The Forgotten Trinity

I'm here at the Presbyterian Church to do our apologetics conferences. A few things before we get started. Ladies room, go through the double doors, take an immediate right and head straight back. Men's room, go all the way across the fellowship hall, then take a right and go straight to the back.

We are going to have pink lemonade and cookies after the presentation this evening, so we invite you to stick around. Some of the cookies have nuts. Yes, some of the cookies have nuts. Some of the cookies aren't.

Those are gargantuan peanuts. Be warned. If you have an allergy, you're probably going to have to fly to Chile and not come. Anyway. It is very nice to see a number of people from other congregations.

We have Free Will Baptists and Independent Baptists. I'm not sure what you're called. I know you're Baptists and you're Independent. Did I say Free Will? Quite a few. Anyway, if you are not familiar with us, we are a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which means that we are a remnant of those who still believe the Bible.

We received the right to go to Christian fellowship out of the mainline Presbyterian Church nearly 80 years ago. We still believe the Bible and it is our only and powerful rule of faith in practice. We are centered, say, by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.

And all that we do is speak to God's glory alone. And so, we try to stress simple reverent worship, expository preaching. Rather than lots of programs, we try to equip and encourage fathers to be the spiritual heads of their homes.

We think it's far better for a family to be gathered around the dining room table, reading the Bible together, than all the slickest programs in the world. If you'd like more information on us, there are some flyers around.

I'll be hanging around as well. And it is a privilege to have you with us. We'll be continuing to meet tomorrow night and Saturday night. The topics will be, tomorrow night, Romans 9, Potter's Freedom.

Then Saturday night, with it being July 4th, we figured that we would go for something tame and non-controversial like homosexuality. But at any rate, it is a great privilege to have Dr. White with us.

If you are not familiar, Dr. James White is president of Alpha Omega Ministries. He is the author of 20-some-odd, I think, pushing 30. Can you close this down? Twenty-four. Twenty-four. Only twenty-four.

But he has participated in part of over 130 formal moderated debates with a host of different people who aren't airmen. If you missed last night's presentation, a better recording of the same material is available on YouTube.

Apparently, most of it is on YouTube, but a better version is also on YouTube. It's not on our channel. But we are going to be posting all of these up there. It's a great privilege to have Dr. White with us.

Please express your gratitude. This is his gift to us. He has known us for many years and contacted me several months ago. He has basically volunteered to come here without speaking to any honorarium.

He has said, in our heart, we give it to you to encourage the ministry. And that means a great deal to us. So please express your appreciation for him, Dr. James White.

It's an honor to be back with you again this evening.

It seemed like it was a little bit cool. But I got up this morning. I've been exploring. And every time I was on Lake City in the past, it's just been to come up and do whatever. Do debates outside the temple, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'd always seen those canyons going off of those huge mountains. And I knew that there were skiers that come up during the winter to explore those places. Well, now I'm getting to explore them. And this morning, I discovered a place called Garzman Path on my bike.

I started down at the bottom and rode up to the top there and went, oh, this is really nice. It's a beautiful, beautiful area up there. I'm enjoying that. I'm sort of killing myself in the process. But riding here in the morning and speaking during the evening and this evening, we have a subject that is, in one sense, similar to last evening in the idea that it requires of us a fair amount of concentration and work, but very different.

It's one of the reasons I chose not to use the projector this evening. I have, obviously, entire presentations on this that I can present to you. But I decided I wanted to go a little more sermonic rather than professorial, shall we say, in talking about our God and talking about why we believe what the Christian Church has professed for its entire history, really, when you go back to the very earliest, outside of the New Testament.

It's interesting to note that, for example, Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, on his way to a martyrdom in Rome, wrote seven letters. And in those letters, he over and over again expressed full belief in the deity of Christ.

He had a very high Christology. This was not something that just developed over time. This was something that you find not only in the pages of Scripture, but in the earliest faith as well. And so, to me, it is vitally important that we know who God is.

Because what differentiates between Christianity and paganism is that in paganism, you worship unknown gods. You remember on Mars Hill, Acts chapter 17, the Apostle Paul latches on to that image, that altar to an unknown god.

They're sort of covering their bases, just in case there was somebody out there that somehow had forgotten to communicate clearly, or maybe had chosen a prophet that was very absent-minded. Who knows?

I mean, if you think about how that all worked. And he latched on to that, and he talked about this unknown god, and said that actually the one true god has revealed himself. We do not worship an unknown god.

And we do not worship a god that you can edit down to make comfortable to us. Well, when I say we, I'm talking about those who truly desire to worship God, who desire His honor. We do live in a day when much of what calls itself Christianity is, in fact, creating a designer god.

Creating a god that will not make demands upon them. Creating a god that is more psychologically fulfilling to worship. You can, in essence, determine how you're going to worship God in such a way as to make you feel the best when you walk out the back door.

This kind of a Christianity is very popular in Atlanta. It is, however, I would suggest, utterly unknown to the page of the scripture itself. In fact, in my experience, as I seek to interact with Christians who struggle with certain elements of the Christian faith, I am over and over again struck by the fact that when you raise issues in the scriptures where God reveals Himself, and He reveals certain aspects of His being that are the most challenging to sinful man, that is really when you find out whether someone is under the authority of the Word of God or whether they are not.

Because when you think about it, there are certain things that God has revealed about Himself that are uncomfortable to any sinful person. The holiness of God. You think what happens in Isaiah chapter 6.

You think about that encounter where Isaiah, one of the holiest men in Israel, sees God as He truly is. And what is the immediate response of this holy man but to say, I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among two people of unclean lips.

In other words, once he saw God for who God truly was, then he saw Himself for who He truly was. And I think that is what people are concerned about. They are afraid of seeing who they really are reflected in the reality of who God really is.

Some of you may have read in your experience in your lifetime a book called The Institutes of Christian Religion. And I have often said that the vast majority of that book, the ink still smudges on the page, it remains so relevant to where we are today.

It starts off with this discussion of what comes first, our knowledge of ourselves or our knowledge of God. And basically it comes down to the conclusion that, well, we need to know God rightly to know ourselves.

Because if we are His creatures, then a true knowledge of Him will give us the proper context to truly know ourselves. We live in a day, however, where the idea that God has spoken with clarity and therefore has revealed Himself is not something that is shared by a large majority of people.

And I have to report to you, it is not actually shared functionally and meaningfully by a large portion of the people who actually call themselves Christians. When you look into what is taught in the seminaries, when you look into what is taught in Bible colleges across our land, you will discover that a belief in the true inspiration and revelation of Scripture is a small minority.

Even amongst people who would say otherwise, to really treat the Bible as what it claims to be, and even more so as what Jesus taught it to be, is unfortunately a rarity. In the vast majority of instances, that word is subjugated under all sorts of other traditions, or subjugated to the mind of man, or whatever authority you want to put over it, that is what ends up happening.

Now, what does this have to do with our subject this evening? Well, let me begin with this statement. If you don't believe that God has spoken with clarity, if you do not have the highest view of Scripture, you will never believe the Doctrine of the Trinity.

Because the Doctrine of the Trinity is based upon two fundamental assertions, Sola Scriptura, that Scripture alone is the sole and valid rule of faith, and Tota Scriptura, that we must accept and believe all that God has revealed in Scripture.

We can't get to pick and choose, we can't say, well, well, there's a fairly well-known fellow who, what, about two or three weeks ago now, came out and switched his position and did the flip-flop that many people are doing today on the subject of marriage and human sexuality, and he calls himself a red-letter Christian.

A red-letter Christian. Now, I have talked in the past about what I call hyper-red-letterism. There are those people who basically seem to think that if the words are printed in red, they're more inspired than if they're printed in black.

