You have people like Bart Ehrman. And these other Jesus Mythers,
claiming that this theology of Christianity was invented by later church councils
basically out of thin air. And that New Testament attestations
to Jesus' deity were written late.
Both of those ideas show a deep, profound ignorance of the Old Testament.
We want to loop the Holy Spirit into this, from the Old Testament. This is Isaiah 63.
This is a little encapsulation of the wandering of the Jews to the promised land.
And in verse 10, Isaiah makes the comment about his people
that "they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit." I mean, we know the story of Israel
going through the desert, the wilderness, I mean, they complain all the time,
you've got all these episodes where God wants to judge them. And Moses intercedes,
and God says, you know, okay, I'm going to be long-suffering again,
and, you know, so on and so forth. But there's this one particular incident
where this language is used; "they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit."
If you look up the parallel, which is longer in Psalm 78,
where you get sort of a whole litany of things that happen.
Look at the language here; there's a reference to the Most High God in verse 35.
And you keep reading down here, and you get the same language.
The reason I have these colorized
is that "rebelled" is the same word. In both passages,
the same Hebrew word. "Grieved" is the same Hebrew word in both passages.
But the object is different. In Isaiah 63, they rebel and grieve against the Holy Spirit.
And here they rebel and grieve. And the object is God, the Holy One of Israel.
Now we could read elsewhere in this passage, the angel actually shows up in Psalm 78.
The point is that God and the Spirit are interchanged. Both things are God,
just as God and the angel were interchanged in other passages.
They're both God. Different ways of saying and referring to God.
Now, this is important for when you get to the New Testament.
And here's where I really wanted angle for today.
If you think about what's going on in the Old Testament,
you have two Yahweh figures that are prominent.
Yes, the Holy Spirit is also referred to as God, we just saw that, but
I want to focus on the two.
You have Yahweh invisible and transcendent, then you have Yahweh as a man,
okay. And you have the Spirit looped in here too. They're all connected,
they're all referred to as God, they're all identified with God in someplace.
The two are more prominent than the Spirit is, at least in terms of an explicit sense.
But just as the angel, think about this, the middle circle here, just as the angel was God,
but also wasn't the same person. I mean, he's not, he is, but isn't God, He is God.
But yet God's still up there in heaven and transcendent.
He's not like when the angel who is God is on Earth, that doesn't mean God is only there.
God still everywhere, you know, you get this sort of language, again,
the same difficulty that we have talking about the Trinity.
But just as the angel was, but wasn't Yahweh. So, if we put Jesus here,
it's the same struggle, the same language, Jesus was, but wasn't God.
But Jesus also is connected to and identified with the Spirit.
So you have an analogy here, just look at where the bubbles are.
Yahweh God, the Father, same person. The embodied God as man in the Old Testament
aligns with Jesus and then the Spirit. Because we don't realize,
and here are the list of passages. There are several places where the Spirit of Jesus
or the Spirit of Christ is in the text parallel to the Spirit of God.
There are a couple of places were in 2 Corinthians 3:18, for instance,
where Paul refers to Jesus, he says, The Lord Who is the Spirit,
but we know that Jesus wasn't the Spirit, but he is the spirit but he's not.
The Spirit is Jesus, but he isn't. They're independent, but the same.
Again, this is where the Trinitarian struggle really comes from.
And its antecedent is the Old Testament.
Jesus is the central figure linking both Testaments
and linking with both the Father and the Spirit.
This is where Trinitarian theology comes from.
Not from proof texts like the Great Commission, even though those are important,
they echo the point. But the theology of it comes from the Old Testament.
Two Yahwehs, actually three because the Spirit is identified
with God who is also the angel.
Again, you get this three-in-one language in the Old Testament,
and you get it in the New Testament. So this is the antecedent.
And the payoff for us today are the Godhead concepts are rooted in the Old Testament.
They're rooted in the Old Testament. They're applied to Jesus in the New Testament.
This is where trinitarianism comes from. And this makes certain passages coherent.
"Before Abraham was I am", Jesus says, yeah. If you know your Old Testament,
you know how the visible Yahweh in human form connects to Jesus.
Yeah, Jesus can say that.
The Gospel that was preached before unto Abraham (Galatians).
Yeah, it's the Abrahamic covenant. Okay. I mean, we understand this.
You know, you have people like Bart Ehrman, and these other Jesus mythers,
and Ehrman is not a Jesus myther. But I'm using Ehrman
because of his criticism of Christology.
And Jesus mythers are just sort of ultra ignorant at this point,
claiming that this theology of Christianity was invented by later church councils
basically out of thin air, and that New Testament attestations
to Jesus's deity were written late, just added arbitrarily.
Both of those ideas show a deep profound ignorance of the Old Testament.
The antecedent for all of this.