what the significance of that is. What I find, sadly, is that
there are a lot of folks today, especially young people—twenty somethings, thirty somethings,
but a lot of folks who are older as well—who no longer are involved in
any kind of church life. They’re not involved in any kind of Bible study.
They’re believers. They trusted in the Lord at some point, maybe when they were
a kid, maybe when they were older. In some cases they’ve actually converted to
something else, some non-Christian religion. Maybe they converted to Islam.
Maybe they converted to Judaism. Maybe they converted to Buddhism, Hinduism, or
they’ve become agnostic. What I usually find in these cases is that even though
they may understand what the basics of Christianity might be, they never really
grasped, or it was never really explained to them, why these things were important.
So what if I believe God is just a single God or a
Trinitarian God! What difference does it make? So what if I don’t believe that
Jesus is fully God? What difference does that make? Why are these things so vital
and so significant? Way too often a lot of that has to do with the Bible being
taught as sort of snapshots and disconnected events, disconnected stories, and
disconnected doctrines, and we don’t see how they tie together and ultimately
why they’re important and why they ought to shape our thinking. This is one of
the things I think is a great benefit in listening through Charlie Clough’s
Framework series and going through all two hundred twenty-four lessons, because
he shows in those lessons how everything interconnects from Genesis 1 to
Revelation 21. All of that ties together and all of that fits so that we can
understand the Scripture.
When we looked at last week, we came to this phrase
and I started talking about the Old Testament and how within the Old Testament
we see a plurality of the Godhead. In other words, what we see is multiple
persons talked about that are given the attributes of deity. So that as we look
at the Old Testament we’re not looking at a singular monotheism or a unitarian monotheism where we just have one person and one
essence.
I pointed out that this is recognized even in the 1986
and 1987 edition of the Tanakh, the Jewish
Publication Society updated translation of the Old Testament where you have in
the Shama
in Deuteronomy 6:4, “The Lord is our God. The Lord is one [echad in the Hebrew].” The Lord
is one and historically that has been emphasized as a singularity that the Lord
is one but you have two ways in which that word echad is used in Scripture. Either one would fit the context. The
translators of the Tanakh recognized that in their
view translating it as alone was probably best within the context and I agree
with them. The context of Deuteronomy is really arguing against and warning the
Israelites against the polytheism of the Canaanites. The emphasis in
Deuteronomy 6 is that the Lord alone is our God, meaning we don’t have multiple
gods. We don’t believe in polytheism.
The other possibility is that the use of echad as we find
in Genesis 2 is that “the two became one flesh”. So you have multiple persons
in a marriage but they are a unity. We could even translate the verse, “The
Lord is a unity”. The Lord is one in the sense of unity, not a solitary
monotheism. We looked at that last time and then I went through passages that
talked about God as our Father. Primarily that is in relation to a passage we
will look at in a minute in Exodus 4 where God called Israel as His firstborn.
That’s another very pregnant concept and there, with a
lot of implications to that. I’m not going to get off on that as we look at
this tonight but we looked at these various passages that indicated reference
to God as our Father. There’s an Old Testament background for understanding
what Peter is saying here when he says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ”. We saw that the word “blessed” here is not MAKARIOS, which is another word for blessed
but it’s EULOGETOS, which indicates that you’re saying something good or you’re praising a
person. The best translation is to praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ. The focus there is on one Person as the Father and then the second
Person is the Lord Jesus Christ. We began by looking at this idea of God as the
Father and the doctrine of the Trinity.
We’re going beyond the Fatherhood of God to talk
tonight a little bit about the Sonship of the Messiah as an Old Testament
doctrine. I ended up close to this last time and will mention a few passages
we’ll go back to tonight. I want to go back and look at them again because again
we hear these but sometimes we just move through things a little quickly and it
takes a little more time just to sit and soak in our thinking and to come to
understand this.
Also, along with this, I’m putting up our doctrinal
statement. A lot of times we know we believe these things in the church
doctrinal statements but we don’t necessarily understand why. A triune
conception of God is radically different from a unitarian
conception of God. We start off saying, “We believe in one God who is sovereign,
righteous, just, eternal, love, omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent,
immutable, and truth in His essence.” God is one in essence and we’re
summarizing His attributes through those ten attributes. The second statement,
“He exists in three Persons.” So He’s one in essence and three in person. The
three Persons are identified in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit.” These three Persons are co-equal, co-eternal, and co-infinite.” One is
not ontologically superior to the other. Ontological is a synonym for the word
metaphysical. It’s talking about their very essence, the essence of something.
