What About The Trinity?, Pt. 2 (Articles of Faith Series)

This is a multi-part episode. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Did you guys have any other points on that question? No, I shot enough spitballs on that one.

I think we gave some good ideas and yeah, I think that's pretty good. All right, so you guys ready for my number one argument from when I was a Mormon apologist? I hope Matthew is. All right, Matthew.

I'm throwing this one right at you. How can it kill us to see a God who cannot be seen? How can it kill us to see a God who cannot be seen, right?

Yep. So in Exodus 33, verse 20, it says God spoke to Moses, and it says he added, You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live. Also later, we learn when Gideon spoke, when he had seen the angel of the Lord face to face, Judges chapter 6, verse 22, when Gideon realized that it was the Lord's angel, he said, Oh no, sovereign Lord, I have seen the Lord's angel face to face, or the angel of the Lord face to face. But in verse 23, he was ensured that he would not die. So there was this understanding among the Israelites, probably based on Moses' words, that if you were to see God, it would be fatal to us.

So what does this mean? Well, there's two different ways that it talks about in Scripture about seeing God. So there's one expression that's used as a figure speech when it says that we speak to God face to face. So in Exodus chapter 33, it says the following, It came about whenever Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. When all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would arise and worship, each at the entrance of his tent. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent. So if we compare that verse in Exodus 33 with the verse that I read previously, Exodus 33 20, where it says, You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.

It seems like this is a contradiction. But if we see this figure of speech face to face, it's not saying that Moses actually exited the tent and saw a human face and spoke with that face. So if we see, if we continue on in 33, in particular with verses 18 and following, it says, Moses said, I pray thee, show me thy glory. And he said, I myself will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you.

And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion. But he said, You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and you shall stand there on the rock, and it will come about while my glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take my hand away, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. So God is speaking to Moses face to face, but it also says that he would not allow Moses to see his face. So in this context, we can see that when it speaks of God speaking face to face, that's not the same as saying, seeing his face.

So face to face is kind of an expression that means that you're having a close, intimate conversation with someone, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually physically face to face talking to them. So God was speaking with Moses intimately, if we apply that expression. He's speaking with Moses intimately, but he's saying that you would not actually be able to see God and live. And so we see elsewhere in Scripture, like in 1 Timothy 1 and 1 Timothy 6, it talks about God living in unapproachable light. Or elsewhere, like in John 1, where it says that God is invisible. This is also reiterated in Colossians chapter 1, where it says that Christ is the image of the invisible God.

So throughout Scripture, we see that God is seen as a spiritual being, which is reiterated in John 4, where it says that God is spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth. So we know from these teaching passages that God is spirit, God cannot be seen completely or physically, and we cannot actually see him in his fullness and in his glory and live. If we imagine, it would be like if you stare at a light bulb, you can look at the light bulb and not cause severe damage to your eye, because the amount of lumens, the amount of light that it produces is not so great as to burn our eye. But if we look at the sun, that produces enough light and radiation that it could cause permanent damage if we stare at it with our eye. Now if we compare the glory or the light that comes from the sun to the glory and light of God, if we in our limited human physical capacity were to actually see the fullness of the glory of God, the absolute fullness, it would just be so much light and glory that we just could not comprehend it.

It would be fatal to us, literally fatal. We could not completely comprehend or see the glory of God. So even in instances where, for example, on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17, where Peter, James, and John are allowed to go up to the mount with Christ, and where his glory had been withheld from them, at that point on the Mount of Transfiguration, that glory is allowed to shine through Christ. But even in that instance, they are not seeing the fullness of the glory of Christ.

They are only seeing the amount that they could withstand, that their physical bodies could be able to take. So if we compare all these scriptures together and we look at it systematically, we can see that man can only withstand so much of the glory of God before it's just so great and so powerful that we just couldn't withstand it. So that is why it would be fatal to us if we were to completely try to comprehend the glory of God. So we won't be able to really truly withstand God's fullness until after this life. All right, that makes sense. And I was actually going to throw in just an epiphany I had just relooking at the question here too.

