Answering Objections

Tell someone that there is one God — the Father — and that Jesus Christ is the literal, only-begotten Son of that God, and the texts come quickly. What about “let us make man”? What about “the Word was God”? What about “I and my Father are one”? What about the three that bear record in heaven? The list feels long, and each verse feels, on first reading, like a wall.

It is not a wall. Nearly every verse offered as proof of a triune God is a verse that, read in its own context and laid beside its own cross-references, says something the doctrine does not need — or something it cannot use. What follows is the patient work of taking the objections one at a time. No creeds, no councils, no later authorities are appealed to here. Only the text, and the rule the text itself gives us for reading it.

How to weigh a proof-text

A proof-text is a single verse asked to carry a doctrine by itself. The danger is not that the verse is false — it is that the verse is being read alone. Scripture gives the remedy in its own words:

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.

Three questions disarm almost every proof-text. First: what does the passage itself say in the verses just before and after — does the wider paragraph mean what the clipped phrase seems to mean? Second: what do the clear texts say on the same subject — a doctrine must be built on the plain verses and then asked of the obscure ones, never the reverse. Third: does the reading contradict the whole drift of Scripture — because the Bible does not teach two things that cancel each other. Hold those three questions and the objections answer themselves.

The one God of the whole Bible

Before any single verse, set the frame Scripture sets. From end to end the Bible names one God, and it identifies Him.

But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

One sentence holds the whole architecture. There is one God — and Paul names Him: the Father — the source of Whom all things come. And there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, the One by Whom all things were made. Two persons, not three; and they are not interchangeable. The Father is the fountain; the Son is the One through Whom the fountain pours. This is not an isolated saying. It is the constant grammar of the New Testament — “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3), “one God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:6), the God Whom Jesus Himself called my God (John 20:17; Revelation 3:12). Every objection below is being asked to overturn this. None of them can.

Part one · The Old Testament

“Let us make man in our image” — Genesis 1:26

The plural is real, but it does not need three, and it does not mean a committee inside a single being. The very next verse drops back to the singular and settles the count:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.

Us in verse 26 becomes his and he in verse 27. Whatever the plural signals, it is not a plurality of gods, or the writer would not have switched to the singular to report the act. Scripture itself tells us who the us is, and it is exactly two: the God of whom are all things, and the Son by whom they were made.

God … hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son … by whom also he made the worlds.

The Father creates by His Son; the “us” is the Father speaking to the One at His side, the same One John calls the Word Who was “in the beginning with God” and through Whom “all things were made” (John 1:1–3). As for Elohim — the plural form is used of the single false god Dagon (1 Samuel 5:7) and of the single golden calf (Exodus 32:4, 8); Hebrew uses the plural for fulness and majesty, not arithmetic. The word never adds up to three persons, because Scripture uses the very same word for one.

“The LORD our God is one LORD” — Deuteronomy 6:4

Echad is simply the Hebrew number one. It is the word for one day, one man, one altar, one law. It can describe a unity made of parts — but only because the noun beside it does, never because the number itself means “more than one.” You cannot get plurality out of the word one; you have to read it in from somewhere else. And the decisive witness is the One Who quoted this verse:

Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord … And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he.

Jesus recites the Shema as Israel always understood it, and the scribe answers “there is one God, and there is none other but he” — and Jesus tells him he has answered discreetly and is “not far from the kingdom of God” (verse 34). If one secretly meant three, this was the moment to correct the man. Instead the Son of God commends the plainest possible reading. One means one.

“Holy, holy, holy” — Isaiah 6:3

Threefold repetition in Hebrew is the language of emphasis — the superlative, the absolute — not a count of persons. The same prophets cry “O earth, earth, earth” (Jeremiah 22:29) without three earths, and warn of “the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” (Jeremiah 7:4) without three temples. A thing said three times is said with all possible force. And Scripture tells us exactly who is on the throne the seraphim are praising:

… Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

The threefold “holy” is glossed in the same breath — not by three persons, but by three tenses: the One which was, and is, and is to come. It is one Being praised in His eternity, not three beings counted on the wing.

