“But he is one, and who can turn him?” (Job 23:13).
Job said it about God to his companions as he suffered.
God is one. That can be read in many different ways and has
a bunch of implications, certainly more than Job had in mind at the time:
One vs. Three
When the Unitarian says, “Good, God is one; that puts paid to
this nonsense about a trinity,” he is making a theological point. He’s wrong,
of course. Don’t use the word trinity if it bothers you. Don’t refer to the ‘persons
of the Godhead’ if you find it a non-scriptural or extra-scriptural turn of
phrase. That’s certainly a position one can take. But if you can read your Bible
without noticing that God manifests himself in three distinctly different ways,
modes — or possibly, um, ‘persons’ — well, you’re just not reading the same
thing I’m reading.
Only One God
Someone may say, “There is one God”, meaning that all other ‘gods’
are the lies of demons or the hallucinations of man. That is certainly true and
the subject of other writers in the word of God, but it’s only a very basic
starting point. James says even the demons believe there is one God in that
sense. At least the demons tremble. If only there were a pantheon of squabbling
deities one might possibly hope to escape their scrutiny.
But God is one, so good luck with that.
Another Implication
A scribe once overheard the Lord Jesus disagreeing with a
group of Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead, something that sect didn’t
believe in. The scribe saw that Jesus had “answered them well” (Mark 12),
meaning that he had stumped the Sadducees with the words of their own law.
Unsurprisingly, he knew it better than they did, since he was its author.
“Which commandment is the most important?” the scribe asks
him. Jesus responds in a way I’ve never quite understood, because his first
sentence doesn’t appear to address the question. After all, it’s not a
commandment. He says:
“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one’.”
Then he gets to the commandment. He goes on, “And you shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your mind and with all your strength”.
When the Lord quotes the Jewish law here (Deut. 6), he isn’t
making a theological point about the trinity. Neither is he saying that God is ‘one’
in the sense that he’s the only true god. He’s saying, among other things, that
God is entirely unified in purpose. He is one. He is wholly and utterly
consistent and dependable. He is “not a man, that he should change his mind”.
He cannot be swayed by circumstances, emotion or whim. He doesn’t suddenly
realize he’s forgotten something and recalibrate his position with respect to
mankind.
And he’s telling us that the ‘one-ness’ of God is a motivator
for every facet of human love, since from his unity springs his other attributes.
He is one, so his love endures forever. He is one, so his justice is never
arbitrary. He is one, so his grace is perpetually sufficient. He is one, so his
mercy is everlasting. He is one, so he will not relent from his ultimate purpose
(though he may change his methods from time to time for our sake) because his ultimate purpose is
always our good.
God’s One-ness and Job’s Pain
Job, in all his pain, got this. The ESV translates our verse
this way: “He is unchangeable, and who can turn him back? What he desires, that
he does. He will complete what he appoints for me”. That prospect terrified Job
because he was thinking at the time only of God’s justice, power and
unrelenting nature.
What Job couldn’t see in his pain was that the one-ness of
God demanded that he be rewarded and restored, for he was a righteous man,
about whom God had said to Satan, “He is blameless and upright, who fears God
and turns away from evil”. God could have chosen to reward Job in eternity. He
chose to reward him in life. But he was most certainly going to reward his
servant one way or another. Job's suffering did not mean that his redeemer had
forsaken him.
“Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham once
asked rhetorically.
Indeed he must, for he is one.
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