So the ontology of something has to do with its very core being. Those of you
who went through evolutionary indoctrination when you were in about the tenth
grade under the old BSCS textbook that was used in public schools in Texas were
introduced to the concept called ontology recapitulates philology. Y’all
remember that, don’t you? You probably had to spit it out on an exam and then
you forgot about it. That’s the first time you ran into that word and you
probably haven’t heard it too much since, other than from me. It’s the idea of
the essence of something. In their essence, in the core of their being, what
makes God God; they are identical. One does not have
more knowledge or less knowledge than another. One is not more present or less
present than the others. One is not more powerful or less powerful than the
other. They are all equal and equally eternal.
There wasn’t a time when one began and that was the
Arian heresy in the early church. In the more modern church we call it Jehovah
Witnesses. It’s the idea that there was a time, they say, when Christ was not.
Sometime in eternity past God the Father generated the Son. If you go back
beyond that then they say, Christ was not. That was a huge heresy in the early
300s in the Church and it has popped up again and again throughout church
history. So they are all co-eternal and co-infinite in all of their attributes.
That’s our basic doctrinal statement and we’re developing this.
I also talked last time about this concept of the
Angel of the Lord. We looked at
Zechariah 1:12 and the conversation between the Angel of the Lord who is having
a conversation with Yahweh or Lord,
which refers to the four letters that give the name of God in Hebrew, Yhwh or Yahweh, which basically is a form of the
Hebrew word yesh
which means to be or to exist. When Moses asks God, “Whom should I say sent
me?” God’s reply was “I am that I am. Tell them ‘I am’ has sent you,” meaning
the eternally existing One. He is “being” itself and the source of all being.
Here we have the Angel of the Lord talking to the Lord of Hosts so obviously
there are two distinct personages talked about in Zechariah 1:12.
We also looked at Judges 6:11 that the Angel of the
Lord was worshipped by Gideon in this passage when you compare Judges 6:11,
talking about the Angel of the Lord with Judges 6:14 that the Angel is now
called Yhwh
in Judges 6:14. So the Zachariah passages shows the Angel is distinct from God.
Judges 6 shows that they’re viewed also as being identical. You see that also
in the rest of Judges 6.
Take a look at our starting point here in Exodus
4:22–23. God is talking to Moses. Moses is getting his operation orders
to go to the Pharaoh to demand that Pharaoh free His people. When Pharaoh asks
why Moses is doing this he is to say, “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus
says the Lord: “Israel is My son, My firstborn.” ’ ” Now this is a very
important passage. There are lots of things related to being firstborn. One of
the things related to being firstborn is what? You get the double blessing. You
are the prime heir under the law of primogeniture in the Old Testament. So the
firstborn is the designated heir of the father. The main line of the father
will go through the firstborn. Inheritance rights are part of what it means to
be the firstborn. He’s the pre-eminent one.
This idea is going to be applied to Jesus as the
firstborn of creation in Colossians 1:17. He’s the firstborn of creation, not
because He’s first because there were others that were born after Him or that
He was born but it’s emphasizing His preeminence. He is the one who has the
inheritance and the possession. We’re going to connect the dots to the role of
the Messiah in Psalm 2:7 and 2:9, that He is the one who receives the
inheritance from God. This is the declaration of the Sonship of the 2nd
Person of the Trinity.
What we see here is an analogy or a replacement here
for the first Adam. The first Adam was created by God and his role is to rule
over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field.
He’s created in the image and likeness of God but Adam fails. He blew it. He
disobeyed God and he’s no longer able because of his fallen nature to fulfill
the original creation mandate to rule over creation as God’s vicegerent. Now
there’s another good vocabulary word for you. A lot of people get a little
mixed up when they read it and their eyes look at it. They don’t know what a
vicegerent is so they think it means a vice-regent. It’s not a vice-regent.
It’s a vicegerent and there’s a distinction in the terms. A vice-regent is sort
of like a vice president. You have the president who is in charge of things and
he has an assistant or someone who will take his place when he can’t do it and
that’s a vice president. A vicegerent is a different concept. A vicegerent is
someone who is sent as a representative of a ruler. It’s like an ambassador.
It’s a little bit different but it’s like a representative so Adam is the
vicegerent of God. He represented God to rule over God’s creation.
When Adam blows it, Satan takes control of planet
earth and Satan is the prince and the power of the world, the god of this age.
He is the one who controls the planet but he has had his death sentence at the
cross where he was defeated but he still has power. How is this initial
function of man going to be fulfilled? If man was to rule over the creation and
Adam fell from that, how is that going to be fulfilled? It’s going to be
fulfilled by the Second Adam who is God Himself, God the Son, who enters into
human history and takes on true humanity. As a man He is going to come back to
rule over the creation. So the fulfillment of that initial destiny for mankind
is going to be completed by the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the same way, Israel as a nation was called out by
God to be a priest-nation. They are going to fail as a priest-nation. That was
part of their responsibility as the firstborn. They were to be a priestly
nation and lead and direct all the nations to a relationship with God. They
failed in that so ultimately this firstborn concept related to Israel is going
to be fulfilled by the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. As the Son of
Man, He fulfills that priestly role. He’s a prophet, priest, and king so these
things get pulled together. I’m starting with this concept that Israel is God’s
son but ultimately this is going to be fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now when we look at what the Old Testament teaches, we
recognize that the Old Testament gives divine names and titles and ascribes
divine attributes to the Son. That means that ultimately Israel cannot be the
son. What I’m dealing with here is that there are passages such as Psalm 2:7
where we read, “I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, ‘You are My
Son, Today I have begotten You.’” Who is the son? We look at Proverbs 30:4,
“Who has ascended into heaven, or descended? Who has gathered the wind in His
fists? Who has bound the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends
of the earth?” These are all rhetorical questions. They don’t expect an answer
but they want to get the reader to think through who this is. This is talking
about the Creator God. It says, “What is His name, and what is His Son’s name…?”
So the question is who’s the son?
In the history of interpretation, Jewish
interpretation says the son is Israel but the problem that we have is that the
Old Testament gives divine names, divine titles, and ascribes divine attributes
to the son. Therefore, the son can’t be Israel. The son has to be a divine
individual, a divine person. If divine works are ascribed to the son, then
Israel can’t be the son. If divine worship is given to the son, then that
certainly can’t be Israel because we don’t worship Israel. So the son has to be
an individual, a person, a divine person.
Furthermore as we looked at God the Father last time,
when we study what is said about God the Father, we recognize that our
understanding that He is fully divine is based upon the same things. It’s based
on the titles, the attributes, and worship for the Father. This indicates He is
fully divine. What I’m saying here is that if the ascription of attributes,
names, titles, and works, and worship to the Father is evidence that He’s divine;
then assigning divine names, titles, works, worship, and attributes to the Son
should be equally valid as evidence that the Son is fully divine. That’s what
we’re going to see. We demonstrated that God the Father is fully divine by His
titles, His names, His works, and His worship so we’re going to use the same
categories to show that the Son is God.
One of the reasons this is important is that there are
those that are strict monotheists, such as Jews, Moslems, and Unitarians who
will accept this evidence of the works and worship, names, and titles related
to the Father as evidence that the Father is divine but they don’t accept that
line of evidence as valid for supporting the deity of the Son which shows they
must have a superior agenda or a hidden agenda because what they’re saying is
that the Father is divine but the Son is not. One line of evidence works for
the Father, but we reject it for the Son. That’s inconsistent and it’s
illogical. It’s only that way because they have a presupposition that the Son
can’t be divine. For them the Trinity is irrational. The Trinity is not
rational; I would say it’s super rational. It’s beyond our finite minds to
totally comprehend it so we can’t control it so there are those who want to
make human reason the final arbiter of truth. They say that because they can’t
understand the doctrine of the Trinity, then it must not be true.
We’re going to go forward tonight and look at what the
Old Testament teaches about the Son. To do that I want to go back just a little
bit to what I talked about last week in terms of this other personage mentioned
in the Old Testament that is the angel of the Lord. The angel of the Lord is
the pre-incarnate Christ. If we are accurate, which is one of the problems you
get into with English translations, is that the term should be translated the
Messenger of Yhwh, not the Angel of Yhwh or the angel of the Lord
because “angel” communicates something different.
What we have in the Old Testament is the word mal’akh, which means a messenger. It is often
translated angel. Now the Greek word that was used in the New Testament is the
word ANGELOS. That is simply a Greek term for messenger. A messenger is an ANGELOS. We’ll look at this in a minute.
When Jerome translates the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, into
Latin he just transliterated the Greek word ANGELOS over into Latin and it was the word
AGGELOS. It was
then taken to be technical term for a special kind of “spirit being”.
