Jesus: Only Way to God the Father

Answering a question on Quora: 

Where in the Bible does it say the only way to the Father is through the Son?

New Testament

John 14:6

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Acts 4:12

And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among mankind by which we must be saved.

Note that approaching the Father requires “being saved.” This means that God must do what we cannot: redeem, regenerate, justify, and sanctify. Since the Son provided the means of redemption, it is not too much to ask that we acknowledge that the Son is whom He is and receive the gift as a free gift.

Old Testament

Psalm 2:11–12

Worship the LORD with reverence
And rejoice with trembling.
Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

Additional Evidence

The relationship between the Son and the Father is defined explicitly in the New Testament. Old Testament clues are there, but relevant passages are better interpreted in hindsight, that is, in light of the New Testament.

The first clue is in the opening lines of the Bible, where God says, let us make…. People who deny that the one God used creative power over space-time to experience it as three Persons frequently explain away “us” as a “royal we.” However, the literal interpretation is reinforced by the plural, “Gods,” in In the beginning Gods created the the heavens and the Earth. And the unity of the plural Gods is reinforced by the singular number of made. The best interpretation is that one God exists in space-time as three Persons in communication with each other.

Another clue, less clear in the Old Testament, is that, while God remains in heaven and unseen by any human, He also walked the earth in the appearance of a human. This can be traced from the Garden of Eden, through Abraham’s entertainment of strangers, to God’s revelation of Himself to Moses. The earthly liaison, so to speak, gave Himself a descriptive name, I AM — as contrasted with all other gods, who are not. He chose this name for our sakes but does not actually need one. No previous god existed with the authority to name Him, and no other god exists from whom He needs to be distinguished.

(The Hebrew word translated I AM and the LORD is YHWH. Note that the word has no vowels and the pronunciation was lost a few centuries before Jesus was born. Anybody who makes a big show about its pronunciation “knows” more than what the facts establish.)

To prevent desecration of God’s “name,” translators began a tradition of translating YHWH as the LORD (in capital letters). This is the God whom all Jews and Christians aspire to know.

In the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth reveals Himself to be YHWH, the I AM (John 8:58), the Word who was God, who was in the beginning with God, and through whom all created things were created (John 1:1–3, Colossians 1:16–17). In this light, passages such as Isaiah 9:6 make sense:

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

If you aspire to know the Lord, that is, God or God the Father, you aspire to know the Son. If you know the Son, you know the Father as well (John 14:7–11), but you cannot know the Father if you reject that the Son is who He says He is (John 8:9).

Copyright 2021, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for non-remunerated use. Please give credit where credit is due.

Bad Logic and Errors of Those Who Reject the Trinity

Denial leads to further denial.

One non-Christian belief holds that Christ Jesus is not God the Word come in the flesh (John 1:1, 2, 14). One symptom of this is the denial that their Jesus took part in his resurrection. They hold that their Jesus was entirely passive. Conceding that Christ had a part in raising Himself would imply His deity. Therefore, they must contradict the evidence.

My convention: The human Jesus of the deniers of Christ is he. The Christ Jesus of the Bible is He.

He really did say it.

Christ claimed to have the power to rise from the dead (John 10:17-18). Before the fact, He demonstrated the truth of His claim by raising others from the dead. This is crucial to us because Christ promised that He would raise believers from the dead in the Last Days. 

If Christ lacks such power, then He is a liar. Even worse, He is a blasphemer because He promised to do what only God can do. But if Christ can do what God can do, then He must be God. This is the truth that anti-Trinitarians must deny.

In Mark 8:31, Mark 9:9, John 2:19, Christ used active voice, meaning that he would do the raising -- I will rise or I will raise; and in Luke 18:33, He used middle voice, meaning that He would perform the raising on Himself -- I will raise myself. (1) 

One cannot deny that Christ Jesus said He would raise Himself without either treating the gospels as unreliable and non inspired or else contradicting Him. And one cannot contradict Christ without implying that He was a false prophet who did not keep his word. 

Non-Trinitarians would not openly call their Jesus a false prophet. They would not openly call the gospels non inspired. But their doctrine requires either one or the other.

If God says I will, does He need to say I did?

They argue that nobody in the New Testament says, after the resurrection, that Christ had an active role in raising Himself. This is false both factually and logically. 