And it kind of is just a shortened version of what you were saying, but when I wrote this question out originally, you know, I think I was just adding an extra step that's not really there just to make it more like a trick question. But, you know, it really just boils down to, you know, God cannot be seen because it would kill us to see him. I look at the word invisible and I just think, like, oh, yeah, I can look at him. I just wouldn't see him because he's invisible. But it's more saying, like, it's not possible to see him in our capacity, you know, as he really is. So it's an act of grace for God to withhold from us his full glory and power. Yes.

Yeah, I agree. So does that answer your question, Mr. Ex-Mormon Apologist? It answers it really well. I've decided to convert out of Mormonism. No, I have a question for you, Mr. Ex-Mormon Apologist. Okay, but you realize I'm an ex-Mormon, right? I do realize that. I'm just asking you to put your Mormon hat back on for a minute.

Right. Why did you view this question as your number one argument? It's a good question. I just felt like there was a contradiction in the New Testament. There were verses, and I'd get arguments from Christians all the time against the first vision saying that it was impossible because, you know, half of them would say God is invisible. And then the other half would say, if you saw him, you would die.

And I'm like, okay, these are contradictory arguments because if he's invisible, how can it kill us to see him? And so it's just kind of my way of trying to, you know, bash some Christian heads together and kind of turn them against each other. Kind of my specialty at the time. Yeah, I do remember those passages being viewed as problematic for Latter-day Saints. I remember conversations in Elder's Quorum about the first vision and people questioning, well, you know, was Joseph Smith transfigured so that he could experience that? So even Latter-day Saints viewed those passages as being accurate in terms of representing the idea that being in God's presence would actually kill you. And so they, you know, they sought to somehow make it possible for Joseph Smith to have seen God. Absolutely. And one of the things, too, I remember using in my argument was I would throw omnipresence into the mix and try to disprove it all at once because if it would kill God, if it would kill us to see God and he's omnipresent, you know, then we shouldn't be able to walk around with our eyes open because he's everywhere.

And, you know, we should all be dead, but we're not. So the Trinity must be false. See again, classical view of omnipresence. Yes. That is an interesting argument, though. I could see how that would be enticing to a Latter-day Saint.

Yeah. OK, here's my next point. My next question for you, Matthew. One of the big things that made me believe the first vision was valid was that it appeared that Stephen had a very similar vision in the axe. He saw Jesus standing on the right hand of the Father.

And so my question is, how can you stand to the right of an omnipresent being and how does this, is there any way that this doesn't prove the first vision or lend it credibility, I guess? OK, Mr. Ex-Mormon Apologist. Let me just read that and I'll even read it in King James to appease you. How's that sound? I'm appeased.

Let's go for it. So it's in Acts chapter 7, and I'll just read from verses 54 through 60. So this is after the trial of Stephen. He's addressing the Sanhedrin, and basically they've determined that he's a heretic.

So starting with verse 54. So this is the instance that we're talking about where we're talking about Stephen's vision, and this is a very common argument that it's used to demonstrate both that God is not omnipresent or that the Father has a body. But if we look at it and we just read what it says, we have to take off our goggles, we have to try as best as we can to get rid of our preconceived notions in our traditions and just read what it says. Now does it say anywhere in here that the Father has a body?

So I'll read again the relevant part. It says that, but he, Stephen, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. Now again, if we look at that, there's no reference anywhere to the Father having a body. But what you'll often have is that you'll see Latter-day Saints inject that idea into the passage and say, see, you've got Jesus, he's got his body, and he's standing right next to the Father that has a body.

But if we really look at it, there's nothing that says that. Now what we talked about earlier, we talked about Exodus and we talked about when God demonstrated and displayed his glory to Israel. Now when you talk about God displaying his glory, it's often spoken of as like in a cloud or with fire or with smoke or some kind of like physical manifestation or in the instance where Moses saw the Lord in the burning bush, we saw fire in the bush.