That’s where confusion enters in. When we hear the word “angel” we think of
someone like Gabriel or Michael or something of that nature, rather than the
concept of a messenger. The word mal’akh and the word ANGELOS simply
refer to a messenger and not necessary to a spirit being.
Let me give you one example here in Matthew 11:10
which is used in reference to John the Baptist. It is quoted from the Old
Testament in Isaiah. “Behold, I send my messenger before Your face.” It’s
obvious in context that the messenger isn’t an angel. It’s a human being. The context
is referring to John the Baptist. Jesus is quoting from Isaiah here and
applying this to John the Baptist. So messenger here is the word AGGELOS. Now if you’ll notice [for those of
you who pay attention to details] notice how I’ve transliterated ANGELOS here with an “agg”
because literally the word is spelled AGGELOS but in Greek whenever you have a “g” or a “double
gamma” or a “gamma” and a “kappa” or “k” that go together that is pronounced
like an “ng”. That’s where you get ANGELOS out of what looks like AGGELOS. It should really be transliterated
as an ANGELOS because that’s how it would be pronounced. Here it’s clear that ANGELOS means messenger and if we look at
these translations as the angel of the Lord as the messenger of Yhwh it gives us
a totally different image.
Most people when they hear angel of the Lord
immediately picture whatever they think of as an angel. We’re not talking about
an angel. We’re talking about a messenger. Within the Godhead you have God the
Father who’s the planner and God the Son who is the redeemer. He’s also called
The Logos in Greek and Rhema
in Hebrew, which is the Word or expression, the communication of God. It’s the
role of the 2nd Person of the Trinity to communicate the essence of
the Father and the message of the Father. They have a division of labor and
responsibility within the Godhead. Henry Ford did not invent the idea of the
assembly line and division of labor; that was originated by the eternal essence
of God the Father. Ford just sort of discovered it and applied it in a new way.
Turn with me in your Bible to Genesis 16. You can use
your pen to underline some things in your Bible. I know that always surprises
some people. Every now and then I run into some people who say, “You write in
your Bible?” Yes, of course you do. That’s how you remember things. Genesis 16
is the episode where you have Hagar who is the concubine of Abraham. Sarai, Abraham’s wife, has not been able to bear a child so
she is going to convince Abraham to take Hagar and have sexual relations with
her so Hagar can conceive and have this child that neither one of them can
conceive at this particular point. Abraham does what his wife suggests and then
afterwards Sarai explodes in jealousy and kicks Hagar
out. She wants her out of the house and doesn’t want her around. So Hagar
leaves.
In Genesis 16:7 we read, “Now the angel [messenger of Yhwh] found her
by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur…” He asked Hagar where she had come from and where she
was going. She said she was fleeing from the presence of her mistress, Sarai. Look at Genesis 16:9 where the angel of the Lord
says, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” All the way through here
Hagar asks who is speaking to her and she is told it’s the messenger of Yhwh in verse 10,
and He answered her. Here we have four references by verse 11 from the
Messenger of Yhwh.
In verse 11 we read, “And the messenger of the Lord
said to her, ‘Behold you are with child and you shall bear a son. You shall
call his name Ishmael because Yhwh has heard your affliction.” In verse 13 the reason this
is significant is because in verses 7, 9, 10, 11 the person she is
communicating with is the messenger of Yhwh. Then in verse 13 Hagar identifies the messenger who
spoke to her as Yhwh.
Here you have another example like the Judges 6
passage with Gideon where it starts off talking about the angel of Yhwh and then the
angel of Yhwh
is described just by the name Yhwh. The same thing happens in Judges 13. In Judges 13 you
have the angel of Yhwh
appear to Manoah, the father of Samson, and give him
instructions about the fact that his wife is going to give birth to a son who
is going to be a Nazarite from birth. So as a result
of that Manoah is going to fall down and worship Yhwh. So you have
the messenger of Yhwh
identified in those contexts as Yhwh and sometimes also you see the ascription of the word Elohim to the messenger
of Yhwh. All of this shows that the messenger
of Yhwh is
worshipped as Yhwh.
Every other place you have an angel or a creature being worshipped as God they
always say, “No. No. No. You don’t do that. You only worship God.” So the angel
or messenger of Yhwh
is viewed as Yhwh.
