The Trinity

I was on Tumblr (my other blog with all the same stuff I have in this one, but much more community based; it's like Facebook-style blogging... or maybe more like MySpace, since it's a world-wide community based on usernames and personal interests) yesterday, and a question came up about the Trinity and who we should pray to: Jesus or God.  The resulting conversation was really interesting, and I learned a lot, so I thought I'd share it.  Enjoy!

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Anonymous:

One question: If Jesus is the son of God, and God is the father, which one do I pray to? Like when I'm saying grace or something, do I praise the son or the father? Is Jesus an intercessor that relays prayers between me and God, or can I pray to him to directly answer my prayers? Forgive me, I know I said "one question" but I'm really trying to understand this concept.
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Bethany (uniting-all-christians):

I’ll try to answer this the best I can…
Matthew 6:9 says to pray to the Father. “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name,’”
You don’t necessarily have to say “Father” though… because the Father is also God, Lord, etc.
However, we’re supposed to pray to God in Jesus’ name.
“And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” -John 14:13-14
Jesus does connect you to God. When Jesus died on the cross for your sins, THAT’S what made it possible for you to have a relationship with your Father :)
Hope this helps! If you’re still confused, please come back lol. God bless you<3
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Anon:

Ok I get what you're saying, but still a bit confused. If anything, I'd say that having to pray in Jesus' name takes away from my connection to my ultimate Creator. The way I see it is instead of sending 100% of my praise or prayer to God, I'm giving off a percentage of that to Jesus because I'm associating him with God. I guess my question is more on the lines of who takes credit for everything that happens? Jesus or God? Which ever one does is the one I'm completely submitting to, not both.
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(after a few comments about the Trinity all being the same God, saying that by praying to One, you are praying to all three)

Anon:

Thanks to everyone that replied to my question! I'd still say that there's no way that God can be on the same level as Jesus, even if they existed as a trinity. God existed way before Jesus and He created everything including Jesus, so how can I place both of them on the same level? It doesn't make sense to me. After all Jesus was human, so it confuses me even more to say that I'm allowed to place a human being on the same level as God.
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Me:

John 1:1-2 & 14 says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."


Even though Jesus was a Man, He was (and is) also God. God did not create Jesus. He created His body. But Jesus has always been with God, and He has always been God. When you make God and Jesus out to be two different beings, that's when you start running into trouble with asking, "Which one should I pray to?" The thing is that they're not two different beings. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three in One. Like someone else said earlier, if you pray to One, you pray to all three.


You absolutely can pray to Jesus, because He is God. But if you always associate Jesus with the Man and God with the Spirit in heaven, then you're separating the Trinity. In that case, praying to Jesus would be exactly like praying to a person. Jesus was just a Man. Yes, He was also God, and yes, He was a perfect Man, but He was a Man all the same. Praying to a man is just praying to an idol. We, as Christians, have to get out of the mindset that Jesus is the Man and God is the Spirit, because that's confining them to their locations: God is in heaven and Jesus was on earth. When we understand that Jesus is God and that God is Jesus, then we can pray to Jesus as if we're praying to the whole Trinity. But if you pray to the Man who performed miracles, taught humility, died on the cross, and rose from the grave, you're worshiping an idol. Pray to the Spirit of God that filled His body, because without the Spirit, Jesus would have been an empty shell of a man.

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Anon:

Hi, I'm the anon from the "uniting all Christians" blog. Your answer seemed to make the most sense, so thnx for that. However, if we're not supposed to focus on Jesus as the man, then why are there so many depicted pictures and statues of him, or his body in this case? Isn't that the whole point of the cross? Because Jesus, the man, died on the cross, it became a strong symbol of Christianity?
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Me:

Hey, anon!  Thanks for the question and encouragement.

