The Oneness of God By Ken Raggio
It is important to know who God is! The greatest experience you or I can ever have is to know God. The knowledge of God is man's highest possible achievement. For the creature to have a meaningful relationship with his Creator is utopian. By contrast, for one of us to question God's existence would be to prattle as a fool. Atheists plead an empty cause. God is real beyond any description we could give of Him, and He is very much alive. If only everyone knew him! Some men refer to God as "Divine Providence". Some generically say "the Universal Consciousness," "The Force," or the "Man Upstairs". But those titles are woefully vague, ambiguous, and worse - disrespectful. They are almost blasphemous. If we properly recognize God's role as The Father and Creator of all things, we should have to admit that such inadequate references as above positively mask or obscure His true magnificence. Let us not speak ignorantly of God. Let us know him! Let us talk to Him and hear from Him! Let us reach into the haze of the world's darkness to find a crisp image of His brightness. Make no mistake about it - we did not create Him. He created us! He is not made with hands. He is no idol, neither carved nor molten. Neither is He the figament of the human imagination. No mortal mind can possibly concoct all that He is. No philosophy nor ideology can ever substitute for His essence.
Our God is an Invisible, Living, Thinking Spirit.
There are no examples of God except Himself. He is totally unique, forever sovereign. "I am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself" (Isaiah 42:13). As the solitary Deity, He has no peers and no counsellors. There are no others like Him. Moses declared, "the Lord our God is one Lord" (Deuteronomy 6:4). "Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any" (Isaiah 44:8b). "I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (Isaiah 44:6b). He is life, the Father of all life, and the Father of all spirits. He is, at the same time, our God, Father, Lord and King. David asked, "Who is this King of Glory?", then answered, "The Lord of Hosts, He is the King of Glory" (Psalm 24:10). Even Father Himself said, "I am the Lord, your Holy one, the creator...your King" (Isaiah 43:15). We know these things because He revealed them to us by His Word. God made Himself known to men for all times with His word. It is because of His word that we know what we know about Him. The ancient men who were moved upon by His holy spirit spoke His words. He inspired what they wrote. Their explanations of Him were actually His explanations of Himself. So as we read His Word, we more accurately comprehend His true nature. Let us look and see Him.
Did Old Testament Men actually see God?
Adam and Eve heard a "voice" walking in the "cool (Hebrew: wind) of the day" (Genesis 3:8). The invisible God manifest Himself to Adam and Eve as a voice in the wind. We have no evidence that the voice came from any particular body, but obviously came from an invisible source in mid-air, in the same manner that it would later be heard by the young child Samuel (I Samuel 3), by John the Baptist (Luke 3:22), and by Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9:4).
The invisible Spirit (Father, Lord, and King) manifest Himself to Abram in a "vision" in Genesis 15:1. He manifest Himself as a "man" in Genesis 18:2, 22, 23, 33; but the "man" was apparently an "angel", according to Genesis 19:1, 10.
Then God manifest Himself to Abimelech in a "dream" in Genesis 20:3. Later, Jacob also "saw" the Lord in a "dream" (Genesis 28:12), standing at the top of a ladder that reached into heaven. God manifest Himself to Jacob as a "man" in the wrestling match of Genesis 32:24,30, but the prophet Hosea identified that "man" as an "angel" (Hosea 12:3,4).
God's Spirit again "appeared" as an "angel" to Moses in the burning bush of Exodus 3. The "angel" said, "I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob". Yet God is not a mere angel. He only occasionally appeared as one. In Exodus 19:10-19, God "appeared" to the people of Israel at Mount Sinai. They did not actually "see" Him however, because He "descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly". There were "thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount".
"Moses spake, and God answered Him by a voice", verse 19b. Moses and seventy elders of Israel "saw" an apparition of God, which must have been ghost-like: "and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in His clearness" (Exodus 24:10). This was a translucent manifestation of an invisible Spirit, not a flesh and bone appearance, because "God is not a man" according to Numbers 24:19 and Job 9:32, and Jesus testified that "A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39).
"A cloudy pillar descended, and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses", in Exodus 33:9b. Then, "the Lord spake with Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to a friend", in verse 11. Even though God was "face to face" with Moses, Moses did not actually see a face. The only physical manifestation was a cloud, for in verse 20, God said, "thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and live". The cloud obviously did not satisfy Moses, so he said, "Shew me thy glory", (Exodus 33:8) to which God replied, "I will make all my goodness pass before thee" (verse 19).
Was His glory or goodness a body? God agreed to put Moses in a "clift of the rock" and "cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen" (verse19).
God's "hand" would "cover" Moses. Was God's hand six feet tall? And how could an invisible Spirit extend a "hand"? Exodus 34:5 describes exactly what happened: "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him". The hand of the Lord must have been the cloud, because in fact, that is all Moses saw. Again, there was no actual view of God. We look painstakingly for a description of what Moses "saw", but we find no evidence of any literal physical body of God at all. Only a cloud. But God had not promised to show him a body; only the "back parts" (verse 23) of "my goodness" (verse 19) and "my glory" (verse 22).
In one last Old Testament story, we read of the prophet Daniel's great vision of Daniel 7. He "saw" the Father God, as the "Ancient of Days", "whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool" (Daniel 7:9). Then Daniel "saw" that "one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before Him" (Daniel 7:13).