So Hagar called the name of the one who spoke to her…”
Who spoke to her? Four times it’s mentioned that this is the messenger of Yhwh. Hagar calls
Him “You are the God Who sees” and she says, “Have I also here seen Him who
sees me?” Then in verse 14 we read, “Therefore the well was called Beerlahairoi; observe, it is between Kadesh
and Bered.” It is also seen in verse 11 that the term
Angel is identified with Yhwh
saying, “He has heard your affliction.” The NKJV doesn’t
quite translate verse 13 the best. See the last line, “Have I also here seen
Him who sees me?” The NASB says, “Have I even remained alive
here after seeing Him?” That is the more accurate translation. She is astounded
that having seen God that she is still alive. That response of hers expresses
the fact that she has seen Yhwh. She’s astonished that the messenger of Yhwh has left her
alive.
Let’s go on to the next reference. Turn over a few
pages to Genesis 21. Here we’re going to see Hagar, part two. After she has
given birth to Ishmael, when Sarah finally becomes pregnant with Isaac, then
what happens is that Sarah talks to Abraham, and now it’s time for Hagar to
leave. We read in Genesis 21:17 that they leave and go off in the wilderness.
God is going to promise to take care of her and it is going to be for the good
for them to separate. In verse 17, “And God heard the voice of the lad
[Ishmael]. Then the angel of God [Elohim] called to Hagar out of heaven, and said to her,
‘What ails you, Hagar?’ ”
Now when it says “out of heaven” that is hashamayim. It’s
not coming out of heaven in terms of a location like the throne room of God,
it’s literally out of the sky. It appears that the messenger of God has
appeared to her again in the air above her and begins to talk to her to find
out what her problem is. In verse 18 He says, “Arise, lift up the lad and hold
him with your hand, for I will make him a great nation. Then in verse 19, “God
opened her eyes.” So we’ve gone from the messenger of God to God. It’s talking
about the same Person. “Then Elohim opened her eyes. She saw a well of water and went and
filled the skin. God was with the lad and he grew up in the wilderness.” In
verse 21 we read that He dwelt in the Wilderness of Paran
and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Then we go over to Genesis 22:11 and we’re going to
see another appearance of the messenger of Yhwh. “But the messenger of Yhwh called to
him from heaven…” This is just as Abraham is about to slit Isaac’s throat as a
sacrifice to God. Just as he picks up the sacrificial knife the messenger of Yhwh from where?
Not from heaven, which is the Throne of God but from hashamayim, which is the plural. So the Angel of the Lord appears to him and
says, “Abraham, Abraham!” This was to basically stop it. God said, “Do not lay
your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God,
since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” Abraham looked
and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket so Abraham took the ram as a
burnt offering instead of his son.
Then in Genesis 22:14, “And Abraham called the name of
the place, The-Lord-Will-Provide [Yhwh] ; as it is
said to this day, ‘In the Mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’ ” So then we
have this reference of the messenger of Yhwh being identified as Yhwh. Then in Genesis
22:15–18 we have the second part of the conversation, “The messenger of Yhwh called to
Abraham a second a second time out of heaven [the heavens], and said, “By
Myself I have sworn says the Lord [Yhwh], because you have done this thing, and have not
withheld your son, your only son blessing I will bless you [summarizing the
Abrahamic covenant], … In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be
blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” So “my voice” is the messenger of Yhwh.
Now remember places you can go to see similar events
such as Judges 6:11–22 which is Gideon. That’s the same interplay where
the Messenger of Yhwh
is called Yhwh
and is worshipped as Yhwh.
We looked at that last time. Then Zechariah 1:11–12 where you have a
conversation between the Messenger of Yhwh and Yhwh Sabbaoth which is the Lord of hosts. We studied that
Tuesday night in 1 Samuel 1. This is critical for understanding that you have a
plurality of deity that exists. You have at least two Personages mentioned here
that are both given the ascription of deity. They’re both called Yhwh and Elohim and they
worship the Messenger of Yhwh
as God.
So this takes us back to the passage where I started
which is in Proverbs 30:4. This is a proverb of Agur
that brings out something extremely significant. All I covered on this last time
was that this indicates that God the Creator has a Son. It’s very clear from
the Old Testament that God, the Creator God [Yhwh], has a Son. The question is who is the Son and what we’re going to
see is that the Son is a divine Son. He can’t be understood to be Israel or the
nation Israel. As we look at this particular proverb, as I pointed out there
are five rhetorical questions at the beginning which are designed to focus our
attention on God. “Who has ascended into heaven or descended?” No one has. The
only one who has been to heaven is God so we don’t know anything about heaven
because God is the only one who has been there. “Who has gathered the wind in
His fists?” Only the Creator has control over the winds. “Who has bound the
waters in a garment?” Who controls floods? Who is the one who created the water
and then separated the waters from the dry land in Genesis, chapter one. Only
God has done that. “Who has established all the ends of the earth?” Who has
laid the foundations? Only God. So the answer to all those questions is going
to be God, Yhwh,
the Creator of the heavens and the earth.