To tell you the truth, I think the whole thing that started the spread of the cross as a symbol of the sacrifice Jesus made was idolatry.  Not to bring down anyone who wears a cross around their neck, but it is what it is.  Of course, the cross is a great reminder of what Jesus did for us (I have one sitting next to my computer), but we have to be careful that we don’t start worshiping the image rather than the Person—the God—who gave the cross its meaning.  (Basically, if you can’t pray to God without clutching your cross necklace for dear life, then you need to put that cross away for a while.)

People worship in different ways.  For some, it’s painting.  For others, it’s sculpting.  For some, it’s composing.  For others, it’s acting.  Whatever the method of worship is, we usually don’t intend to make those things into idols.  We use diverse forms of worship to remind others of what God did for us, not so that they would worship the art we make.

This is a little bit off topic and will probably just make things harder to understand: Jesus died for our sins on the cross, but He also did much more than that.  He actually descended into hell.  I don’t think anyone will ever understand how that’s possible until we meet Him face to face.  But I’m going to take a whack at reasoning through it.  Jesus was a Man, so He had a soul and a spirit, just like every person.  (The Bible makes several distinctions between the spirit of a man and the Holy Spirit of God.)  The spirit/soul of a person is what goes to heaven or hell (although the Bible also says that we will be given new bodies when Jesus returns).  This may not be biblically correct, but if it helps someone understand, then God can redeem it and use it for good (that same idea applies to what I said earlier about the different forms of worship not being intended to serve as idols): Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, but He also had His own human spirit.  That human spirit was what descended into hell, because the Holy Spirit, being perfectly holy, could have nothing to do with evil.  After all, God can’t be separated from God.  So Jesus’ spirit—Jesus the Man—went to hell, carrying all the sins of the world.  But because He had lived a perfect life, His human spirit was spotless and served only as a carrier, dropping off our sins in hell.  The cross was the least of His suffering because He paid for our sins in hell, but when all of our sins had been paid for (because, no matter how many sins we commit, all our sins are numbered and there is an end to them), Jesus’ spirit was found to be pure and righteous, deserving to be set free from hell, kind of like holy parole that only God can earn.  So His spirit, having escaped from hell, returned to His body on the earth, and He was carried up into heaven by the Holy Spirit, who had reunited with His perfect human spirit.

Sorry if that made things a thousand times more confusing.  Remember that that’s just my idea of what when on “behind the scenes.”  My point in saying all of that is this: The spiritual side of what Jesus did for us is far more complex than we could ever imagine.  Because nobody has ever fully seen or experienced what goes on in heaven and hell and returned to tell about it, nobody knows exactly what heaven or hell are like.  So we’re left to imagine it, and we have to resort to using things we do know so that we can describe what we don’t know.  That’s why the cross and Jesus the Man have become such huge symbols in Christianity: The cross is the worst form of torture imaginable to man, so we use that to symbolize the infinitely worse torture in hell that Jesus suffered for us.  Nobody has seen the face of God in heaven (we’d die if we did, because He’s so holy), but Colossians 1:15 says that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” and Jesus said in John 14:8, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.”  So because artists can’t paint God the Spirit, they have to paint God as Jesus the Man.

Sorry to make an essay out of this, but… In closing, the images and symbols used in Christianity serve not as idols to be worshiped, but as reminders of the One who deserves to be worshiped.  Don’t let the paintings and sculptures of Jesus define the God you worship and confine Him to humanity, but let them remind you that the Almighty God saw it necessary, and even desirable, to become a mortal Man like us and to suffer for every wrong that we ever committed and ever will commit, so that we could spend the rest of eternity with Him.

I hope that helps a little.  Sorry if that was too confusing.  Haha.  If it was, message me again, and I’ll try to do a better job of explaining.
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Anon:

It's me again! Thanks for the long reply, it did clarify some things up for me. So you're saying at the end of the day that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all God, even though they're different entities and are referred to by different names? The way I see it is that there is one God and even though we don't see Him, He makes His presence felt through every intricate detail of life; whether it's through scriptures or messengers or even prophets that can perform miraculous things, it is God's way of making His presence felt. Which is where Jesus comes along; a human being chosen by God to deliver the one true message of monotheism that has always been delivered by all of God's chosen individuals. That makes Jesus and all other chosen ones a mercy to all of mankind, however, we must understand the ultimate source of that mercy, which is God, and worship Him alone. We can praise the Lord for blessing us with individuals like Jesus and Abraham and all the way back to Adam, but we must not confuse who is the All Mighty and who are His blessed servants.