There's a lot of people who take that view, whether they want to say that or not. The point is, this particular fellow, well-known guy, wants to create a view of Jesus. He creates a Jesus that amazingly looks a lot like him.

And then, with that view of Jesus, he then wants to read everything else in Scripture through that particular lens. Now, what that results in is, well, if you do that, then you don't have to worry anymore about all those troubling passages in the Old Testament where, well, isn't everyone just a little bit bothered by Luza?

I mean, is Luza really one of the favorite childhood Bible stories? Sometimes you're going, who in the world is Luza? Luza was that nice, he seems like to us, his nice guy. And remember the people of Israel, they're moving the ark, and they're not doing exactly what God had said was to be carried on poles by the priests.

But they decided there was a more effective, more efficient way of doing it, and so they had it on a cart. And one of the oxen stumbles, and the cart stops to tip, and Luza, what a tragedy would it be for this beautiful ark of the covenant to fall upon the ground, and so he reaches out, and he keeps it from falling, and he saves the day.

God strikes again. Strikes again.

And a lot of us, we sit back, and we look at that, and we go, I don't like it. Now, when Aaron's sons were consumed at Afra's strange fire, and I struck that before God, we don't know much about them, and we don't really know what they were up to, we're not really sure what the strange fire thing was, despite any conferences that were recently held in California, and we're really not sure about any of that stuff.

And so we're like, well, he seems really strict, you know, this God seems really strict. But Luza really bothers us, really, really causes problems. So what a lot of people do is they take Jesus, and they take the Jesus lens, and then they look through, that's the lens they've created themselves, and then they look back at the Old Testament, and all of a sudden, the entire swaths of the Old Testament disappear.

All that stuff about bringing Israel to the land, and destroying the Amorites, and judgment, and, you know, all that stuff just disappears because we have a new lens that we can look through. Problem is, once you start playing with scripture like that, there really isn't any stopping point.

And there really isn't any reason to continue to believe the things that we have believed down through the centuries, either. Because unless you have the highest view of scripture, you will not be a biblical Trinitarian.

Now I know, I know, if you go off to the university, or the community college, you're going to be told that the doctrine of the Trinity developed over time, and it's just a matter of believing what the Council of Nicaea said, and then reaffirmed the Council of Constantinople, and you've got Chalcedon, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And it's all just historical meanderings of the Church once it's sort of lost rooting in the Bible. That's not the case. The only reason to believe the Trinity is because you are willing to believe everything that the Bible says about God.

And if you don't believe that the Bible is God's self-revelation, there's absolutely no reason to believe the Trinity. And I'm sorry, I know there are people who say, well, you know, if you look up in the sky, you'll see that there are certain constellations.

But that constellation and that constellation, it reveals the truth. And I just sort of go, what? I mean, I know there are some good folks who have certainly done that stuff. I don't even know how to begin to try to defend something like that from the pages of Scripture.

The reason we believe in the Trinity is because we believe all the Scripture teaches about God. Now, let me give you a definition and warn you ahead of time. I am not one of those people that discusses this subject without passion.

I believe this is central to our worship. I believe it's central to our Christian experience. I am not claiming to be some objective scholar just examining the evidence. I am a biblical Trinitarian. I am forced to believe in the Trinity by the revelation of Scripture itself.

And so I'm not one of those folks who starts off with all the philosophical definitions and all the rest of that stuff, and then eventually might get around to looking at the Bible. My focus this evening, that's the right amount of time to be spent looking at the three foundational doctrines that make up the doctrine of the Trinity, that force us to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity from the Scriptural definition.

But I do have to be given the definition, given the fact that, well, I recently have been having the opportunity of going down to South Africa, for example. And one of the first conversations I had when I got there with one of my hosts was the fact that in essence the majority of what calls itself the Christian Church in South Africa is not Trinitarian.

