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DEUTERONOMY 6:4 “HEAR, O ISRAEL; THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD.” (KJV, RSV)
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (NKJV, NIV, NASB)
“Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah.” (ASV)
“O Israel, listen: Jehovah is our God, Jehovah alone.” (TLB)
"Hear, O Israel" is the beginning of the Shema, a Jewish prayer and declaration of faith. It's a central part of Jewish liturgy and a foundational statement of monotheism. The prayer emphasizes loving God with all one's heart, soul, and might. Most importantly, it stresses the point God has made through the ages…He is God alone! We serve ONE GOD.
Throughout the Old Testament, God recognized the presence of many “gods” even among the Israelites. But He always returned the message, both directly and through His prophets, that He alone is God and there are no others. He expected Israel (and us) to worship Him alone.
In 1 Samuel 7:3, Samuel spoke to the house of Israel saying, “If you return to the Lord with all your hearts, put away the strange gods from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the Lord and serve Him only, He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” Later, in both Matthew 4:10 and Luke 4:8, when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, He reminded him that the Word was written that “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him ONLY shalt thou serve.”
We serve a “Him Only” God! He proved many times throughout history that He is a jealous God. We learned that men constantly tried to choose other gods to serve, other idols that we constantly want to put before God. Through that disobedience, Israel repeatedly fell into disaster and destruction, to only be rescued by returning to the Only God for repentance and restoration.
We must be careful as Christians as well to never attempt to put multiple gods in His place. This was the problem the pharisees encountered in confronting Jesus. They still have not recognized Jesus, the Messiah, God in flesh coming to us for our salvation two thousand years later.
They crucified Him, primarily for claiming equality with God as His Son. To them, this was blasphemy which denied their understanding of One God and no other. They could not accept God becoming flesh and living as a man, our only sacrifice for sins, as anything other than an attempt by Jesus to declare Himself God. In John 8:58, Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” They tried to stone him for that claim.
Even in the early days of the church, by attempting to explain the oneness of the Godhead under the title of “trinity,” Christianity treaded dangerously close to explaining our One God as three separate persons. In fact, everything in Scripture clearly explains, as Jesus did to his disciples, that God became flesh, lived as a man, died as the only acceptable Lamb/sacrifice for us and rose from the dead so that we might also experience that resurrection some day.
When Jesus came, the angels declared the coming of Emmanuel, God with us in Matthew 1:23, “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, ‘GOD WITH US.’” This was prophesied over a thousand years earlier by Isaiah: Isa 7:14 “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”
Jesus declared in John 10:30, “I and my Father are ONE.” In His priestly prayer in John 17:22, Jesus prayed, “the glory which You gave me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are ONE.”
Read Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. Both descriptions of the creation can only be true if Jesus and God are ONE. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis) “All things were made through Him (the Word), and without Him nothing was made that was made.” (John 1:3) “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory…” (verse 14) Did God create the heavens and the earth? Did Jesus? Who is “the Word?” Yes, HE created all things that were made, not THEY.
When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus declared to them all, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father,” John 14:9. Both Martha and Thomas, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, declared Jesus, “my Lord and my God.” See John 20:28. They were not replacing God with Jesus…they were recognizing Jesus as God in the flesh.
Jesus did not send another God to the disciples after He was gone. He came in the manifestation of the Holy Spirit to be with them. Otherwise, how could he declare to the disciples (and us), “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5-6) Jesus was with them throughout the rest of their lives. He is with us as well, and never leaves us, just as He promised.
Colossians 2:9 declares to us, “For in Him (Jesus) dwells the fulness of the godhead bodily.” Jesus was the bodily manifestation of God, sent to us to live with us, be like us and die for us. Jesus was FULLY God, not a part of God. 1 Timothy 3:16 tries to explain this mystery when it says, “Great is the mystery of godliness: GOD was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” Each of these events described were the testimony of the life of Jesus, yet Paul describes them as God manifest in the flesh.
We need to be gracious in our attempt to understand God as faulty human beings. The fault of trinity thinking is that we attempt to explain God as three persons…He is ONE. I have studied thoroughly trinitarian theology and acknowledge that it fully teaches that Jesus was and is fully GOD. I also acknowledge that we are trying to put a concept of the Creator of the universe coming in human flesh, miraculously born of a virgin, in terms we can understand. As hard as us humans describing God must be, however, I never want to discourage the lifelong goal of trying to understand Him. I think He encourages us, through the Word and through the testimony of our lives, to try to know Him better and better every day.
God has been working for almost 6,000 years now to restore fallen man from his desperate lot. He manifested Himself in many ways through those years. He chose to manifest Himself in flesh for thirty three years and became the only acceptable sacrifice for my sins. For the last 2,000 years, He has manifested Himself as the Holy Spirit, in many mighty and wondrous ways.
At the end of this life, we each get to meet Him face to face. Paul says, then we shall be like Him and see Him as He is. Wow! He is ONE. In Christ, we are one with Him. Some day soon, He will declare Himself again, in the flesh to rule and reign forever. We don’t have to understand it all. We just need to keep being faithful to the work He has given each of us to do. Be faithful!
Questions to ponder: Can we really think that, in this life, we will ever come to the point when we can say we fully understand God? Is the contrast between Trinitarian thinking and Oneness so different that they are worth arguing over? What does the phrase “the mystery of godliness mean?” Is it easy to have agreed with a concept that we have been taught all our lives so thoroughly that it is impossible for us to consider a different way of thinking about it? Is the goal of spending a lifetime trying to understand God a worthy goal? Or, is He so hard to comprehend that it really isn’t worth trying to?
Other Scriptures to Study: Did I not list enough Scriptures above to study to give one enough to consider? To give grace to those who consider the Father and the Son separate, are there many verses in the New Testament where it appears that Jesus kind of describes Himself in terms that could be interpreted as being separate? What are they?
 
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