Then he asks two questions: What’s His name and what
is His Son’s name?” In order to understand the significance of that question we
have to understand what it means when it talks about the name of someone. We
talk about believing in the name of Jesus. The way we use these concepts of
name, we basically use them as brands and labels. That’s not how the Bible uses
the term name or the concept of the term name. Name represents the essence or
the character of a person. That’s why it talks about the fact in Revelation
that when we get to heaven we’re going to be given a new name, a name that
reflects who we are and identifies something about us.
That brought up an interesting little story I’ll tell
you because I had actually forgotten about this until he reminded me. Back in
about three lifetimes ago when I was a counselor at Camp Peniel,
one of the things that we would always do as an experienced staff or older staff
or senior staff or however you want to call it, is that when you had the young
men who at the conclusion of their time at camp were given names. We always ran
this Indian motif or chief motif. We would give them a name. We would give them
an Indian name that had something to do with attributes or characters or
characteristics that were expressed by that person. This was something that was
emphasized and then we would try to find a verse in the Bible that emphasized
this character, this character trait or this characteristic.
Now that I’ve thought of that off the top of my head,
I’m looking around for the verse given to me. Here it is. Titus 1:9. A couple
of weeks ago I had lunch with an old friend of mine, David Whitelock
whose father founded Camp Peniel. David was one of
the main staff there, of course, when I was a young counselor. When he came to
lunch one of the first things he said to me was, “Robby, you know when I was
coming over here, I remembered the verse that I gave you years ago, which you probably
don’t even remember, was Titus 1:9. That’s you and I saw that forty-five years
ago.” The verse says, “Holding fast the faithful Word as he has been taught,
that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convict those who
contradict.” I thought, “Hey, that’s really great. That’s a good verse. I’ve
got to remember that.” So that was a few years ago. Anyway, that’s the idea of
naming in the Bible. It’s to identify something about the essence of character
of someone.
What we see here in these questions in Proverbs 30:4
is that he’s bringing out a particular point that he wants the reader to think
about. So he asks these first five rhetorical questions about who has done all
of these things. Of course the answer is God the Creator. Then he says, “What’s
His name?” The superficial answer is that His name is Yhwh. His name is God. But that’s
not what he’s asking. He said, “What’s His character? Do you understand? Do you
comprehend who He is?” The answer of course is, “No. Not really.” Then he asks,
“What’s His Son’s name?” In other words do you understand the character and the
essence of His Son? The expected answer is “No, I really don’t understand the
nature of the Son either.” The point that Agur is
making in this proverb is that God is incomprehensible. What is His name? If
you know, tell me. The implication here is that you don’t know. None of us
know. We cannot fully comprehend the incomprehensible. So this is what he is
emphasizing here in this particular verse.
The parallelism here shows that His name and His Son’s
name are parallel and if one is divine, then the other is divine. His Son would
be as divine as the Creator God. Both are evident in the Creation. Both are
implied here so the Hebrew parallelism is designed to show that the Son of God
is a divine being and it can’t be Israel. The complete understanding of the Son
is incomprehensible. It is apparent that Agur, who
was writing this proverb, understands that there are at least two personages in
God. He understands that there is a plurality in God, that God is not a
singular monotheist.
So this takes us to another important passage in Psalm
2. I want you to turn in your Bible to Psalm 2. Psalm 2, I would say, is
probably one of the ten most significant passages in all of the Bible. It is
either the most or the second most quoted Psalm in the New Testament. It is
very significant. In Acts 4:25 it is attributed to David even though it is not
stated to be a psalm of David at the beginning of the psalm. The New Testament
fully affirms that it is so this brings us to this very important passage.