It claims to be. But in reality, the vast majority of people in South Africa that claim to be Christian could never define the doctrine of the Trinity accurately. They do not believe that it's central or important.

There are no sermons on the subject. Some people thought that some of the seminars I did there were the first seminars on that subject in 50 years in that country. And so you can have people, and you can have churches.

I mean, a lot of the liberal mainline denominations still have the doctrine of the Trinity in their creeds. They don't believe it. They don't really believe it's a divine revelation, but it's still there.

And so when you ask people what is the doctrine of the Trinity, when my Muslim friends ask people that in South Africa, they get a lot of different answers. And I'll be honest. I think that if you were to go to most evangelical churches this coming Sunday and pass out just a short little quiz, a basic little quiz of what the doctrine of the Trinity is, I do not have any confidence that 50 of the people would pass that quiz.

And in fact, I have a feeling that about 70 would prove themselves theoretical in the doctrine of the Trinity. But completely out of ignorance. Completely out of ignorance. You rarely hear sermons on the doctrine.

I started my book, Forgotten Trinity, by saying, I love the Trinity. And then I said, when was the last time you heard someone say that? When was the last time you heard someone say, I love the Trinity?

And the reason I think you don't hear that is because people don't say they love something that they don't understand. And I think most of us as believers are a little uncomfortable. When Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door, if you challenge them, the first thing they're going to do is run to attack on the Trinity because they've found that to be the most effective way of silencing something.

Because they realize that Christians are extremely hesitant to really dive into the defense of the Trinity. Or, even if they do, their knowledge is so fragmentary and self-contradictory that it's easy to end up tying them in knots.

In fact, back before YouTube became what YouTube is today, back in the 90s, I remember going to a large church in Florida in the late 90s. And what I used to like to do is I would role-play. I would go in and I would role-play.

Because no one had seen me before, so it was easy to sneak in and I would role-play. And I was teaching a junior high school class. Do we have any junior high school teachers in here? People who teach either junior high schools or Sunday school teachers in junior high?

No? Oh, there's one person in the entire room. Well, you have my sincerest respect. As I look at it, we're born and we start that process of maturation, moving toward adulthood, toward true humanity. And then this happens.

It goes like that. That's the junior high school years, right there, where you get back down below the human level into some puzzle. And then somewhere around the middle of sophomore year, you start coming back out toward humanity again.

So anyone who can survive teaching junior high school deserves at least a Purple Heart, if not a congressional award. Anyway, I had a junior high school class to teach on Jones, but this is what we did.

We had the youth minister. Why do we have youth ministers who are always youth? I mean, does that really make sense? Take the most immature person we have, take the other most immature people we have.

Isn't that a rather dangerous combination? It's like having to drive you by all these fireworks, little shots out in the heat. I'm trying to sort of get around here. I don't know. It's very frightening to me.

But anyway, the youth minister comes in, and he introduces me as Elder White from the local kingdom hall. And since we've been talking about what other people believe, then we've got him to come, and he's going to talk to us.

And so I start talking with the youth minister, and within 30 seconds, I had the youth minister spouting Harrison. I turned him into a vocalist, like that. And then once you've got that, it's really easy to tie it up with a little bow and just...

And the kids, that was the only way to get them to listen. I mean, they're actually feeling bad for the youth minister for once in a while. It shows some compassion for them. You can only go halfway through the class that way, because it's going to take at least half the class to undo the damage that you did during the first part once you tell them who you really are.

But they really listened. I mean, if I was just some guy from Arizona, they would never listen. It was so easy to get even a staff member to start spouting Harrison in the Doctrine of Trinity. It took literally 30 seconds.

And so I am concerned that there is a tremendous amount of confusion, and if we do not have clarity on the Doctrine of Trinity, we will not be captured in seeking to defend it, and we will not see it being properly applied to the entirety of our worship.

