The One True God (Trinity Sunday)

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Our Old Testament reading comes from the historical section of the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses recounts to the people of Israel how God led their fathers out of Egypt in the Exodus. Through the miracles that God wrought, He showed how the gods of the Egyptians were completely impotent, and not gods at all. He further shows Himself by many wonders to be the one true God and how the gods of all the other nations were nothing but idols. All of this leads to the affirmation of His uniqueness, found in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Yet there is more to the nature of the one God than is immediately obvious to a surface reading of the text. We learn in many other places that God can appear to be two persons at once, such as in Genesis 19:24. We also read of a being that is described as an angel, yet also bears the name of Yahweh (Exodus 23:20-21). Later on, we find a description of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-23, where Wisdom is presented as co-Creator with God.¹ For this reason, some Jews came to see God as two persons, a concept that came to be known as “Two Powers in Heaven.”² Although this tradition was suppressed in later Judaism, it is a testament to the presence of this idea in the Hebrew Bible.

We have the most explicit presentation of this idea in the New Testament. Here, we see Jesus presented as divine through His words, works and titles. Most significant for our understanding of Deuteronomy, however, is an enigmatic reading in Jude 5. There it states: “Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.”³

If we take this passage at face value, it teaches us that the God whom Moses describes as saving Israel out of Egypt was none other than Christ Himself. Even before His Incarnation, He was already at work, redeeming a people for Himself, in preparation for when He would someday come into their midst.

Thus, an early hint of God’s triune nature emerges from a close study of these passages put together. This Trinity Sunday, let us meditate upon how God reveals His true nature through the Sacred Scriptures.

J. Luis Dizon

Notes