Here we read in Psalm 2:7, “I will declare the
decree…” We have to identify who is speaking here. Who is the “I”? Who is the 1st
person here? Well, the next line says, “The Lord has said to Me…” So you have
the Lord identified as a personage here and “me” as a second personage. So the
Lord is Yhwh
and who is “me”? The “me” is identified as “My Son” in the quote. So the person
who is speaking would be the Son, the Messiah. The Son says He’s going to declare
the Father’s decree. Yhwh
has said to Me, “You are My Son. Today I have begotten You.” This introduces
important vocabulary within this whole psalm.
So let’s just take a brief little review here. [In
Psalm 2] it starts off in the first three verses talking about this conspiracy
against God by the leaders of mankind. “Why do the nations [Gentiles] rage, and
the people plot a vain thing?” You see that the nations, the people of the
world, are pictured as being in a state of high anger and violence. They are
plotting against God. Psalm 2:2 describes, “The kings of the earth set
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against Yhwh and against His Anointed.” So you have two personages here, Yhwh and His
Anointed. The Hebrew word for anointed is Mashiach. The Greek word for
anointed is CHRISTOS. So CHRISTOS is just the Greek translation of Mashiach, the Messiah.
So you have two personages, Yhwh on the one hand and the
Messiah on the other hand. What the people are saying is “Let us break their bonds…”
This is like Romans 1:18 where they are suppressing the truth in
unrighteousness. Let’s deny God. Let’s throw off His authority. Let’s rebel
against Him. Let’s destroy Him. Let’s break their bonds in pieces and cast away
their cords from us. So this sets the context. There’s this open rebellion by
the human race against the Creator God.
We’re going to skip down through the next three verses
that describe God poking fun of them. God is not politically correct. God pokes
fun at the false religions of mankind. That’s divine viewpoint. That’s
righteousness on the part of God. Modern man would say, “You poke fun at other
people’s religions? You’re terrible. We ought to kick you off the planet.” But
God pokes fun at other people’s religions all the time. That’s the godly thing
to do. Okay. Moving on.
Psalm 2:7. The anointed one is described in verse 6 as
My King. “God has announced that He has set His king on My holy hill of Zion.”
Now that king makes this declaration, “I [Messiah] will declare the decree; The
Lord [Yhwh,
God the Father] has said to Me [the Messiah]…” Who is this king? David’s
greater son, the Messiah. “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.” So it’s
a declaration of the Sonship of the Messiah. The Messiah isn’t Israel. The
Messiah is the Son of God who is the Messianic King, the Davidic king. It’s
talking about an individual, not a corporate group or a corporate entity.
Now the next thing which we see hear I think is really
interesting in Psalm 2:8, The Father says to the Son, “Ask of Me and I will
give You the nations for Your inheritance.” So, God the Son, the Mashiach, is
supposed to ask of the Father to give Him the nations as His possession. The
core idea in the word inheritance is possession. We’ve studied this before but
it’s been a long time.
In Daniel, chapter 7 we had the Son of Man come before
the Ancient of Days and ask the Ancient of Days for the kingdom. The Ancient of
Days gives Him the kingdom and He goes to the earth and destroys the rulers of
the earth. That happens at the Battle of Armageddon and then He establishes His
kingdom. That’s what is going on. He says, “Ask of Me, and I will give You the
nations for Your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for Your possession.”
Notice how possession and inheritance are parallel. That’s the idea of
inheritance. Not that someone died and left something for you in a will.
Inheritance has to do with that which is rightfully yours and you own.
Then the psalmist goes on to say in Psalm 2:9, “You
shall break them with a rod of iron; You shall dash them to pieces like a
potter’s vessel.” This is really important to see the connection here. Who is
it that breaks and smashes here? It’s the Son. It’s the Son who breaks and
smashes. It’s the Son who is the king.
We then look at Job 34:24, “He breaks in pieces mighty
men without inquiry, and sets others in their place.” Who is it that has the
right to break mighty men in pieces? It’s God the Father, Yhwh in context. It’s talking
about Yhwh
identified in the passage as El in
Job 34:23. It uses a verb meaning to break or shatter. “He breaks in pieces
mighty men without inquiry.” It is God who has the authority to break in
pieces. It is El. In Psalm 2 that
authority to break in pieces is given to whom? It’s given to the Son, the king,
the one who is declared to be His Son.
We look at a passage such as Psalm 24:1–2, “The
earth is Yhwh’s
and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.” This is asserting
the sovereignty of God over all His creatures on the earth. “For He has founded
it upon the seas, and established it upon the waters.” He is the One that
rules. Then as we look at this we notice that in Jeremiah 51:19–23, “The
portion of Jacob [another term for the Messiah] is not like them for He is the
maker of all things and Israel is the tribe of His inheritance.”
