JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Tom Kelby and Jason DeRouchie consider a question regarding the Trinity and the Old Testament. What did the Old Testament saints know about the Trinity? The podcast begins with an overview of the deity of the three persons of the Trinity from the New Testament.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk, Jason and Tom here. By the way, Jason has a weird microphone today, so if it sounds weird, that’s on him. It’s all on you, Jason.

JD: It’s all on me. That’s right.

TK: So we have a question, Jason. You had a question that came to you. So what’s our question we’re going after today?

JD: Today we are thinking about this: the question that someone wrote me: “Were the Old Testament Jews Trinitarian? If so, how did they know about the Son and the Holy Spirit? Can you point me to passages of Scripture that show what they believed on the topic of the Trinity?” And I thought this was just a great question.

TK: It’s a really good question.

JD: I initially just drafted an email response putting together texts that immediately came to mind. And then afterwards I thought I bet this would serve the broader listeners of our podcast, and so we would raise the question here.

TK: I love it. And just jumping beyond this to other questions, we sometimes get them, but if you have questions that you say, “Wow, I’d like to hear that on GearTalk,” please email them in.

JD: That’s right. That’s right. We want to address the pressing issues that our listeners are wrestling with. So we’re going to tackle the Trinity in the Old Testament today, but even before we get there, I think it might be helpful, Tom, if we just give a quick summary of New Testament claims to three persons, one God—what we mean by Trinity.

TK: You’d find this from front to back in the New Testament. I think if somebody would say that’s something that people added in after the apostles, I think just reading the New Testament, you’d say no, this was baked into the New Testament from the very beginning. But start at Jesus’ baptism. Matthew 3:16-17: “And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.'”

JD: Yeah, we’ve got this voice from heaven.

TK: How do you…?

JD: We’ve got the Spirit of God and then we’ve got the declaration that Jesus is God’s Son. All three persons right there. God includes three persons—a heavenly voice in this text, the Father; then the Spirit that descended; and the Son himself. We see something similar in Matthew 28:19, and I love this text. And it drives what we do at Hands to the Plow. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name”—it doesn’t say “in the names,” but rather “in the name,” a singular name—“of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” They are united in this portrayal, distinct in persons and yet united in a single name. God includes three persons.

TK: I love it. The thought too is we’re going in that name and in the essence of who God is. We are moving forth with all the help that this community brings us together. I just had, Jason, an 80 pound lab run through here right now. There we go, a little distracted on that answer as I was hearing him thumping all through the house.

JD: That’s OK. So we’ve got God in three persons. And then we could just go to a number of texts. I just want to give one for each that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. 1 Peter 1:1-2, Peter writes to all the elect exiles. And then he says he’s writing “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood.” There you see again the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus, but he specifically calls God the Father. And that’s my point—the Father is God. But it’s not only the Father who’s God. The Son is God. Romans 9:5…

TK: “To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” It’s really remarkable, isn’t it?

JD: It’s remarkable. Paul simply says we’re talking about the Messiah, the Christ, who is God over all. King of Kings, Lord of Lords. This is him. And simply Paul tags Jesus as God. Holy Spirit is God as well.

TK: I was just reading this morning in Second Peter 1, and the very beginning—I’m just looking it up right now. The very beginning of Second Peter. And the statement we read—let’s see, it says, “To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

JD: Beautiful. Same exact point. Yes. The Holy Spirit being God—it’s an interesting text. I want to draw attention to Acts 5 where we have Ananias and Sapphira. You remember those who deceived, claiming that they had given all their money when indeed they hadn’t for the sale of this property. Peter says something intriguing. First, he says to Ananias, “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” But then in the very next verse he says, “You have not lied to man but to God.” So there’s the equation—he’s lied to the Holy Spirit, he’s lied to God. They are one and the same. The Holy Spirit is God.

So God includes three persons. Each of these persons is God. And then the reality pervasive throughout all of Scripture is that there’s only one God. We don’t have three gods that we worship. We have one God in three persons. So God can declare in a text like Isaiah 44:6, “Thus says Yahweh, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, Yahweh of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no God.” He is alone God supreme. And yet in that single God supreme, there is Father, Son, Spirit.

