The complex God

The first time I went to the ocean I was entranced by it. I was perhaps 10 and I loved the feeling of the water on my feet. It lapped and moved in and out. The further in I got, the stronger the pull seemed to be. Then I took one step and my feet met nothing, the bank dropped away and I slipped under the water with a sudden shock. I started floundering and got scared until my dad came out of nowhere and caught me, he steadied me and laid me back so that I was floating and the previously scary depths became something that bore me up instead. 

I keep coming back to this story in my mind when I think about God. God is like the ocean: vast, powerful and containing hidden depths. 

three . . . in one?

When it comes to describing God these kinds of analogies are sometimes all we have. After all, God surely wouldn’t be someone you can describe easily. Isaiah 46:9 says, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.” It stands to reason God is not easy to quantify or describe. And so when it comes to describing the personhood of God, once again Christianity has historically called on analogy or metaphor to picture what God is like. 

For Christians, that seems to be three distinct persons in one Godhead: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three in one. There are famous analogies—for example St Patrick used the picture of a clover, three individual leaves on one unifying stem to picture God’s being. 

The problem is that while these pictures get us started on understanding God, none of these analogies feel completely satisfactory, and I suspect using a simple picture to describe a complex Being will always leave us flat.

So where do we get this idea of three Person from? The Bible has many verses that confidently declare God to be one Being only. For example, the ancient Jewish declaration of faith in Deuteronomy 6:4,5 seems to indicate the oneness of God.

“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And as for you, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” 

It seems very clear from that one verse that God is one Being. But many other verses starting from the very first book of the Bible also present another picture—one of God being a plural. For example, the word used for God in Genesis 1 is Elohim. When you see an -im (pronounced eem) suffix in Hebrew, that designates a plurality (more than one). So God is being referred to here as a plurality. That image is further reinforced by the Spirit of God being shown in verse 2 as hovering over the waters. It would be easy to say God was hovering there, but the verse is very clear this is a different Entity, a Spirit, or Breath. Then there is more reinforcement of the plurality—in verse 26 God says,

Let us make mankind in our image (italics added). 

Some have argued this is simply God using the royal we, or perhaps God was speaking to angels when He said we. However, verse 27 makes it very clear:

So God created mankind in his own image.

Humans were made in the image of God alone, not the angels. So, who is God speaking to when He says, “Let us make mankind in our image”? Those are both plural terms. Yet we know God is one, the contrast can be confusing.

So why not ignore these little pictures and Bible verses about a plural yet singular God if we don’t quite understand them? Because there are just so many of them through Scripture. 

When the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Genesis 19:24 says,

Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens.

There seems to be two Lords present in this scene. Lord is the term used in the Old Testament when the tetragrammaton “YHWH” was written to represent God’s name. If you look in a Bible you will notice that Lord is written in all capitals LORD. That’s when that “YHWH” is used—the belief was that the name of God was too holy to put into words. So in this verse, we have two separate LORDs, one on earth, and one in heaven. What are we to make of that except that God is a plurality.

It gets even clearer in Matthew 28 when Jesus declares that the Christian mandate is to baptise in the name (singular) of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (a plurality). In other verses we are told that the fullness of God is in Christ (Colossians 2:9), that it is possible to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31), both of which indicates very clearly that both Jesus and the Spirit are unique Persons and yet both God as well. 

still confused?

You aren’t alone. Even the disciples of Jesus didn’t quite get it. Jesus explained it to His disciples in John 14:7 saying, “ If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Jesus is telling His disciples that when they look at Jesus they have seen the Father. But this is still confusing for some of them. We see a follow up from Philip who says in verse 8,

Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.

Jesus replies with this astonishing statement:

Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? 

Well, Jesus must have been met with a sea of confused faces because He says next in verse 11,

Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.

“Believe,” Jesus says. “Believe Me because the evidence that God is in me is right in front of you. Believe because I say it, but if you still aren’t sure, look at the evidence you see. 

“The sick are healed, the blind can see and the dead live again. God born as a human to live among us.” 

For all our theological confusion, Jesus says, “If you want to understand God look at Me”.

The evidence I have seen of Jesus in people’s hearts, of the Spirit moving through their lives and of the creation of a sovereign God is enough for me to believe in what Jesus has said. Will I one day have 100 per cent understanding of the uniqueness and wonder that is God’s personhood? I doubt it. Because if I could comprehend and encompass God with my thoughts He would hardly be worthy to be God. But when that confusion and desire to understand makes me feel like my feet have slipped out from under me and I am being tossed and turned by a powerful unknown ocean, I feel the hands of Jesus beneath me lifting me up to float on the surface, and I am steady and safe in His arms. And that’s all I need to know.