The Trinity really does make monotheism so complex when it really isn't. There is one God and only one God and we owe Him 100% of our worship. No intercessors in this life, no one to speak on our behalf, and definitely no one to remove our own sins. We have a relationship with God, and we can speak to Him whenever we want, and we can repent and ask for forgiveness so our sins can be removed. There isn't anything or anyone in between the creation and their Creator.
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Me:

I'm glad my rambling made sense to you!  But I think part of what I said might have been a little misleading.  I said that Jesus' human spirit was what descended into hell to pay for our sins.  But that doesn't make Jesus any less than God.  Yes, Jesus was a Man that God chose to send to preach salvation by repentance, but if God hadn't been in Him, then He wouldn't have been sent.  In other words, the Person of Jesus only existed because God chose to manifest Himself in His body.  Luke 1:35 says that the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary so that she would give birth to Jesus.  Think of it this way: Humans give birth to other humans, right?  (I would hope so.)  Babies are born by the combination of the genes of the father and the mother; therefore, the baby only exists because the father and mother have come together to form one being.  In the same way, if God were to give birth, His child could be nothing other than God.  To use evolution as an analogy (I don't believe in the theory of evolution, by the way), humans don't give birth to apes that are less than human; so God can't give birth to anything less than God.  So Jesus was born fully God because He was God's Son, and He was fully Man because He was Mary's Son.  Mary's humanity gave Jesus His body, and God's... Godhood? gave Him His Spirit.  As C.S. Lewis puts it, "You don't have a soul.  You are a soul.  You have a body."  Jesus was God in the flesh.



I'm not an actor, but let's pretend I am.  I go backstage and put on my costume, then I come out on stage as the Cowardly Lion.  Am I the Cowardly Lion?  Yes.  But am I really?  No, I'm Michael, just an average person playing the part of the Cowardly Lion.  At the end of the day, I'll take off my costume and resume acting like myself.  Does that make me any less Michael while I'm acting as the Cowardly Lion?  No.  Behind the scenes, God made a body—a costume—for Himself and came to earth in the form of a Man as Jesus.  Was He a Man?  Yes, but only for a time.  In reality, Jesus was and is God, even while He was a Man.  And at the end of His time on earth, He ascended into heaven and shed His earthly body to reveal the fullness of His true identity as God.  He wasn't any less God while He was a Man, but He chose to play the part of a Man while still existing as God.



Yes, Christian monotheism is very complicated, but if we understood everything about God, then He wouldn't be an infinite God, would He?



You're on the right track with your last paragraph, but you have to be careful about the way you say that.  You're right that there is nothing separating us from God... anymore.  Because Christ served as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins, our sins are paid for and we are now wholly righteous in God's sight.  But if we have not accepted Jesus as our sacrifice, if we have not laid our hands on the Lamb as the Israelites did (Leviticus 4:24), then our sins have not been passed on to Him, and we are still guilty of all our sins.  We are completely separated from God until we repent and come to Christ.  Yes, we can speak to God directly whenever we want, but only because Jesus cleansed us of our sins and tore the veil between us and God (Mark 15:37-38).  But now, because of Him, the Spirit now lives in us, and we can never be separated from Him again.  As Paul says in Romans 8:38-39, "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neithe the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."


I hope that helps, because none of this was from me.  I never could have come up with any of this stuff, especially the whole thing about birth and acting.  So I have to thank God for telling me what to say.  This actually helped me a lot too.  Haha.

Have a great day/night, and God bless!

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There may be more to come.  We'll just have to wait and see.