So there's many different ways that God demonstrates his presence or his glory without having to actually show a body, a physical body. And also when we spoke of Matthew chapter 16 or Matthew 16 through 18, specifically 17, where the three disciples and Christ reached to the top of the Mount of Transfiguration and they see the glory of God through Jesus, what do they see in Jesus's face? They see light, they see glory, they see this divine presence about Jesus's face. It says that his face glowed. So if we think about that and we realize that glory is demonstrated in this kind of light or power or fire and then we reread the passage, if we think about it, it says that being full of the Holy Ghost, he looked up steadfastly into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. So whether we want to take this literally to mean that Jesus stood on the right hand of God or that it's figurative, either way, it's saying that he saw the glory of God, this does not require whatsoever to see the father with a physical body. And Jesus was standing on his hand. Exactly.

I was going to get to that. If we want to take that literally, how literally do we want to take it? Like you said, if we take it absolutely literally, it's saying that God has a hand and Jesus is standing on top of that hand with his feet touching his hand.

But of course, the Latter-day Saint would say, well, that's silly. You're being too literal. Okay, well, so to some degree, we have to understand that it's an expression. It's an expression to demonstrate what it's saying. So you could actually, you could understand this to say that Jesus is literally standing right next to God.

But even in that case, like I said, it does not require that it means that the father also has a body. It could mean that there's the glory and light of God shining through to Stephen, and next to that glory and light is Jesus. Another way is to understand it, which is how most understand this passage is, is that in Jewish culture and they see standing on the right hand of somebody similar actually to how we talk about standing on the right hand of someone.

We talk about, you know, this is my right hand man, meaning that this is the guy that I trust the most. So when it speaks of Jesus being on the right hand of God, it's speaking of how he has the preeminent authority over all of God's creation of any person, of any man that has lived in creation, Jesus being God in flesh. He is the preeminent man, so he has full authority, equal in power and glory and authority to God himself. So when we really examine this, the argumentation that it must mean that A, that both the father and the son have exactly similar bodies, and that B, that God the father has a body, flesh and bones, and that he's just like the son. All these argumentation just kind of collapse very easily if we just try to look at the text itself without injecting our presupposed ideas. Well, I think it's pretty clear that this scripture is saying that, you know, God the father is really big and strong and was holding Jesus up with just the palm of his right hand.

But actually, no, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, and I don't really have anything to add to that. I was going to mention on that passage before when it talks about God passing over Moses, it says that he was going to pass by Moses and put his hand over Moses to protect him in the rock. So does that mean that, like, you know, it's like Stretch Armstrong, where if you were to take that literally, where his hand is literally covering the entire body of Moses as he's flying by, you know, it's like if you want to take these things literally, it kind of, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, and that's another thing.

I mean, I hadn't really thought about this back when I was LDS. But, you know, for all the same species, you know, us and God are the same species, then, you know, we were the same species as Goliath. Like, people were just bigger back then. Like, maybe God is a giant, too. I don't know.

Yeah, it kind of reduces to absurdity if you take it too literalistically. I just noticed something on my Skype screen, Michael, when you're speaking. When Matthew speaks, his little icon shows a little picture to me. When you speak, it shows like a generic icon that's like three people, which is kind of interesting, given your intro for this episode.

Really? Yeah. You need to just put a picture on there so that I don't get that generic icon.

It's just kind of funny. Okay, yeah. It doesn't show me, so I have no idea what you're seeing on your screen, but I will go back. I'll screenshot it. That's weird, because I just see your initials. It just says MF on there. Yeah, that's all I see on my screen is you guys' initials.

I don't see any pictures. Oh, really? Huh. Interesting.

Yeah. I see Paul's picture, but yours is just MF. Wait, so do you see mine as ME? I do. So when I'm talking, you think ME is talking? Does that ever freak you out? I hadn't really noticed, but now I can't unsee it. Oh, my gosh.

I am the Trinity of Us. That's modalism, Patrick. Yes, it is. Did that make sense? I tend to repeat myself often, so I'm sure we can cut some of that out. Yeah, no, it made really good sense to me. I read a lot of commentaries, and I just kept coming to the same conclusion that most people saw about this.

They all had pretty much that conclusion. Yeah, and it does say right there in the passage that he saw the glory of God. It mentions the glory of God first, but then it starts just saying God after that. It definitely makes more sense just to assume that that's the glory of God.

It's easier not to see it as being a physical embodiment that looks like a person. Okay, so moving on here, how could the Father forsake Jesus on the cross if they share an essence? There's a really great video from Dr. James White if you go and Google and search for Psalm 22 or Jesus forsaken on the cross, because he's debated a lot of Muslims that use this argument to try to demonstrate that Jesus is not God or that they're separate. Because if Jesus were God, how could God forsake him?

How could he forsake himself? Well, first of all, in Trinitarian theology, we do not believe that the Father is the Son, we do not believe that the Son is the Holy Spirit, and we do not believe that the Holy Spirit is the Father. They are distinct persons within the Trinity. So we've been talking about this all throughout, but just to make it more explicit, we don't believe that Jesus was praying to himself, to his own person, when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. We believe he was praying to the Father.

However, each person shares the essence of God co-equally, co-eternally. So when Jesus descended in his incarnation to become man, he humbled himself and took on human flesh. But this does not mean that Jesus gave up divinity. He was always God, but that godliness, that divinity was kind of veiled within his flesh. He didn't go walking around the street with the divine light, the divine glory constantly around him. It was veiled for the purposes of performing the work that he had to do in his incarnation. So if we remember that, and then we speak of Christ being on the cross, I'll just read a passage here, I think, Matthew 27.

So Matthew 27, verse 45 onward, says this, Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And some of the bystanders hearing it said, This man is calling Elijah.

And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filling it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the other said, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him. And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. So when we read this, it does appear that God is forsaking Christ.

However, there are different ways to look at this. One way to look at this is that Jesus is crying out in the humility of his position as the God-man. So he's in his humanity, in his flesh. And Orthodox Christianity has taught that Christians truly believe that Christ was truly man. So it wasn't as if he was some kind of, like, superman in the sense of, like, he wasn't truly like us.

He just kind of looked like us. We believe that he truly had a human body, a human spirit. We believe that he truly grew up, he learned. But at the same time, he was also God. And this has caused a lot of controversy over the centuries trying to understand this, because God is so much different than man. But what we know is that Christ as man truly suffered.

He truly felt pain. And when he was on the cross and he was taking the weight and the guilt of sin upon him, he had to feel some kind of separation in terms of just the utter shame and the guilt of humanity, of the sins that he took upon him. I read earlier, I read the Apostles' Creed, and I'll read one part that is really interesting. So in that second paragraph, it says, And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who is conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.

He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. And the phrase that it says that he descended into hell has caused a lot of controversy.

In the original language it was written as hades or hades. So that could either mean the grave, or it could mean the place of suffering. But people such as John Calvin believe that when it says that he descended into hell, this is speaking of his suffering upon the cross. So in his suffering on the cross, it is as if he descended into the depths of pain and suffering and torment on the cross in order that those who believe in him might have everlasting life. So when he was on that cross, it is not as if God truly forsook him in the sense that he completely cut off his presence, because as we were talking about, Christ is truly God. So it is not as if you can take the Godness or the deity out of Christ, but it's as if the presence or the special grace that God had been granting Christ throughout his ministry had been kind of pulled away slightly so that Christ could really descend into that hell that he was in on the cross. And throughout his ministry, Christ had the Holy Spirit working in him to perform miracles and to do all kinds of work. And I believe that on that cross, that special grace or that special presence that had always been with him perhaps was pulled away slightly. But this does not mean that Christ's divinity or his status as God was taken away. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense too. And I was thinking about that a little bit. I think it just, as a Latter-day Saint, I saw the word forsake and I just automatically assumed that, oh, it had to mean that if it was a trinity, that that essence was broken apart. And it doesn't mean that at all, because that essence can't be broken. But I guess a way I could kind of explain it too is, see, this is what you're not supposed to do, right? Like, try to come up with comparisons for the trinity. Oh, no.

