The Only True God Is One Person
– Not Two or Three
In spite of Trinitarian tinkering with language by redefining the word “person” to being simply “mind” there is no biblical reason to imagine that God is triune i.e., three persons in one essence or three minds in one essence. So, however one defines the word “person” God speaks of Himself as a single person with a single mind and is spoken about in this way throughout the Scriptures.
The Singular Person Yahweh Is the One True God
When we look at the entire Bible there are more than 20,000 singular personal pronouns and verbs attributed to God (e.g., Deut. 4:35; Ex. 20:3-5; Matt. 4:10; Matt. 19:4) indicating that He is a single person. If the Scriptures did teach Trinitarianism then all references to the “persons” of God require the use of plural personal pronouns and verbs. Yet this never occurs.
NOTE: The “we/us” passages (Gen. 1:26; 3:22; 11:7 and Isaiah 6:8) all have a natural explanation as found in 1 Kings 22:19, 23; Job 15:8 and Jeremiah 23:18 showing that God is speaking, not within Himself, but to the angels.
ONLY YAHWEH IS GOD
So how many persons must there be in Yahweh God according to God’s statement in Isaiah? “Yahweh...I am the first and I am the last...there is no God except me” (Isa. 44:6 NJB). Evidently, He is only one person. Therefore, there is no God in the sense of the very alien concept of multiple personalities within one essence as Trinitarianism proposes because there are not three persons in Yahweh. He always speaks using the grammar of a single person.
As an illustration, whenever one is told that someone did something alone, one never imagines that three persons or three minds did it, but rather it is common sense to think that a single person using his single mind did that particular deed. This is true of the picture that the Bible gives us concerning Yahweh God when it says “...the LORD [YHWH] alone guided him, no foreign god was _____________
THE ONLY TRUE GOD IS ONE PERSON - NOT TWO OR THREE
with him” (Deut. 32:12). So, if there were two or three persons within the essence of “Yahweh” then no one individual could be said to be alone. Indeed, even the word ‘alone’ refers to a single individual, in this case Yahweh. In fact, there are many Hebrew Scripture texts that show us that Yahweh is one person because of His being alone in His actions: Ex. 22:20; 2 Kings 19:15, 19; Neh. 9:6, Ps. 4:8, 72:18, 83:18, 148:13; Isa. 2:11 and 44:24.
In the Shema—“Yahweh Is One”—Not Three
The Hebrew word shema means “hear” or “listen” and is the first word in Deuteronomy 6:4 which gives Israel’s declaration of the oneness and uniqueness of God when it says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD (Heb. Yahweh) our God (Heb. Elohim), the LORD (Yahweh) is one” (Deut. 6:4 NIV). Here the NIV is carefully following the Hebrew grammatical structure as do most other translations and so leads to the conclusion that God is one person because he is Yahweh and “Yahweh is one.” This usage of the Hebrew words Yahweh and Elohim in Deuteronomy 6:4 leads Trinitarian apologist Murray Harris to conclude that:
[In Heb. 1] o theos [God] was understood to be ‘God, the Father.’ Similarly the differentiation made between o theos as the one who speaks in both eras, and uios (Son) as his final means of speaking shows that in the author’s mind it was not the Triune God of Christian theology who spoke to the forefathers by the prophets. That is to say that for the author of Hebrews (as for all NT writers one may suggest), the God of our fathers, Yahweh, was none other than ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Such a conclusion is entirely consistent with the regular NT usage of o theos. It would be inappropriate for Elohim [God, 2,570 times] or Yahweh [6,800 times] ever to refer to the Trinity in the OT, when in the NT theos regularly refers to the Father alone and apparently never to the Trinity. Jesus as God, p. 47n.
Furthermore, The Illustrated Bible Dictionary notes that: “There is only one supreme and true God and he is a Person.” This in coming from a Christian source is in addition to the fact that Judaism today recognizes the Shema as referring to a unipersonal God and never to two or more persons. In fact, the Jews have never considered God to be comprised of two or three persons. Sadly, it is the Trinitarian proposition that because God calls Himself “I am” in Exodus 3:14 that Jesus must also be God, making two persons who are God. This faulty reasoning is because Jesus said in John 8:58, “before Abraham was I am” and therefore making a second person in the Godhead. However, the two phrases are quite different as is shown in Chapter 54. Nevertheless, for example in Exodus:
““Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:13, 14).
However, the correct meaning is: “I will be what I will be” although the LXX gives, “I am the One who Is (exists).” Nevertheless, in both Hebrew or Greek, the grammar of these pronouns and verbs is singular, thereby showing that God speaks of Himself as a singular person. This is a very important fact for those seeking to know how many God is. Indeed, the Jews knew of only one person who was God as noted in 2 Samuel, “For who is God but Yahweh” (2 Sam. 22:32 NJB) and neither Jesus nor the holy spirit are Yahweh who is shown in the shema to be one person.
In the New Testament the Greek Word for One
Means One
Further to the fact that Jesus is not part of a so-called “Godhead” the Apostle Paul stated that, “for there is one (Gk eis) God, also one (Gk eis) mediator of God and of men, the man (Gk anthropos) Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Because the Greek word eis is a numerical absolute, the term, “one mediator” obviously refers to a singular person. Clearly, the term “one God” is in this same sense and so also refers to a singular person. Furthermore, the one mediator—Jesus—is called anthropos (man) and so is fully human in the same sense as all other humans. So, the Greek words eis (masc.) = one person and, en (neut.) = one thing. (See Appendix B).