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Many a trinitarian holds to the belief that Jesus pops up here and there back in the Old/Original Testament proving that he is God. They believe that such a view is tenable based on the fact that in certain events described in the OT, the text describes God appearing to someone and conversing with them or doing something else in person. Yet NONE of these instances does the text ever say that the being described as God is Jesus or is “God the Son”, or any “person” of a tri-personal Godhead.

Discussion of Thomas’ words in John 20:28 has been a hot discussion topic of late here on kingdomready. So I thought it was fitting AND timely when I ran across an excellent article on the same subject by Ivan Maddox of West End Bible Fellowship in Atlanta Georgia. Ivan’s full article is rather long, so I thought I would post a couple of interesting latter segments of it and provide a link to the full piece (Did Thomas Claim that Jesus is God?) for those who wish to read the entire paper (which I would heartily recommend).

The God of Thomas?

Another fellow Bible-believing Unitarian wrote an interesting article entitled “Two Gods?”. In it he (Juan Baixeras) makes the point that the Bible expressly shows that there is only ONE God and then that Jesus HAS A GOD. Therefore it is not hard to see the logical conclusion that if Jesus is God, then there has to be TWO Gods. Of course the inverse is the real truth in that since Jesus has a God, then he is NOT that God and is just who the Bible tells us he is - the Messiah, “God’s anointed” human representative.

Here’s Juan’s article in its entirety with all formatting:

TWO GODS?

By Juan Baixeras

With all the trinity discussion that has been going on here at kingdomready.org, I thought I’d take time out to write an article on few of the issues I find with the trinity. Now I have a host of them – some of which have been brought up in the comment debates going on here in the blogs and some others probably to follow. But I wanted to address a couple of particular issues in detail that really bug me about the trinity belief. So let’s get started.

The Trinity contradicts the Biblical record

of how God reveals himself and his Messiah

By Ron Shockley

1. God seen or not seen – in human form or not?

Since there has been so much “Trinity” debate here on the kingdomready blog, I thought this week I would cover something on subject. Even more reason since during the debates between us Unitarians and our Trinitarian visitors, we also had a “Oneness” believer join in and several people didn’t really catch his positional stance at first. The following might help with that somewhat.

Historical Christianity has had four main belief views on who is God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Some might say include other views such as the Latter Day Saints and Herbert Armstrong’s Church of God folk that believe in a “God family”. But when it boils right down to it, the following four are the longer term predominant viewpoints. And they are: Trinitarian, Oneness, Arian, and Unitarian. What does each profess? Well here is each one’s primary view of God, Jesus, & the Holy Spirit.

I thought I’d take a little break from my “False View of Hell” series this week and post something a little different - though certainly on topic. In fact, it covers many of the topics I’ve already covered and some to come up next. But for now I thought I would share this nice little “visual” resource I ran across a few years ago concerning the proper Biblical view of death (and Hell). This is a comic style booklet by Jim Pinkoski that has been published for years by the “Amazing Facts” people (amazingfacts.org). And except for once little part throwing in the traditional error of the trinity (in Part 7), it does a pretty good job in both its broad coverage of scripture, common sense reasoning, and entertaining pictorials/graphics. It use to be available on the Amazing Facts site for full web viewing, but it seems to be only available for purchase there now. However I did find a viewable/download-able PDF version of the same book at helltruth.com.

This week I’m continuing my little paper - “The False View of Hell”. My goal with this piece is to try and show to both our Christian and non-Christian visitors, that the typical, predominant view that good people go to “Heaven” and bad people (or people just not believing in Jesus - a.k.a. “becoming a Christian”) go the “Hell” when they die, is NOT what the Bible actually says. Such a belief can only be seen in the bible when the presuppositions of that idea are read into certain Bible passages. And even then, they come into direct conflict with other parts of Scripture that point to different “afterlife” views. However, if (as I mentioned in Part 1) one looks at Scripture as a whole and doesn’t read Plato’s dualistic concepts into the Hebrew texts, it can be seen that man doesn’t automatically continue to live on past death in the “good place” or the “bad place”. Let’s dig deeper into this here in Part 2!

A few weeks ago, an atheist visitor to this site posted something that I’ve heard many a person say who was raised in some form of Christianity as to why they no longer believe in it. I’ve also read quotes from several famous atheists and agnostics over time expressing the same basic complaint. “Hell” as traditionally taught in mainstream Christianity is too absurd, too cruel, and too unconscionable to have come from any real Supreme Being of the universe . And you know what? I would agree with them.

In the following article series I will endeavor to dig deeper into this subject and hopefully show that one does not need to throw the “baby out with the bath water”. Once the truth of hell is known, the God of the Bible should no longer be seen as a vindictive monster, but the designer of a sensible master plan for his creation.

A long time friend of the faith sent me an email today that impressed me so, I thought it would be great to share with everyone here on the KingdomReady Blog. And the subject concerned Mr. Chuck Norris (yes THE Chuck Norris best know from 30+ years of martial arts/action films and the long-running TV show - “Walker Texas Ranger”) openly critiquing Oprah Winfrey’s recent open endorsement of the latest spiritual self-help guru. But it wasn’t his counter-opinion of her or the guru that I was impressed with, it was the fact that he was standing up for the oldest and ONLY TRUE self-help book - the Bible and the only spiritual guru that can truly save us - Jesus the Christ.
Here’s Mr. Norris entire column from 3/3/08 from the “World Net Daily” website - entitled - “Oprah’s new Easter“:

For many years one of my favorite chapters in the NT Scriptures was the Apostle Paul’s famous Chapter 15 of 1st Corinthians. It is commonly referred to as “The Resurrection Chapter” with good reason. Throughout the entire chapter Paul preaches the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, and directly because of and in the pattern of his resurrection, his followers would also be eligible to be resurrected in the future.