Rodney L. Smith
God is one and only one person. He has always existed as a solitary, personal, eternal Spirit. For the last 2000 years he has existed as both Eternal Spirit and begotten Human Being simultaneously. One person, two modes of being.
Who Jesus is? How is he both God and man? How is the man God? Namely, what you misunderstand is that the unlimited, exalted God became a limited, weak, humble human being just like us.
The Bible teaches: Jesus is God, Jesus is the Father, Jesus is the Holy Spirit, the Father is the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is both Jesus and the Father…
The biblical Oneness position is that Jesus is God. Period. One hundred percent. The body, soul, and human nature are all human but are also one hundred percent God. God possessed a one hundred percent limited, frail, weak human body which is now a glorified spiritual human body, the same as we will have at the resurrection. God became like us. Those who teach trinitarianism, a semi-oneness which denies any part of Jesus is fully God, or worse yet, Arianism, do so because they do not understand how Jesus could be and is fully God and fully human simultaneously in two distinct realms of existence and do not have a full understanding of the Scriptures. That’s not meant to be condescending in any way. You must pay the price for understanding, and you must be totally submitted to God, willing to follow scriptural revelation wherever it leads.
If the Father is the only God and Jesus is God, then there is only one God for Jesus to be. The disciples didn’t fully get it for a long time, and it slowly dawned on them. Others missed it too because he came as a human humbly. He kept his identity as both the Messiah and God largely hidden, yet revealed it enough times to finally be killed for it. It was at the Last Supper in John chapter 14 Jesus finally sat his disciples down and explained what “I and my Father are one” means. He is God become human flesh in the same way a CEO puts on a work uniform and becomes the new janitor or dishwasher for the day, a week, or a month.
There is a reality show like called Undercover Boss in which the top person in a company, usually the CEO or owner, poses as a new employee in hopes of identifying ways in which he or she can help the company in some way. The point of the show is, the CEO never stops being the CEO, which is a kind of omnipresent position within the company, and that new employee was never any less CEO although he served the lowliest role and all that it entails. The biggest difference, as all analogy fall short at some point, the ordeal doesn’t create a new person who never existed.
Now, if God was this CEO, and he wanted to sweat, get tired, ache, possess expendable time and energy and sacrifice his time and energy for others in the company, well then, he would need to create a new person who would be him. However, in this instance, the CEO chair would never be empty. He would be both at once. That is how this translates over into reality. My underlying point is that God can’t become man without being both God and man simultaneously. He cannot beget a son without himself being both father and son at the same time.
In the Light 