What Is God Actually Like?

I ended the last chapter with a promise: that “what is God actually like?” would be answered not from my church or a creed you don’t hold, but from the word that stands above every prophet — from scripture, and specifically from yours. This is where I keep it.

So here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to argue the Trinity at you, or hand you a diagram, or a fourth-century council, or a word you can’t find in your scriptures. I’m going to ask you five questions and let your own Bible — the one your Church canonized, the King James your Church prints — answer each one. You draw the conclusion. If it isn’t there in the verses, throw it out.

Every question has the same shape. The Bible names an action only God can do — indwelling a believer, raising the dead, creating the world. Then it credits that one action to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Spirit, as if any of the three had done it. And then, every time, it insists there is only one of whoever did it. Hold all three facts at once and see where you end up.

Question one: whose Spirit lives in you?

Paul is writing to believers about the Spirit that dwells inside them. Read who he says that Spirit belongs to — and watch the name change while the Spirit doesn’t.

Same indwelling Spirit, four names: the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Father, and the Holy Ghost. So how many Spirits actually live in a believer? Paul answers flatly — “by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” One. Sit with that a moment, because the pattern you just saw is the whole letter in miniature.

Question two: who raised Jesus from the dead?

This is the hinge of the whole faith, yours and mine. So it matters who gets the credit for it. Ask the New Testament, and it answers three different ways.

Paul says the Father raised him. John records Jesus saying he would raise himself — “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — then tells you plainly he “spake of the temple of his body.” Peter says he was quickened, made alive, by the Spirit. Three answers. So did one God raise Jesus, or three? Peter, at Pentecost, gives the count: “this Jesus hath God raised up.” One God did it — and yet the Father, the Son, and the Spirit each did it.

Question three: who made the world?

Now go all the way back to the first act there is. If any work belongs to God alone, it’s this one. Watch the Bible hand it around.

God creates. The Spirit of God moves over the waters and creates. Jehovah makes the earth and the heavens. The Word — who John says “was God,” and who “was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” which is to say Jesus — makes all things, “and without him was not any thing made that was made.” And then, at the making of man, God says something strange for one lone person to say: “let us make man in our image.”

So did one God create, or several? Here the Bible slams a door on the very question. Read this slowly:

“I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself.” Not with help. Not with a council of Gods dividing the labor. Alone. By myself. Whoever the Father, the Spirit, and the Word each were in Genesis, the God who says he did it says he did it with no one beside him. You cannot fit a second God into “by myself.” That’s not my sentence to defend; it’s Isaiah’s.

Question four: who is Jesus’ Father?

Here’s one more, and it’s the gentlest and the sharpest at once.

God gives “his only begotten Son” — that’s the Father. But Matthew, twice, says the child in Mary was conceived “of the Holy Ghost.” And in the Psalm it is the LORD, Jehovah, who says to the Son, “thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” I won’t resolve this one for you, because it’s fairer as a question: if the Father and the Holy Ghost were two separate beings, two different Gods, then whose Son is Jesus? The Bible seems perfectly untroubled calling him the Son of the Father and the Son conceived of the Holy Ghost — as though Father and Spirit were not two Gods at all.

Question five: how many Gods are there?

That’s the whole thing riding on this last one, so I’ll let Isaiah answer it three times and add nothing. This is Isaiah closing it himself.

Now, I want to be fair to how you read these, because you do have a reading. You believe in the Godhead — three distinct beings, “one in purpose.” When Isaiah says “beside me there is no God,” you can hear him ruling out the idols of the nations, not the perfect unity of Father, Son, and Spirit. That’s a real answer, and I won’t pretend it has nothing to say to Isaiah 44:8.

But lay it beside 44:24 and 43:10 and feel where it strains. “By myself” is hard to share among three who each created. And 43:10 doesn’t just say there are no idols; it forecloses something else: “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.” No God came to be before him, and none ever will after him. That is precisely the door the other doctrine tries to enter through — a God who was once a man and progressed to godhood, and faithful men who may yet become Gods themselves. Isaiah shuts that door from the inside. If no God was formed before Jehovah and none will be formed after him, then there isn’t one God for this world among many — there is one God, full stop, and no assembly line making more.

Your own keystone already agreed

And here’s the thing I most want you to notice: you didn’t need my Bible to get here. Three chapters back, we measured the Book of Mormon on this exact question, and it said the same. Nephi, closing the doctrine of Christ, named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as “one God, without end. Amen” (2 Nephi 31:21). One God, without end. Your keystone was already there — the same one God Isaiah names — long before I opened a Bible to you.

What you’re holding now

So look at what you’re holding. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit each do what only God can do — indwell the believer, raise the dead, create the world. And one God insists he does all of it alone, with no God formed before him and none after.

Three who each do what only God does. One God who does it alone. The Trinity isn’t a philosopher’s puzzle — it’s just what happens when you refuse to throw away any of these verses. You weren’t argued into that. You opened your own Bible and found it already sitting there.

I didn’t build that room. Isaiah did, and Paul, and John, and Genesis, and — quietly, in its own words — your own Book of Mormon. All I did was ask five questions and hand you the answers your scriptures already gave.

Your friend, Brock