It is true that throughout Acts and the epistles, the authors do not use active voice (He rose). They usually state that God raised Christ from the dead. Grammatically, however, this is not a solid claim. Many occurrences of the verbs are ambiguous; they could be translated as either passive voice (He was raised) or middle voice (He raised Himself).

To a Trinitarian -- or to a Jew -- the statements that God the Father raised Jesus illustrate the Father's seal of approval on the Son. Christ stated that the Holy Spirit bore witness to His identity through the miracles He performed. Similarly, the Father's involvement in Christ's resurrection validated Christ's identity, so a Trinitarian expects many references to the Father's involvement. Congruent actions of Christ and the Father give evidence of Christ's divine nature. Admitting to this would undermine the non-Trinitarian view, so they must deny it.

Factually, Mark wrote that Christ rose (active voice in Mark 16:9), and the resurrected Christ Jesus Himself explained to the disciples that the Old Testament prophesied that the Christ would rise out from the dead (active voice in Luke 24:46; see also John 20:9). If only the Father were involved those sentences would all have used the passive voice (he was raised).

Logically, if Jesus Christ is the Truth (John 14:6), then He cannot lie; neither can He prophesy falsely. If He said something before the resurrection, it stands, regardless of whether somebody else later confirmed that He kept His word. To say otherwise is to call Jesus a liar, to call Jesus a false prophet, or to deny the reliability of Mark, Luke, and John.

Pitiful Logic

Another facet of their contradiction of what Christ said points to the many statements in Acts and the epistles that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. According to their faulty reasoning, if God the Father raised Jesus, then Christ did not. 

Such pitiful logic follows an either-or relation and rejects, without justification, an either-or-and relation. In logic, or does not preclude the possibility of both propositions being true. (If one and only one out of two alternatives can be true, it is call an exclusive or.) Their reasoning is like looking at a quarter and concluding that it either has the face of George Washington or it has the image of an eagle, but it cannot have both. Their logic is faulty because both descriptions are true.

A Trinitarian can reconcile saying both that Christ does something and that God does it because Christ is God the Son. God the Son can raise Jesus' body from the dead, God the Father can, and the two Persons can do it cooperatively. Thus, Trinitarians do not have to attack the character of Christ or the gospels, nor do they have to use faulty logic as the non Trinitarians do.

Warning

Christ's involvement in His resurrection has an importance greater than that regarding the future resurrection of believers. According to 1 Corinthians 12:3, one who does not confess, Lord Jesus -- which implies His deity -- does not have the Holy Spirit. Rather, according to 2 John 1:7, the person who denies that Christ Jesus came in the flesh -- which is meaningless if we do not accept His pre-existent deity -- is guided by antichrist. 

Beware Unitarians, liberal mainliners, Jehovah's Witnesses, or any other theological cult that denies the deity of Christ. You don't want to follow that spirit.

Copyright 2015, Richard Wheeler

Differences between the Persons of the Trinity

Differences between the Persons of the Trinity

Raymond, a Oneness Pentecostal, challenges the Trinity. If the Father, Son, and Spirit are One in nature and One in substance, how can we tell them apart? If there's no difference, the Trinity must be pointless and a Unitarian God makes more sense.

Oneness refers to the Unitarian belief that God exists as only one Person. Some Unitarians believe that God is a quick-change artist who switches costumes to appear as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Others believe the Father is God, the Son was just a man, and the Spirit is an impersonal force.

Raymond says no Trinitarian has ever answered his question, How can we distinguish between the Persons or personalities of the Persons of the Trinity? With that claim he implies that the Trinity does not make sense.

Differences in Person

The question has two answers because it has two parts. By Person, we mean all that makes up the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. There is no reason to expect any difference in nature (the characteristics) or substance (whatever spiritual stuff they are made of. If there are differences, no mortal mind could grasp them.

We except from that statement the body of Christ Jesus. God translated the body of Jesus from physical form into spiritual form when Jesus ascended to Heaven. So the Son may have that additional "substance."

I'm sorry, but I have to hedge even on the exception. Jesus said, "I am in the Father, and the Father is in me" (John 14:11). Also, after His baptism by John, Jesus "returned from the Jordan [river], full of the Holy Spirit" (Luke 4:1). Therefore, the Father and the Spirit may share the the body of Jesus in Heaven. That brings us back to the Three having identical substance, even during and after the Son inhabited a physical body!

More than one in one

How does one program in a computer differ from another? They share the same hardware. They share access to all the power, interfaces, and data within the computer. Since a computer's existence is limited to the physical universe, the programs have to take turns checking the keyboard buffer, executing instructions in the CPU, storing data to or retrieving data from RAM, displaying information on the monitor, and so forth.