And by the way, the Gospel is Trinitarian in its nature as well. So if we don't understand that, we are going to have some serious difficulties. So let's start with the definition. Within the one being that is God, there exist eternally three co-eternal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Now, that is one sentence. It's not even a majorly compound sentence. That's one sentence. And you would think, well, if you can define something in one sentence, then how complex can it really be? But the problem is, most people conflate to the terms that I just used.

Let me just repeat it again. Within the one being, which is the first term, that is God, there exist eternally three co-eternal persons, there is the other one, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Now those who oppose the Doctrine of Trinity say, well, what you're saying is one plus one plus one equals one. And what they're hearing us say is that there are three persons that are one person, or there are three beings that are one being.

And we're playing around with the meanings of one and three. But being and person are not the same thing. Now you say, well, you're going to go to the Bible. You're going to get all philosophical. Well, I believe this is forced upon us by the testimony of Scripture itself.

But let me at least define it, and then we'll see if that is indeed the case. Being is what makes something what it is. Person is what makes someone who they are. And so these are distinctions that we recognize in the creative order all around us every single day.

A rock has being. And in fact, one of the reasons that I was tapping the brakes quite as much as I was coming down the mountain this morning is that there were the shadows of trees on the road. And sometimes those shadows can hide things like a rock.

And it doesn't take a very big rock when your tire is only that wide to send you sprawling on the ground. And so a rock has being. Trust me, if I hit one at 40 miles an hour, I will be able to testify to you that a rock has being.

It has substance. If you've ever gotten nailed by one, you know, when we were kids. We were students when we were kids. And we threw rocks at each other. I mean, you know, Mom and Dad told us not to do that.

But, you know, they were building houses near where I lived when I was a teenager. And there would be this period of time where it was really cool because they were digging these pits where they were running the sewer and stuff.

So once the people that were working were gone, there would be a period of time where you could have the most cool army games in the world.

I mean, you've got one pit and you toss dirt plots at the guy in the other pit.

You couldn't see them, so you're sort of doing the bombing thing, you know. But, of course, what's inside a dirt plot anyways? Rocks! So, yeah, we just about knocked each other silly. And, you know, I realize that in today's politically correct world, that would be a really dumb thing to do.

But it was a lot of fun. But a rock has being, but it's not personal. So if you're not old enough to remember this, and you young people will laugh, but I bet you Jason didn't. There was a time, there was a brief period where there was a craze of having pet rocks.

Pet rocks. No, no, no, you don't remember that. This was 1970 or something. It was a weird house. Oh, okay. Oh, it was a weird house? Oh, okay. Pet rocks. Now, you've got to be pretty desperate to have a pet rock.

All right? I mean, you can't even get along with a cat, dog, what? You don't need to feed the rock. You don't need to feed the rock, that's true. But you don't get much from the rock. Why? Because while a rock has being, it is not personal.

No matter what you say to it, you can hold it, and you can pet it, and you can say nice words to it. Or you can use it to throw at the guy in the next ditch over at the housing development. It won't make any difference.

It doesn't care because it's not personal. It is not personal. The Bible reveals that God is personal. The Bible reveals that we are personal. We are each human beings. That's what makes us what we are.

But we are each different in the personhood that is ours, the who that we are. And when we have people who think that there are many people, we generally try to take them to a nice place with beautiful white clothes, and feed them nice food, and keep them in a nice, soft room, and things like that.

It's unnatural for us to have the idea that our being can be shared by multiple persons. When we come to talk about God, the question is, does the Bible say to us that there is one being that is God? Does the Bible say to us that there are three persons who are differentiated from one another?

Is that what the revelation of Scripture is all about? Now, I want to be practical. I want you to be able to take some notes, be able to go away with some text, maybe to be memorizing as you consider to commit to memory.

But I also want it to be very clear for you to understand exactly what it is that we're saying. So, what are the three doctrines that I say force us to believe the doctrine of many? If you've ever had a discussion about this, I know many of you have.