Or Galatians 3:20, Paul’s talking about the way God brought the old covenant through an intermediary, an intermediary meaning Moses was the mediator. He says, “Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.” So there was a mediator between God and man, and yet he indicates God is one. That’s how we’re supposed to think about the Trinity as a single God in three persons. And there’s mystery there, but it’s very clear that’s what the New Testament teaches.

And our question today is: Did Old Testament Israelites think about the Trinity? Or in their monotheism, that is, there is only one God, did they not have any categories for a Spirit and a Son? And in my response to that question, I just thought of numerous texts and I packaged them. And so we’re going to go relatively fast today, but I hope it will give our listeners a good picture that there is a solid foundation for the Trinity, for the doctrine of the Trinity, already apparent in the Old Testament. Indeed, I’m going to plant it right already in Genesis chapter 1. So we’re going to go all the way back there in our discussion. But I think we’re going to see there are already so many anticipations of the fully developed doctrine of the Trinity, so many anticipations already in the initial 3/4 of our Bible.

TK: So what you’re saying—just thinking about this is—Genesis, Moses wrote it. Did Moses have any conception that God is a plurality?

JD: That God is a plurality, that he manifests, that the one God manifests himself in three distinct persons. That’s the question we’re running with here for this podcast. I think it’s important to start right off the bat and recognize that Scripture is clear—both Moses and Jesus and Paul—that God is spirit. And God said to Moses, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). So we have God as Yahweh speaking to Moses and saying you’re not going to see me or you will die. And then we learn God—that Moses got to see his back.

Jesus in John 1 and in John 6—so John 1:18, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” So that’s an intriguing statement. No one has seen God. And then Jesus talking about himself, the only God who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. So Jesus seems to be claiming divinity there and declaring that he’s the one who’s making the Father known.

John 6:46, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God. He has seen the Father.” And Jesus is the one who’s from God. So God here is specifically God the Father, and Jesus is displaying him, disclosing him.

Paul is explicit. Colossians 1—that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. That’s who Jesus is. Or Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:16, God “alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.” He’s talking about God the Father as one who cannot be seen.

Or John in 1 John 4:12, “No one has ever seen God. Yet if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us,” such that we now become resemblers and reflectors of God himself to the world. But no one has ever seen God. And that is a foundational concept right off the bat when we’re thinking about who God is and how he discloses himself. No one has ever seen him, but for Jesus to say that and for Jesus to be God, what he means is no one has ever seen the Father. He dwells in invisible light, unapproachable light.

TK: Right. And I think going back to that Exodus passage where Moses said to God, “Now show me your glory.” He was asking to see something that only Jesus Christ would reveal to us. And so the essence of that was God said, “I will let you see my backside” or my effects. Almost like a jet—you can see the trail coming off, but you’re not going to see my face. No one can see me and live. And then we get Jesus coming, exactly like you said. And he said, “I have seen him and I am making him known.”

JD: That’s right. That’s right. So even though God declares, “No one can see me,” we do, like you just said, see his effects. God allows people to see the manifestation of his Spirit. That is, when God enters into space and time, what we see consistently is the creation gets transformed. It gets altered. Something happens when God shows up. And what’s amazing is that the Bible can call that God’s Spirit or God’s glory. God’s glory is when his holiness goes public and people encounter it. And both terms are used—that we can actually see his Spirit. And by that, I think what it means is we know God is there because everything around his presence is being disrupted. There’s a manifestation of it in some way. Or we can see his glory.

So two examples—his Spirit and his glory. We see first in Genesis 1:2. Genesis 1:1, “God created the heavens and the earth,” but then we learn, “the earth was without form and void. The earth was without form and it was void. Darkness was over the face of the deep. The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Now that’s just an amazing image. I mean, God, his Spirit, he has no form. And yet the vision that’s given to Moses as he’s describing how things were working out at the very creation of the earth is that the Spirit of God was hovering. The same God who would speak over and over again—he would say it and it was so. That God has a Spirit, and that Spirit could be seen hovering over the face of the deep.

Now what’s intriguing—this verb for hovering shows up only one other time in the entire law, the entire Pentateuch. And it’s in Deuteronomy 32 to describe what it was like when God’s presence was leading Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness. It says it was hovering over them—God’s presence. Now back there, the way it’s described is a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day. And yet that language at the end of Moses’ books is connected to his description of the Spirit of God at the front of Moses’ books.