“The everlasting Father … the mighty God” — Isaiah 9:6

Take the titles as they read. The Son is called mighty God — and so He is; He is divine. But the same Isaiah keeps the words mighty and Almighty distinct, and reserves Almighty for the Father. Men are even called el, mighty, in the Hebrew (the “mighty” of the nations, Ezekiel 32:21). To be mighty God is to be divine; it is not to be the Most High. As for everlasting Father — the word is father in the sense of founder, life-giver to a people. The Son is the everlasting Father of the redeemed, the second Adam who fathers a new race that will never end:

… Behold I and the children which God hath given me.

He is Father to us, not Father of Himself. And everlasting looks forward — His fatherhood of the redeemed has no end — which is a different claim from having no beginning. The title exalts the Son; it does not collapse Him into the One He calls His own God.

“Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” — Micah 5:2

Micah is one of the clearest statements that the Son truly pre-exists — long before Bethlehem, back into the depths of eternity. That is exactly what we confess. But notice what kind of word the prophet chooses. Goings forth (Hebrew motsaah) is a word of issuing, proceeding, coming out from a source. The verse does not say the Son never came forth; it says His coming forth reaches back into eternity past. To go forth from is to have an origin in the One you go forth from.

That is the consistent testimony. The Son is the One Whom God brought forth before the works of old —

When there were no depths, I was brought forth … before the hills was I brought forth.

— language Scripture itself reads as wisdom’s, and which the New Testament identifies with Christ “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). The point is not a date on a calendar; there was no calendar, no “depths,” no time at all. The point is a relation: a real Father, a real Son Who came forth from Him in the eternity before anything was made. Micah proves the Son’s eternity past — and locates its source in the Father.

Part two · The Son and the texts that call Him God

“The Word was God” — John 1:1

Read the verse whole and it does the opposite of fusing them; it carefully distinguishes them while affirming the Son’s divinity.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word was with God — you cannot be with someone and be that same someone; the preposition keeps two persons in view. And the Word was God — that is, the Word is of the same divine nature as the Father He is with, fully God by what He is. Sonship does not make Him less than divine; a son is of the same nature as his father. The verse tells us the Word is divine and that He is distinct from the God He was with. It never says He is the One He is with. John finishes the chapter naming the relation outright: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father (John 1:18).

“Before Abraham was, I am” — John 8:58

He is claiming something enormous, and we should not soften it: He is claiming to have existed before Abraham, and to be the One Who spoke with the patriarchs. That is the strongest reading of the Old Testament, too — that the One Who appeared again and again as the angel of the LORD, the One Who is called the LORD and yet is sent by the LORD, is the pre-incarnate Son. The Son rightly bears the divine name, because the Father’s name is in Him (Exodus 23:21).

But bearing the Father’s name is not being the Father. The Son carries the name as the One sent, the One in Whom the Father dwells — which is why, in the same Gospel, this same “I am” immediately adds that He can do nothing of Himself (John 5:19, 30) and that the Father is greater than I (John 14:28). “Before Abraham was, I am” proves the Son’s real pre-existence and His divine dignity. It does not erase the One Who sent Him.

“I and my Father are one” — John 10:30

The word for one here is neuter — one thing, not one person — and Jesus defines the kind of oneness He means a few chapters later, in His prayer for the disciples:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us … that they may be one, even as we are one.

The Son asks that the disciples be one as He and the Father are one. If John 10:30 means one essence, then John 17 asks for all believers to be melted into a single essence — which no one believes. The oneness is a oneness of mind, will, and purpose — perfect unity, not single substance. And when His hearers seize stones, Jesus tells them plainly what claim they have misheard: not “I am God,” but I said, I am the Son of God (John 10:36).

“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” — John 14:9

He explains the words Himself in the very next breath, and the explanation is not identity but indwelling:

Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.

To see the Son is to see the Father because the Father dwells in Him and works through Him — the perfect image and representative, so that the character of the unseen God is read off the face of the Son (2 Corinthians 4:6; Colossians 1:15). That is a relationship between two, not the erasing of one into the other. The Son does not say “I am the Father.” He says the Father is in Him.

“Form of God” and “the fulness of the Godhead” — Philippians 2:6; Colossians 2:9

Both texts exalt the Son, and we let them. He is in the form of God because He is divine by nature, the Son of God. But read on: Philippians 2 is the story of one who did not grasp at equality but emptied himself and became obedient — the language of a Son who submits to a Father, not of two co-equal claimants. And the fulness in Colossians is given, not self-possessed:

For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.

The fulness of the Godhead dwells in the Son because it pleased the Father — it is the Father’s good pleasure that puts it there. A Son who holds all the Father’s fulness, at the Father’s pleasure, is the highest possible exaltation of a Son. It is not a second independent God.

“Without father, without mother … having neither beginning of days” — Hebrews 7:3

The text is about the priesthood, and reading it the way the objection wants breaks it in half. If “without father, without mother” means literally no parents, then it disproves the Son, who is forever the Son of the Father. The phrase is about genealogy of office: unlike the Levitical priests, whose right to serve depended on a recorded family line (Hebrews 7:5–6; Nehemiah 7:64), Melchizedek appears in the record with no priestly pedigree — no listed father, mother, birth, or death — and so stands as a figure of a priesthood that does not pass by descent.

… made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.

Made like unto — Melchizedek is shaped in the record to resemble the Son; the Son is not being defined by Melchizedek. The likeness is in an unending priesthood, not in being unbegotten.

Then is the Son God? — yes, and here is how

After all of this an honest reader asks the fair question: the Bible does call the Son God — in John 1:1, in Thomas’s cry “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28), in “unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God” (Hebrews 1:8). Do we deny those? Not for a moment. The Son is God — truly, fully divine — because He is the Son of God, and a true son is of the very nature of his father. A son of man is man; the Son of God is God.

What Scripture never does is make the Son the God of the Son. In the very verse that calls the Son “God,” the next line says:

… therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

The Son has a God — the Father — even while being called God Himself. Both are true at once because of what the word Son means: divine by inheritance from a divine Father, and yet ever the Son, with a Head over Him (1 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Corinthians 15:28). To confess the Son as God is not Trinitarianism; it is the only-begotten Son taken at His word.

Part three · The Holy Spirit

The dove and the voice — Matthew 3:16–17

Two persons are unmistakably present and named: the Son being baptized, and the Father speaking from heaven. The third element is not a person introduced but a manifestation — the Spirit descending like a dove. A dove is one form; it no more proves the Spirit is a third person than the cloven tongues of fire at Pentecost prove the Spirit is a hundred and twenty persons (Acts 2:3). Scripture says whose Spirit it is:

… he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.

The Spirit of God — the Father’s own Spirit, His presence and power, coming to rest on His Son. The scene shows the Father pouring His Spirit on the Son. It shows two persons and one Spirit that belongs to them, not three persons standing side by side.

“Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” — Matthew 28:19

The verse names the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — and it does not call them three persons, three Gods, or one essence; it simply names them. Name is singular, and in Scripture to act “in the name” of someone is to act by their authority (1 Samuel 17:45; Acts 4:7). Baptism is into the authority of the Father, exercised through His Son, and received by His Spirit. The decisive thing is how the apostles — who heard the command — actually obeyed it:

… Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.

Every recorded baptism in Acts is in the name of Jesus (Acts 8:16; 10:48; 19:5). If Matthew 28:19 were a fixed formula declaring three co-equal persons, the men who stood on the mountain and heard it broke it on the day of Pentecost and never kept it once. They did not break it; they understood it as authority, and the authority is the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Comforter who “shall not speak of himself” — John 14–16

Read the promise to its end and the “other Comforter” turns out to be Christ Himself, present in a new way. Jesus says the world cannot receive the Spirit, “but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” — and then, without pausing:

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

The departing Comforter (the Son) promises another Comforter and in the same breath says I will come to you. The new presence is His own — “at that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). That is why the Spirit “shall not speak of himself” —

… for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.

— exactly as the Son said of His own ministry: “I speak not of myself” (John 14:10), “I do nothing of myself” (John 8:28). The Spirit speaks from its source, not from a separate will, because it is the very life and presence of the Father and the Son reaching the believer. And the same word for Comforter, parakletos, is given to Jesus by name: “we have an advocate [parakletos] with the Father, Jesus Christ” (1 John 2:1).

“Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God” — Acts 5:3–4

The equation is right; the conclusion overreaches. To lie to a person’s spirit is to lie to that person — that is how spirit language works everywhere in the Bible. When Daniel says “my spirit was grieved” (Daniel 7:15), it is Daniel who is grieved. The Holy Spirit is God’s own Spirit — “the Spirit of God” — so to lie to the Spirit of God is to lie to God, just as the verse says. That is precisely why the Spirit can be grieved as God is grieved:

And grieve not the holy Spirit of God …

The holy Spirit of God — Paul’s own phrase. It is God’s Spirit; to sin against it is to sin against God. Acts 5 proves the Spirit is divine because it is God’s Spirit. It does not make it a person other than the God whose Spirit it is.

“The grace … the love … the communion of the Holy Ghost” — 2 Corinthians 13:14

The verse blesses the church with three gifts — grace, love, and communion — not three persons set in a row as equals. Notice the third phrase is not “the Holy Spirit” as a person greeted, but the communion — the fellowship, the partaking — of the Spirit: the shared life God gives. And tellingly, this is the one place Paul writes it this way. His standard greeting, opening letter after letter, names two:

Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

That two-fold blessing — “from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ” — opens nearly every epistle in the New Testament (Romans 1:7; Galatians 1:3; Ephesians 1:2; and on). If the third person belonged in the formula, the apostles left him out of almost every greeting they ever wrote. They did not forget him; there were two from whom grace and peace come, and one Spirit by which they come.

Part four · The two great proof-texts

“There are three that bear record in heaven” — 1 John 5:7

This sentence is the strongest-sounding text of all, and it has a history that settles it twice over. First, on the text itself: the heavenly-witnesses clause is absent from every Greek manuscript of the first thirteen centuries. It appears in no early Greek copy, and the earliest writers — even those arguing hardest about the Godhead — never quote it, which they surely would have if it stood in their Bibles. It entered the printed Greek text only in the sixteenth century and is recognized as a later addition. It is not part of what John wrote.

Second, even reading it as it stands, it does not say what the objection needs. The very next verse defines what “these three are one” means:

And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

The earthly three — Spirit, water, blood — “agree in one” the same way the heavenly three are said to be “one”: one in testimony, agreeing in their witness. No one imagines the water and the blood are persons of one essence. The oneness is the oneness of a harmonious witness, which is the whole subject of the passage. Read out of the text, or read in it — the verse will not carry a Trinity.

The throne, the Lamb, and the seven Spirits — Revelation 1; 4–5

Revelation is the book most often pictured as crowded with a divine three, and it is the book that most carefully shows two. When heaven is opened, John counts the thrones for us. There is One who sits on the throne, and there is the Lamb who comes and takes the book out of the right hand of the One on the throne (Revelation 5:6–7). The whole creation then worships exactly two:

… Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

The Father on the throne and the Lamb before it — two, and no third on a third throne. The “seven Spirits before his throne” are just that: seven, the number of fulness and completeness, the sevenfold Spirit of God sent out into all the earth (Revelation 5:6; Zechariah 4:10). A person is not seven; the sevenfold fulness of the one Spirit of God is. From the first chapter to the last, Revelation’s heaven holds the One on the throne and the Lamb at His right hand — the one God and His Son.

The picture that holds together

Stand back from the verses and a single picture has been there the whole time, from Genesis to Revelation. There is one God, the Father — the source of all things, the One who was never begotten and never sent. From Him, in the eternity before anything was made, came forth His only-begotten Son, of the Father’s own nature, divine as a son is of his father — the One by whom God made the worlds and through whom He redeemed them. And the Spirit is not a third person standing apart, but the very life and presence of the Father and the Son, poured out to dwell in the believer.

Nothing in that picture is diminished by the objections; each objection, followed home, has led back into it. And it is the picture the gospel itself requires. For the love of God to be real, the gift must be real:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son …

A father who gives his son gives something of himself, at real cost. A symbol giving a symbol, or one mask of God sending another mask, costs nothing and loves no one. The doctrine we have been defending is not a smaller view of Christ — it is the one that lets John 3:16 mean what it says: a true Father, who so loved the world that He gave His true, only-begotten Son. That is the God of the whole Bible, and there is none other but He.