Many Christians will say, well, I've tried to have a conversation with a villain of mine, whether they're here in Salt Lake City, it's a member of the LDS Church, or whether it's one of Jehovah's Witnesses, or maybe a one that's been to Costco, or whatever else it might be, or maybe just a confused Baptist next door.

I mean, I've had to talk with some of my old Baptist friends about these things. Very often, the conversation is frustrating, because it doesn't end, it goes from one verse to another verse to another topic to another topic, and you get done after two hours, and you feel like you accomplished absolutely nothing.

Anybody ever had that experience? It helps if you and I have real clarity in our own thought as to what the Bible teaches, and once you have that down, then as you're listening to someone else, you go, okay, what they've just said violates maybe two of these three things, one of these three things, they've got a misunderstanding of this doctrine here.

If we understand what the foundations are, then if we listen to someone else, then it's going to be up to us to do the listening and to figure these things out, we're the ones that have to build the bridges, we're the ones that have to communicate.

Then we'll be able to bring them to the Scripture, rather than, well, my opinion is this, or my opinion is that. And I think that's vitally important. So what's the very first foundation of the doctrine of the Church?

Well, there's no question that it is the biblical doctrine of monotheism. The biblical doctrine of monotheism. Now, my Muslim friends insist that we are not actually monotheists, that we do not believe that there is only one God, and that's because there are people who confuse monotheism with Unitarianism.

Now, what do those two words mean? Well, monotheism simply means there is only one God. Now, there are subcategories of monotheism, and we can talk about some of those things, but what we are saying is there is only one true God, we are saying there is one true God who created all things, who himself is uncreated.

He made everything else, he is unlike anything else, he is absolutely unique, he is the ground of all being, anything else that exists, exists because God created it. Now, how is that different than Unitarianism?

Well, I don't know if you have Unitarian churches around here. You've got your next door neighbor down the road. What is the Congregational Church of St. Louis? UCC. United Church of Christ? Yes. Oh, okay.

That's interesting. I've never seen one of those before. It's a foundation. Very light foundation. Oh, yes, very light foundation. I believe that. I'm well aware of the UCC. They even kept one of the seats up.

They were like quite a long time ago. But anyway, you may have heard Unitarian churches, and you may have sat down next to a nice little lady, you know, at a restaurant once, and she described, I'm a Unitarian.

We just love to have everyone. And you've heard of Unitarian Universalist Church, where they'll very frequently have cat healings and things like that. It's a very interesting denomination. But that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about Unitarianism here. Unitarianism is the idea that the being of God is shared by only one person, unity, Unitarian. So they may be monotheists, historically speaking, and then Unitarian, one being one person.

That's different than Trinitarian, one being three persons. In between, you might have Vinitarianism, where there would be two persons, something like that. But monotheism, the opposite of monotheism, is polytheism, believing in many gods.

There's also something called enotheism. You have one main god, and you have lesser gods, and you need that god, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, there are different categories. Now, if you go to almost any Bible school or seminary today that, again, has a low view of Scripture, that has a view of Scripture that says, well, you know, these are men's best thoughts about God, evolved over time, you'll be taught that the original Israelites were polytheists who, over time, became enotheists, who eventually, in the late 2nd, kind of before the 2nd Temple period, became monotheists.

And they're the ones who look at the Old Testament and chop it up into all sorts of different parts. And this is the J part, this is the E part, this is the D part, that's the P part there, that's the Priestly and the Eloist and the Deuteronomist and the Yahwist, and you just chop it up into a thousand pieces.

And then you can make it say anything you want it to say. Now, I went to a seminary that was way to my left, way to my left, when I did my first math. And now, it's so far to the left, I'd have to look to the right to see how far it was.

But all of my Old Testament professors presented this material. And all the commentaries I had to read, they presented it in that perspective. So I'm not ignorant of the arguments, I'm not just knee-jerk reaction against quote-unquote Biblicalism.

But the simple fact of the matter is, that is not how Jesus viewed the Scriptures. And I sort of think, if you're going to call yourself a Christian, does it really make sense for you to go, I'm going to entrust myself to Jesus for my eternal salvation.

But when it comes to Scripture, I think I know a little therapy. And yet, that's what we have in so much of Christian scholarship and academia today. And I don't understand it. And so, I'm going to go with Jesus' view.

When he quotes from the Old Testament, in Matthew, this incredible section, in Matthew chapter 22, when he says to men, standing right in front of him, have you not read what God spoke to you, saying, and he quoted it, from what had been written 1400 years earlier.

From Jesus' perspective, those words were spoken by God, and every person living in each generation is held accountable to what God said back then. That is a high view of Scripture. When you have a high view of Scripture, you'll be able to understand what the Bible actually teaches about God.

If you refuse to chop it up into pieces and cut it into shreds, if you allow it to actually stand and say, what does this body of revelation, yes, 40 different authors, 1500 years, that's part of the miraculous nature of Scripture.

What does it teach about who God is? It teaches, first and foremost, there is only one true God. Now, I know I have spent many hours downtown Salt Lake City talking with our Mormon friends about this very subject.

Because as you know, the King Paul funeral discourse, which used to be really authoritative, but is anything really authoritative anymore in Mormonism? I don't know. They're just emotions and feelings.

But it used to be that there would be a lot of weight placed in the words of Joseph Smith, and he said, and we have imagines and quotes, that God was God for long eternity. And he said, I'll refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see.

Well, we had a lot of conversations because if you try to refute the idea that God has got to be a God for all eternity, you have separated yourself and your followers forever from the God of the Scriptures.

Because the God that Jesus thought was the one true God, every morning Jesus would get up, just like every other good Jewish person did, and he and his disciples would say, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh our God.

Here, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. And that absolute monotheism was extended to every aspect of the Jews, and it is what is revealed to us in the Scriptures themselves. And in fact, it has a very interesting application, especially up here when we do talk about Mormonism, because, as some of you may know, not 30 days of Joseph Smith, but after him, there was further evolution in the LDS understanding of the Godhead, and eventually the First Presidency defined that the Father is Eloheinu, and Jehovah is the Son.

Now, that wasn't Joseph Smith's view, honestly, that's pretty obvious, but it became the official view when the First Presidency defined it as such, and that certainly is what is presented in the LDS Temple Ceremonies and things like that.

And yet, in Scripture, that kind of division, where you have Eloheinu as one God and Jehovah as a separate God, is absolutely impossible. 535 times in the Hebrew Old Testament, the joint name Yahweh Eloheinu is used, of one God.

In Deuteronomy 4 .3 .5, it says, you might know that Yahweh, He is Eloheinu, there is no other besides Him, not them. Now, it's painfully obvious that Joseph Smith did not read the original languages of the Bible.

He tended to a couple of times, and, well, again, all you've got to do is look at the papal canon and figure out what those are from there, but the reality is that the testimony of Scripture is painfully clear in regards to the subject, the fact that there is only one true God.

And if you ever just want to have this seep into your being, what you need to do is listen to the Trial of the False Gods. The Trial of the False Gods in Isaiah 43 -48, just sit down at some point and let everything else decide, do something modern Americans, I think, almost get panicked when they do it, turn off the TV, shut off the music, silence, I think, scares the millennials.

I think millennials are frightened of silence, personally. They've got to have something expected to hear, something going on, something to start. Try doing that, and then listening to Isaiah 40 -48. Yeah, I realize that's going to take more than half an hour of concentrated effort, but the benefits are incredible, and really, really are.

Because here you have God engaging literally in a level of sarcasm that is amazing. Remember the part in that section where the prophet pictures the man who goes out and he cuts down a tree, and he takes the wood, and with half the wood he builds a fire, and he cooks his food.