Since this is a vision that Daniel is having, we must not assume that he was actually "seeing" God in real time, but was viewing an allegorical representation while in a dream-like trance. Keep in mind that he just "saw" a lion with eagle's wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a fourth dreadful beast with iron teeth and ten horns. No one would construe these to be literal beasts, but figurative and illustrative of a series of world empires in prophetic roles. When we take into account that "God is a spirit" (John 4:24), we must understand the Daniel's vision of the Ancient of Days was an allegory: figurative and illustrative of the God who is the "Blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen." (I Timothy 6:15b, 16). In addition, the "son of man" that Daniel "saw" was prophetically illustrative, in the future tense, of the coming Messiah, who would not even be conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary for several hundred years to come. At the time Daniel "saw" the "son", the son of man did not even exist. The "Only Begotten of the Father" would be made of a woman only "when the fulness of time was come" (Galatians 4:4).
Of the forty-four so-called "appearances" of God in the Old Testament, no one in fact ever "saw" God at all! The overwhelming evidence is that the Lord God, Father and Holy Spirit of the Old Testament did not actually have a body at all. What was "seen" was a wide variety of manifestations of God. Voices, dreams, visions, fire, smoke, clouds, whirlwinds, earth-quakes, angels, men, and even ghostlike figures. None of these forms were actually the fulness of God in a bodily form. They were only temporary, nameless manifestations of the invisible, omnipresent, holy Spirit who calls Himself our Father.
They saw everything but His body. Jesus verified that God was and is invisible by telling the Pharisees, "Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape" (John 5:37). John declared, "No man hath seen God at any time" (John 1:18a). It is impossible to believe anyone truly "saw" God, when we are told specifically and repeatedly that God simply cannot be seen. He is invisible!
That brings us to the magnificent miracle that was manifest at the Birth of Jesus Christ. It was that tiny baby in a Bethlehem stable that Isaiah had referred to when he wrote , "The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man" (Isaiah 43:12). Jesus Christ was the embodiment of all God had ever said about Himself. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). God chose not to remain invisible, but to become visible!
The invisible God had manifest Himself in many forms in the Old Testament, but the highest revelation of God in the Old Testament had been by His Word. It was the Word of God spoken and written by holy men and prophets that was the most consistent and reliable revelation of the invisible God to the Old Testament world. God had to make Himself a body! The invisible Spirit had planned all along to take on a human form. He planned to come into the world as a man. "...The Only Begotten Son... he hath declared Him" (John 1:18b). Webster's Dictionary defines the word "declare" as meaning "to show or reveal". Jesus Christ, the Son of Man shows and reveals the invisible God. Philip asked Jesus to "show us the Father". Jesus replied, "Have I been so long time with you and hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:8, 9).
Unfortunately, the human race has not begun to comprehend the overwhelming reality of our Father's appearance nearly 2000 years ago. The excitement of it all has been lost in the confusion of who Jesus Christ really is. John 1:10 tells us that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew him not". That could only refer to the Father God. Most people do not realize that Jesus Christ was only literal incarnation of the one Holy Spirit - our Father. Paul communicated the mystery to Timothy: "God was manifest in the flesh" (I Timothy 3:16), and to the Colossians, "In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead (Greek: Deity) bodily" (Colossians 2:9).
If the concept seems different from modern teachings, remember John's observation that even the Jews refused to believe that their Father was in this man: "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not" (John 1:11). Is it possible that the same God who was always everywhere, is now somewhere in particular? Isaiah prophesied that His name would be "Emmanuel", which means "God with us" (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23).
Whereas God, in the Old Testament, had been revealed through His spoken and written Word, God, in the New Testament, is revealed in flesh. Hebrews 1:1 says that He "spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets" but verse 2 says that "in these last days He hath spoken unto us by His Son" and verse 3 tells us that the Son is "the brightness of His glory, and the express image of his person". The Corinthian church was taught that Christ is "the image of God" (II Corinthian 4:4). And the Colossian church was taught that the Son is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). "It pleased the Father that in him (the Son) should all (the Father's) fulness dwell" (Colossians 1:19). That is why John said "the Word was made flesh".
Jesus Christ is Jehovah Savior come in the flesh. In fact, the very meaning of the name "Jesus" is "Jehovah Savior". Jesus explained, "I am come in my Father's name" (John 5:43). Jesus is not a clone of God the Father. He is not a duplicate deity. He is not Jehovah, Jr.. He is not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. He IS the Father (the eternal Spirit) manifest in the Son (the man)! Jesus, as a man, insisted that He was NOT equal with the Father when he said, "My Father is greater than I" in I John 14:28, which verifies the Father's oath in Isaiah 42:8b, "My Glory will I not give to another". Jesus Christ is not the second member of the Godhead. He is the man in whom the Father dwelt. God the Father never invented or created a God the Son. The Son of God was "made of a woman", (Galatians 4:4), and was "conceived...of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 1:20). That shows the Holy Ghost is actually the Father, since John said the Son of Man is the "only begotten of the Father" (John 1:14). The human body of Jesus was not only conceived by his Holy Spirit Father, but was a visible shell which actually housed the Father. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself"(2 Corintians 5:19). He was the fulness of God bodily.
Remember that Moses had desired to see the glory of God's face , but it was impossible in Old Testament times. However, 2500 years later he was resurrected from the dead to see "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Corinthians 4:6, see also Mark 9:4). Isaiah 9:6 said, "...His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince Of Peace." As Spirit, Jesus is the King. As man, Jesus is the Prince. As Spirit, Jesus is the Father. As man, Jesus is the Son. Jesus plainly answered the Pharisees question, "Where is thy Father?" by saying "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also." Then He stunned them with this conclusion, "If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins" (John 8:19, 24).
God the Father came to this earth nearly 2000 years ago in the body of a man who was named with His own name, and he was "despised and rejected of men" (Isaiah 53:3) but "hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us" (I John 3:16).
His Spirit was in that man. The Father was in the son. It is the incarnation, purely and simply.
By Ken Raggio Copyright, Ken Raggio 1988.