Yeah. So it's like, this is what you're supposed to tell me, just stop. Don't do it, Patrick.

Don't do it, Patrick. But, you know, it's like if my son was in some kind of a situation and I didn't come help him, it's like it wouldn't stop him from being related to me. You know, that blood that we have wouldn't disappear. I think it's okay to use certain analogies for certain aspects of the trinity, but we have to always remember that analogies always break down at some point, and there's no completely analogous representation of the triune God in creation.

First of all, just for the fact that God is not created. So to say that a created thing is analogous to an uncreated thing is, well, it already immediately falls apart. But I think we can talk about certain aspects like you just did.

We can use examples to try to help demonstrate an idea. So I agree with that. I was kind of thinking it also as like if you have a part of your body where, like, imagine you're slapping your hand or beating your hand. You're causing pain to that hand, but you're not separating it from your body, you know. So when Christ was pouring out his wrath upon the Son on the cross, so when the Father was pouring out his wrath upon the Son, he was forsaking him in terms of placing all that wrath upon him. But Christ was always God. You cannot take away that essence from him. Yeah, no, that's great.

I love that. Did you have anything you wanted to add to that, Paul? No, I think Matthew covered it really well.

I think he did too. Okay, one popular Mormon YouTuber is fond of saying that if God is a spirit, then he is not matter and therefore does not exist. How would you respond? That's a really good question. I'm assuming the question is to me, right? Yes, it is to you. Okay, so we must really be careful when we look at anything through our own limited perspective. When we try to understand Scripture through our own experiences rather than try to understand it in its own context, that can be really dangerous.

And when we even try to actually inject our own meaning into a text rather than extract the meaning from the text, that's something called eisegesis, and that's very, very dangerous. So when we think of spirit and we think, oh, you know, based on either what people have taught us what it is or what we think it is, if we think it must be visible or it must be material or matter or else it doesn't exist, that's injecting our own personal understanding of the world into Scripture. So in John 4, when Jesus says that God is spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth, if we say, if Jesus said that God is spirit, he's not saying God is spirit and he doesn't exist. It wouldn't make sense for Jesus to say that God is spirit while simultaneously saying there is no God.

It's self-contradictory. So spirit then is the negative of what matter is. So if matter is material, then spirit is immaterial. So if we think about Scripture, what we've talked about, we've talked about previously about verses like John chapter 1, 1 Timothy chapter 1, 1 Timothy chapter 6, Colossians chapter 1, where we see throughout that God is invisible. Also in Romans chapter 1, it talks about God's invisible attributes. And speaking of creation, it's demonstrating God's glory, his power. And so it's in the creation that God demonstrates his power.

And it's in Christ that God the Father demonstrates his attributes. So we can't see Father's physical body because he doesn't have a physical body, but we can still interact with God in various ways. But this also doesn't require a physical body. There's nothing that says that we require a physical body or material or matter to exist. It also really depends on what you mean by matter. Does matter have to have mass?

Does it have to have energy? Are we looking at a purely scientific view? Like how would you define matter? But I think that how I would define matter is something that you can interact with.

In the sense that you can measure it, you can weigh it, you can perform scientific tests on it. And I don't think you can do that with spirit. You can't really measure spirit.

You can't detect spirit because it's something completely different. Since God pre-existed creation, he pre-existed matter and energy and time and space, he can't be composed of matter. He's something other. He's immaterial. He's pure being. He's pure essence. He's eternal.

He's uncreated. So if we think about that, there's nothing that requires God be physical in order to exist. If we do, then we would have to ask the question, if you can't exist without something physical, then that must mean that somebody or something must have created God to give him physicality. And who is that that created God and gave him physicality? Well, in Latter-day Saint theology, they believed that there was a God above God the Father, who created him and gave him a physical body. And it goes on and on and on for an infinite regression of gods. There really is no answer to who is the first God in Mormon theology, and that's a real problem. So, long answer, but we can have essence or being without requiring physical matter. Paul, do you have any thoughts on that? I have a lot of thoughts on this. I know you do.