So there’s your word inheritance tying the portion of
Jacob as a term for the Messiah and Israel is the tribe of His inheritance.
What’s the name of the portion of Jacob? Yhwh of hosts. It ties it
together. The Messiah is the portion of Jacob. The Messiah is the maker of all
things. The Messiah is the Lord of hosts. It goes on to say, “You are my battle
axe and my weapons of war [Israel] for I will break the nations in pieces for
you. For with you I will destroy kingdoms. I will break in pieces the horses
and its riders, with you I will break in pieces the chariot and its rider, with
you I will also break in pieces a man and woman, with you I will break in
pieces all the young…”
The “you” here is the Messiah. “You are my battle
axe.” It’s talking about the Messiah. God the Father is going to use the
Messiah as the One who breaks up the nations, who destroys them, smashes them,
and breaks them in pieces. This is the same idea that we have expressed back in
Psalm 2:9, “You will break them with a rod of iron; You shall dash them to
pieces…” What God does in Job 34:24 is ascribed in Jeremiah 51 to the Messiah.
What I started off saying is that the titles of God,
the names of God, the worship of God and the works of God are all ascribed to
the Son of God, then the Son of God has to be fully divine just like the Father
is fully divine. What this does, then, basically is set up for us the fact that
the Old Testament clearly portrays a multiplicity of Persons in the Godhead and
that they are equal in essence, both fully divine and have the privileges of
deity.
Now we come to the last verse of Psalm 2, verse 12,
“Kiss the Son, lest He be angry…” What does that mean to kiss the Son? The
Unitarians tried to retranslate this but the concept of “kiss the son” means to
pay homage to the Son, just as if you went into a royal throne room, you would
kiss the ring of the king. You would bow down and show him your allegiance and
obedience to the king by kissing his ring. So kissing the Son here is an idiom
for showing your homage and obedience to the Son. “Lest He be angry, and you
perish in the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all
those who put their trust in Him.” So the Son is fully divine.
You only trust in God in the Scripture. The Scripture
says you’re a fool if you trust in man. You trust in God. So it is clear when
you look at Psalm 2 that you have God the Father and you have the Messiah, who
is declared to be the Son of God and that He is the one that is going to break
the nations, which is ascribed as an activity only to God in His justice. Then
in verse 12, you give obedience and allegiance to the Son just as you would to
the Father. This indicates again that the Son is fully God and fully divine and
therefore can’t be Israel. So when you look at these passages in the Old
Testament, it has to be a reference to another personage in the Godhead,
treated as God.
Next time I want to come back, look at a couple of
verses in the Old Testament before we push on and start talking about God the
Holy Spirit. So we’ve looked at the Father in the Old Testament, and we’ve
looked at the Son in the Old Testament with a couple of more passages to look
at and then we’re going to look at the Holy Spirit. As I pointed out last time,
there are more things said about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament than are
said about the Father and Son combined. So you have a fully orbed doctrine of
the Trinity in the Old Testament, it’s just not as specific as what you get in
the New Testament.
Now why is this important? It’s important for a number
of reasons. One is because it sets the stage for being able to understand the
main divine Characters in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are
not introducing a new concept of plurality in the Godhead. This was already
present in the Old Testament. It got rewritten or reinterpreted in the post-2nd
Temple period by rabbinical theology in order to avoid the Messianic
implications that were brought out by Jesus and the Christians. The second
thing it points out is that it’s important for understanding the role of God in
salvation, the role of God in the spiritual life, and the role of God in
ultimately bringing to fruition His plans and purposes for the human race and
for Israel. It gives us that global view of history and God’s plan for mankind
that can only be completely understood by understanding who God is and what He
has done. Let us pray.
“Father, we thank you for this time we’ve had this
evening to think about these things and to reflect upon how you are revealed in
the Old Testament, that these doctrines in the New Testament related to the
Trinity and the deity of Christ and the deity of the Holy Spirit are not new
but were already there in the Old Testament, clearly demonstrated. As we go
back and start to put pieces together and compare Scripture with Scripture, it
reveals this remarkable tapestry related to Your essence, and Your attributes
and Your work as our Creator, both in terms of Creation and in terms of
regeneration in each individual’s life. Father, we pray you will help us to
comprehend these things that we might have a greater understanding of who You
are and a greater capacity for relating to You in our spiritual life. We pray
this in Christ’s name. Amen.”