They differ not in substance, but in information. Each contains instructions and data that correspond to their roles. You cannot look at a computer and see the programs. Even if you examined the magnetic states on the hard drive, the logic states in the CPU, or the electrostatic states in the RAM, you would need yet more information to know where to look and to decode it. 

One, but more than One

Since God is spirit in nature, omnipresent, and eternal, it would be unrealistic to think we could "look" with our mind's eye at God or at the three Persons of God, let alone have the ability to recognize differences in what we see. It's not like the Father would have flowing white hair and a bald spot, the Son would wear gold chains and would have his pants hanging down below His butt, or the Holy Spirit would wear a butler's uniform.

The difference until the incarnation would appear to have been strictly informational. The three Persons have self awareness and, although we could not tell them apart, they know each other. Even if there were no differences in nature between the three in their transcendent reality, each would still be able to distinguish the other two because, to the extent that they exercise such knowledge, they know each others' minds (for example, Romans 8:27, "He [the Father] who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit"). 

As a result of accepting different roles and executing the functions of those roles, the three Persons accumulate differentiation in "their" memories. Yet even in that I must again hedge because, since the Trinity shares a common substance, the three Persons can share in each other's experiences.

Differences in Personalities

I would define personality as the aggregate of inward and outward attributes. Inward attributes would stem from one's nature. Having the same nature and shared substance, the three Persons of the Trinity would have identical inward attributes.

Outward attributes would result from the combination of the inward attributes and the Person's role. Whereas inward attributes express the nature, outward attributes put the role into action consistent with the inward attributes.

Listing the personality differences between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rockets past my pay grade (if I had one). Having just enough knowledge to be a danger to myself, though, I'll attempt to name at least one unique outward attribute for each Person.

Personality of God the Father

• Christ said that not even He knew the day or hour of the end of the age; only the Father knew, so the Father is the Planner.
• The Father deploys the Son and the Spirit to execute His plan, so the Father is the Coordinator.
• The Father receives Change Requests from the Son and Spirit and issues Change Orders, so He presides over the Change Control Board.

These tell me that the Father is the Manager among the Three. Although the Father delegates certain judgments, He takes responsibility for the divine plan and its execution. Would He be better than the other two at those roles? No, His leadership does not indicate a difference in nature; but we perceive a recognizable outward attribute that ensues from a difference in role.

Personality of God the Son

• Since the Father fulfills a role of Leader, the Son and the Spirit fulfill roles as Followers. 
• Following requires obedience. While the Spirit obeys, the Spirit does not need to obey sacrificially. For a time, the Son forsook the glory of Deity and the comfort of Heaven. He took on the weakness and vulnerability of a child and a man, took upon Himself the weight of the guilt of the world, and suffered torture and physical death. He "learned obedience," not just as a matter of being obedient by nature, as all three Persons are, but by experience.
• As a follower of the Father, the Son demonstrates humility by representing and obeying the Father.
• As one who experienced the discomforts, risks, temptations, and agonies of earthly life and death, the Son understands our experience, so He has empathy.

This tells me that, although the nature of any of the three persons would have led to identical behavior, the Son acts with humility and grace in ways that the other two members do not have opportunity to express. Moreover, all three Persons can sympathize, but only the Son can empathize with us because He shared the human experience. As we consider the Son's sacrifice and see His humanity and brotherhood, which presents God as accessible, relateable, and an object of affection.

Personality of God the Holy Spirit

• The Spirit enlightens man that he might see and births believers into life.
• What the Son demonstrated, the Spirit enables. The Spirit imbues and empowers spiritual gifts in accordance with the Father's plan.
• The Spirit glorifies not Himself, but the Son and the Father by teaching, through the Sword of the Spirit, the written Word of God, all spiritual knowledge that we need.

This tells me that the Spirit enacts the quiet humility of a servant, teaching and equipping the saints for their own role in the spiritual economy that they might enjoy the benefits of God's love and glorify their Father and Brother.

The difference is also intuitive

It should be obvious to anyone that, although the Trinity is one in substance and its members are equal in nature, if we relate to the Father as our Father, to the Son as our Big Brother, and to the Holy Spirit as our Teacher, Quartermaster, and King's Messenger, we innately recognize differences of personality, even if we fail to consciously recognize them.