And what’s intriguing then to add to that is that in Isaiah 63, reflecting on the Exodus, Isaiah 63:11-13, this is what we read: “Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherds of his flock? Where is he who put in the midst of them his Holy Spirit, who caused his glorious arm to go at the right hand of Moses, who divided the waters before them to make for himself an everlasting name, who led them through the depths?” So here the presence of God, this glory cloud, Isaiah—that’s the very cloud that in Deuteronomy 32 is portrayed as hovering over the people, leading them through the wilderness. Isaiah looks back and he calls that very cloud the Holy Spirit, which is exactly how in Genesis 1:2 the Spirit of God was portrayed.

So it gives us a glimpse that what Moses envisioned in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God hovering over the waters, it was like—it was the same glory cloud that had met Israel at Mount Sinai, the same glory cloud that had led them through the wilderness. That was the Spirit of God. And it was as if it was like a thunderstorm—there’s lightning, there’s darkness, there’s cloud flashes and a sound like trumpet. And that’s the vision that’s being equated with the Spirit of God in the very beginning of our Scriptures.

TK: I love just going a little further in Isaiah. If we went just to the beginning of 64, Isaiah is just hungering for something he’s seen and he knows it. He’s been prophesying of it, but he says then, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down.” That same idea is: God, would you make yourself known with your people here? So that where we started with the Spirit of God coming down like a dove on Christ, our first verse we looked at from Matthew and the Trinity—this picture. Isaiah would say that’s exactly what I was talking about.

JD: That’s right. And we’re actually going to see in a little bit later, I’m going to describe more of this work of the Spirit and how it’s directly associated with the Messiah himself in books like Isaiah. The other image, along with Spirit, is glory. And here what we see is that these are actually, it seems, one and the same. Because in Exodus 24, the glory of Yahweh dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. And the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain.

And then in Exodus 40, we read that the cloud covered the tent of meeting after the tabernacle was built and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. So it’s obvious—even though God is spirit, there is now a manifestation of his person in an image that can be seen, that can awaken affection and awe. It’s called glory. It’s like a devouring fire. And it was what was on Mount Sinai. And then Mount Sinai became portable, like the people met God at Mount Sinai. And then all of a sudden, that very presence came and rested on the Ark of the Covenant in the tabernacle. And when God said it was time to go, the Ark would be lifted up and they would begin to journey through the wilderness. It was as if the Mount Sinai encounter was going with them. And that encounter is called glory.

We see something very similar toward the end of the Old Testament age in Ezekiel. Ezekiel sees the glory of God that had filled the tabernacle in Exodus 40, and that had come and filled the temple of Solomon in 1 Kings 8:9-10. Here in Ezekiel, he sees what he calls the glory of the God of Israel actually lifting up and departing from the temple. It hovers first over the threshold of the temple itself, and then it moves all the way out to the eastern exit, and then it moves all the way up to the Mount of Olives. And it’s because this glory that is the presence of God or the Spirit of God is leaving the temple that the Babylonians are now going to have freedom to come and destroy the temple itself. But God is leaving his temple, and the language used in the text is it’s his glory. Ezekiel 8 through 11.

TK: You can see why with that reality, Isaiah being a little bit earlier, would be crying out, though seeing all this coming: “God, would you rend the heavens and come down? We need you. We need your presence with us.”

JD: That’s right. That’s right. Because the presence is what changes everything. As Moses says when God in Exodus 32 said, “I’m not going to go with you. I’ll send my messenger, but I’m not going to send my glory cloud. I’m not going to send my Spirit.” And Moses says, “God, if your presence does not go with us, there is nothing that will make us different from the nations.”

TK: Right.

JD: And what that implies is that Moses already recognized God’s Spirit is what has to awaken holiness in our lives in order to make us distinct. Otherwise, without God’s presence, we’ll be just like the rest of the world. But my point here, and our point of what we’re trying to draw attention to here, is that in Genesis chapter 1, in books like Ezekiel and Isaiah, we have already this framework for understanding there’s a God and that God has a Spirit, and that Spirit can gloriously manifest itself.

And what’s intriguing now is that in many of those contexts—at least both in Genesis and in Isaiah—in these contexts of encounter with God’s presence, God speaks in plurality. It actually only shows up three times in the Old Testament, but God speaks in plurality. So we have in Genesis 1:26 God saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock.”

