The Godhead

The Godhead is a quite complex and difficult matter to understand, and it is compounded by a multitude of misunderstandings and apprehension on the part of many. It is always difficult for humans to attempt to understand the nature of God, just as it is hard for clay to try to figure out the potter: we are finite, and God is infinite; we are dust and He is Spirit; He is infinitely greater than ourselves (Isaiah 55:8-9). Any attempt to understand God's nature must be predicated with the reality that we cannot understand much beyond what God has revealed about Himself to us. Never should we allow our own thinking or our own limitations to cause us to limit God, for God will always be greater than the box in which we would seek to place Him. On the other hand, God, so to speak, has put Himself in His own box, revealing many things about His nature to His creation that can and should be understood.

The nature of the Godhead has been a source of great contention throughout history. The first millennium of Christianity was spent in various disputations regarding the nature of God: the nature of the constituency of the Godhead, the supremacy of Persons in the Godhead, the human and divine nature of Christ, and so on and so forth. It also has represented a stumbling block to other religions: Christianity has posited many gods in the eyes of both Jews and Muslims since Christians posit three Persons in the Godhead, and not God of a singular Person. These difficulties make it all the more important for us to understand the nature of God as revealed in the Scriptures.

Let us begin with the Father. The Scriptures throughout reveal that the Father is God (e.g. John 8:42, Romans 1:7). The Father was before the beginning, and is the Creator (Genesis 1:1). The Father also is the source of all authority; He grants the Son authority in Matthew 28:18, and we read the following in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28: