Friday, September 5, 2025

How Galatians 1 Distinguishes God And Jesus

When you read through the Bible without making assumptions, verses contradicting certain mainstream doctrines become quite apparent.  The only way you could overlook the real doctrines is if you do so intentionally or, having already made assumptions, fail to look to reason and identify what a given concept is, what follows from it, and what a given set of words actually does or does not say.  There is an abundance of concepts that many people, from Rabbinic Jews to evangelical Christians to atheists, think the Old or New Testament says, and hence that Christian philosophy entails.  But it is often clear from extremely basic analysis (while looking to reason and fleeing assumptions) that it is not so.

The issue of whether the Bible says Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit form some sort of monotheistic Trinity—that is, they are all supposedly different persons within the same God, and yet there is only one God but three distinct entities—is one relevant almost exclusively to the New Testament.  Old Testament verses repeatedly teach that there is only one God (for instance, in Deuteronomy 4:35 and Isaiah 43:10) and also insist that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4) without ever so much as hinting at a conventional Trinity.  It is the New Testament where this doctrine would be present.  And the New Testament in reality teaches that God, the Father, is not Jesus, the Son, and Jesus thus cannot be God.

The distinction between God and Jesus surfaces casually but sharply in places like the beginning of Galatians.


Galatians 1:3-4—"Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever.  Amen."


Paul admits the metaphysical distinction between Yahweh and Jesus in two ways here.  First, he simply refers to them alongside each other instead of calling them the same divine entity ("God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ").  Second, he says Jesus gave himself for our sins in line with the will of God, a very unnecessary and bizarre statement if Jesus is God and merely did exactly as his own will intended.  Since Paul already mentioned God and Jesus as separate beings, by saying that Jesus acted in accordance with God's will, he is clearly reinforcing his non-Trinitarian Christology further.

This is not some subject on which Paul and Jesus disagree, to be sure.  Even when some assert that Jesus and Paul are philosophically opposed, often with "examples" that are obviously incorrect, the Trinity is not a common subject of these alleged disputes.  Jesus himself is not reluctant to differentiate between himself and the Father he submits his will to (as in Matthew 24:36 and 26:39), and Paul makes similar statements throughout his New Testament epistles.  In 1 Timothy 2:3-6, he writes that Jesus is a mediator between God and humankind, an independent party.  Jesus is not the very God he is a mediator on behalf of, or else it is impossible for him to be a mediator!  In 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, Paul says that there is one God, the Father, and also one Lord, Jesus Christ.  There is nothing especially unique about the kind of declaration the apostle makes in Galatians 1:3-4, for these verses are far from the only passage where he plainly says as much.

Paul is certainly not a Trinitarian, saying exactly the opposite of what someone would claim if they believe the illogical set of ideas that hold Jesus and Yahweh are both God, Jesus and Yahweh are separate persons within the Trinity, and there is only one God.  It is not just that this is logically impossible, so that the Biblical doctrine can only be false; the New Testament is absolutely incompatible with Trinitarianism.  Jesus is our mediator that stands between us and God, the one who carried out the will of the Father.  He is not the Father himself!  Paul does not recoil from this before he even finishes his introduction to the book of Galatians.

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