TK: So Jason, let me jump in here just because this is something you might read in a study Bible or a commentary here. A real common thought would be this refers—the “us” refers to a heavenly council of some sort, but it can’t refer to a Trinity because Moses would have no concept of that in mind. So give me your thoughts about a heavenly council idea there when it says “Let us.”

JD: Yep, “Let us.” So we know that God engages in a council, such that, as in the Book of Job, Job 1, in the day when all the sons of God—that is, the angels—would gather into the heavenly throne room, Satan was there. There’s God. He’s getting ready to assign his assignments, to give out his directions. And messengers of heaven are the angels and they do his bidding. They are all created and they never are portrayed as worthy of worship. Instead, there is one judge and one king, one Lord, one causer of all, and he alone is in the pantheon of heaven. “There shall not be to you any other God besides me.”

And that language of “besides me” specifically—it doesn’t mean priority. It means there shall not be to you any other God in my presence. When you envision the throne room of God, you should only picture one throne. But that throne is surrounded by a council, a group of created spiritual beings called angels, elsewhere cherubim, seraphim. These are different titles given to these heavenly beings that God uses to do his bidding throughout the world.

And yet the question is: When God says “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” is he saying—when he says “Let us,” is he referring to those heavenly beings? And that would demand that humans are made not only in the image of God, but also in the image of angels.

TK: Right, right.

JD: And it gives me pause because of that. And also the text has already been explicit that there is a plurality in the single God because he has a Spirit who’s able to hover over the earth in space and time. Already the text has invited us to be thinking about this plurality in the Godhead in relation to multi-persons within the single God.

We—the next time we see this language is in Genesis 3:22. After the fall, God says, “Man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” So again, you either have the angels already knowing good and evil, or God declaring within that plurality of the God—although not fully disclosed yet—what that means is that we’re reading through Scripture, that there is a plurality in the one God.

The last time we see it that I’m aware of is Isaiah 6:8. And this text is going to be significant as we move further into our discussion. In that very text where Isaiah sees the Lord—it doesn’t say Yahweh, it says he sees the Lord, the Sovereign One seated on the throne. And the train of his robe filled the entire palace or temple. And the heavenly beings, the seraphim, are declaring, “Holy, holy, holy.” This is what we read: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.” Those are the three times where God speaks as a plurality in the Old Testament.

TK: Genesis 1:26, 3:22 and then Isaiah 6:8.

JD: Right. And I think most likely in all three instances, the contexts are already suggesting to us we’re thinking about the plurality of—indeed the plurality of the Godhead. I affirm the idea of a council from which God, seated on the throne and the only one seated on the throne, gives direction. But I’m just not convinced that these texts are pointing in that direction. Instead, that God is speaking about his plurality and his unity.

TK: I totally agree. And I think it would turn a lot on its ear to say mankind being made in the image of angelic beings, if that’s what we mean in part by Genesis 1:26.

JD: Right. Right. And yeah, I’m hesitant to go there. Now our next point is this—at times this glorious plurality bound up in the singular God manifests himself in the Bible in the form of a man. In the Old Testament we see God show up in human form. And at some key points, the New Testament is explicit that the one we’re encountering is Jesus before he actually came in his incarnation.

Consider, for example, in Exodus 3, Moses is shepherding his flock. God’s getting ready to deliver Israel from Egypt and Moses is at Mount Horeb, Mount Sinai, shepherding his flock. And that’s where he sees the burning bush. And at the burning bush that was not consumed, we’re told the Angel of the Lord—in Hebrew it can just be “the messenger of Yahweh”—appeared in a flame of fire. That’s intriguing because that’s how God’s glory was depicted in some of those other texts.

The messenger of Yahweh appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush. And he looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight.” And when Yahweh saw that he had turned, God called to him out of the bush. Now, as the messenger of Yahweh, he does not say, “Moses, thus says the Lord.” Instead, out of the bush, we’re told God calls, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” And then he answered, “Don’t come near; take off your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

He is encountering the messenger of Yahweh. He has some kind of a form. And yet when he speaks, it’s God speaking. And it’s this presence that will meet Moses and Israel in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, will manifest himself on Mount Sinai. And it’s this presence, the very presence that met him at the burning bush.

And it’s from that framework then that I think Jude in Jude 5 says this: “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.” And I say, who is it that saved Israel out of Egypt? Was it not Yahweh who met Moses at the burning bush? Yes, it was Yahweh. But Jude says it was Jesus. And it suggests to me the possibility that the messenger of Yahweh in this text—because no one has seen God or his Spirit except Christ, who has seen God and makes him known—that when we have an encounter like this with a human-like manifestation of God’s presence in the Old Testament, that we’re actually getting an early portrayal of the one that we know of as Jesus.

TK: And of course, people listening familiar with the Old Testament are going to have lots of texts they start thinking of then. Genesis 18, Abraham at the entrance of his tent, and it says the Lord appeared to him. Hagar—it says the Angel of the Lord appeared to her. Jacob wrestling before he meets his—before he meets Esau. All these texts and saying, “What am I seeing here?” For instance, with Jacob he says, “I’ve seen God.”

JD: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right. We see another example in the Isaiah text, which we already noted regarding the plurality of speech—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah says, “Here am I! Send me.” Well, it’s in that earlier part, just before that commissioning, that Isaiah says, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord, the Sovereign One seated on the throne.” And then he begins to depict him—the train of his robe filled the temple. He’s like a real person who’s seated on the throne, and he’s wearing a robe that’s filling the temple. And above him stood the seraphim. And he describes them with six wings. And then these burning angelic figures were saying, “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

Now that language—you see the Lord seated on the throne, elevated above all, and then he’s associated with Yahweh. John, right after referring to this very text and the commissioning that follows, he says, “Isaiah said these things because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke of him” (John 12:41). I mean, John in that text says the glory that we are seeing displayed in “Holy, holy, holy,” the one seated on the throne, the Sovereign One above all things—it’s none other than the glory of Jesus. Isaiah saw his glory and spoke of him.

TK: Which answers our question that we had early on. Is—were the—the first question was, “Were the Old Testament saints Trinitarian?” And as far as—as far as did they see the members of the Trinity, though if that’s how we want to frame it right now—you’d say Isaiah absolutely did.

JD: He did. And remember, it’s in this context that we see that mention of the plurality—“Who shall go for us?” So we saw God speaking in Genesis 1:26—“Let us make man, let us make man in our image,” just after the mention of the Spirit of God. Here you see “Who will go for us?” That question comes from Yahweh, and it’s right after the encounter with Jesus’ glory. So again, these are texts that immediately came to my mind when asked this question that truly show that there is a foundation in the Old Testament for the doctrine of the Trinity, that it was already there.

TK: What would you suggest if I was preaching through these passages? If I’m going through a passage like—take your pick—the one we were just talking about in Isaiah. Do I end up at the book of John, or how should I handle that?

JD: I think that preaching through Isaiah within its original context, giving clarity to what he saw, and then being able to take a step back and say—and I think within Isaiah itself, there are numerous signals that within Isaiah 6, it is anticipating the ultimate offspring of the woman who would come, the messenger deliverer the rest of the book is going to unpack as a king, as a servant, as an anointed conqueror. I would just take my people there within Isaiah 6, and then I would, yes, jump to John 12 and say Isaiah himself—what I mean, John, in meditating on Isaiah, he identifies the very one that Isaiah saw, the glory, the Glorious One seated on the throne, the one who makes the commission—identifies him as Jesus. Isaiah didn’t know his name in the same way that we know his name, but he saw the person. He saw the glory, and it was already evident. And I would let my people celebrate that.

TK: It’s really beautiful. We need to draw this to a close—just other stuff going on. But it would be really great, Jason, to pick this up. I’d love to talk to you actually about a passage in Revelation with the Spirit and just connections to the Old Testament there with actually the whole Trinity. But I think this is great for today. Any final thoughts?

JD: Well, I think following up is worth doing. There’s numerous texts that are going to explicitly portray the coming king as a God figure, as one who is reflecting the divinity of God himself. He’s even going to be called God’s Son, and he’s even going to be sitting on the throne of God. And I think going through those texts as well would be super helpful. So let’s plan on another podcast.

TK: I love it. I am looking forward to that, Jason. Well, blessings to you. And thanks everyone for listening. It is a joy to be able to enjoy God’s Word together.

JD: Amen. Amen.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. Today’s podcast was in response to a question. If you have questions about biblical theology you would like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstoplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.