Jesus is fully God. He is also not the Father. Here is how the Bible holds both at once, in plain words, and why it changes the way you pray.
Is God and Jesus the same person? No, and the no matters as much as the yes that surrounds it. Jesus is fully God, and He is not the same Person as the Father.
There is one God, and that one God is three distinct Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus shares everything that makes the Father God, and He relates to the Father as a real Someone, face to face.
That is the Sound of Heaven position and the historic faith of the church. Plenty of sincere believers land elsewhere, and we will take them seriously. The whole question turns on two small words, what and who.
People asking this usually mean one of two questions. Is Jesus the same kind of being as God? Or is He the same individual as the Father? Those have different answers.
Theologians use the word nature, or being, for the first. It answers the question what. They use the word person for the second. It answers the question who. You and your neighbor share one human nature. You are two persons. What you are is the same. Who you are is not.
With God there is one difference. You and your neighbor are two separate beings. The Father, Son and Spirit are not three beings. They are one being, one God, fully shared, and three Persons who know and love one another.
Everything that makes God God: eternal, all-powerful, holy, love. The Father, Son and Spirit do not each hold a third of it. Each has all of it.
Someone who can say I and you. Someone who speaks, sends, listens and loves. The Father is one such Someone. The Son is another. So is the Spirit.
That is the Trinity in a sentence. Not one God plus two helpers, and not three gods in a committee. One God, three Persons.
Water, ice and steam describes one thing taking three forms at different times, which is the very view the church rejected. The egg fails the other way: three parts, each only a third. Both wrong.
The honest answer to the headline is: same what, different who. Jesus is everything the Father is, and He is not the Father.
If the Father and the Son were one Person, you would expect the Gospels to show one Someone taking turns. They show two, in conversation, at the same moment, and John traces it back before creation.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1John says two things about the Word in one breath. The Word was God. And the Word was with God. The Greek word for with there is pros, which usually carries the sense of toward, turned toward someone. You are not with yourself in that way. John is describing a relationship inside God before anything was made. We follow that thread further in Jesus is the Word.
“And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” Glory shared with the Father, not being the Father.
The Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends, the Father speaks from heaven. Nobody is switching roles. We walk through the scene in why Jesus was baptized.
Jesus cites the Law's rule that two witnesses make testimony valid, then names His two: Himself and the Father who sent Him. If they were one Person, He would be one witness counting Himself twice.
“Yet not as I will, but as you will.” The Son pleads with the Father in anguish and entrusts Himself to Him. More on that night in the garden of Gethsemane.
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate.” The Son asks, the Father gives, the Spirit comes.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
That is half the picture. The same Gospel shows the Son claiming the Father's own place, and crowds reaching for stones because they understood Him.
“I and the Father are one.”
John 10:30ἐγὼ καὶ ὁ πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν. I and the Father, one we are. The verb is plural. We are.
Greek has a masculine form, heis, for one someone, and a neuter form, hen, for one thing. John uses the neuter. Jesus does not say the two of them are one person. He says they are one.
Jesus prays that His followers may be one just as He and the Father are one, and uses hen again. Nobody reads that as a prayer for the disciples to merge into a single person.
Unity of life, will and work, so close that in verse 33 His hearers heard a claim to be God. They were not wrong about that part.
Then Philip asks to see the Father, and Jesus answers, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). This is the strongest verse for the Oneness view, and it should be read at full strength. Jesus shows the Father so completely that looking at Him is looking at the Father.
But read the next line: “Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” In, not is. Two Persons dwelling in one another, which is exactly what the church means. The I am sayings press the same claim from another angle, and we trace them in the I Am statements. For the case that Jesus knew what He was saying, see did Jesus claim to be God.
In John 10:30, which Greek word for one does Jesus use?
Hen is neuter and the verb esmen is plural. Jesus claims oneness with the Father, not that He and the Father are a single person. He uses the same word when He prays for His disciples to be one in John 17.
A large part of the Pentecostal world, including many who pray in tongues and see the sick healed, holds a view called Oneness. Sound of Heaven is Spirit-filled and Trinitarian, and we owe our Oneness brothers and sisters a fair hearing, not a caricature.
Here is the view in its own words. The United Pentecostal Church International states that “There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation.” It continues, “Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh.” Father, Son and Spirit are not three Persons in this view. They are the ways the one God has made Himself known, and Jesus is the name of that one God. Oneness churches baptize in the name of Jesus, following Acts 2:38.
Jesus is fully God, not a lesser being. All the fullness of the Deity lives in Him (Colossians 2:9). God is one, and the Shema stands. On all of that we agree completely.
To explain Jesus praying, Oneness teaching has the human Jesus praying to the divine Father. That quietly turns one Christ into two, a man and the God inside him, talking. And it cannot explain glory shared with the Father before the world began, when there was no human nature yet.
Two texts always come up. Isaiah 9:6 calls the coming king Everlasting Father, a royal title for a king who fathers his people forever, not a claim that the Son is the Father. And baptism in the name of Jesus in Acts sits comfortably beside Matthew 28:19, where Jesus Himself gives one name for three: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Name, singular. That is our point exactly.
We believe God is one being in three distinct Persons, each fully God, and that Jesus is the eternal Son, not the Father under a different name. The Oneness position is wrong on that point. The Trinity is the only way to keep every Gospel text at full strength at once: the Word was God, and the Word was with God.
The Oneness answer is also not new. Early in the third century a teacher named Praxeas taught that the Father Himself was born and suffered, and Tertullian's verdict on him was blunt: “he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father.” The church has answered the same way ever since.
And here we cut the other way too. Oneness believers love Jesus, worship Him as God and walk in the gifts of the Spirit, often with more fire than the people arguing with them. We think they are mistaken about the Father and the Son, and we say so. God is the judge of hearts, not us, and nobody should use this doctrine as a club on a family member raised in a Oneness church.
Other groups say Jesus is not God at all. And some Christians, trying hard to avoid Oneness, slide toward three gods. Each drops something the Bible holds together.
Witnesses teach that Jesus is God's first creation, a mighty spirit being distinct from Jehovah and lower than Him. They keep the distinction and lose the deity. John 1:3 says all things were made through the Word, and nothing made can be the maker of all things. More in is Jesus the Son of God.
Unitarian Christians hold that God is one Person and that Jesus is a man uniquely chosen and raised by Him. But they have to read Thomas saying “My Lord and my God!” in John 20:28 as less than it says, and John places that line at the climax of his Gospel.
Trinitarians can overcorrect. Talking about God as three separate beings who agreed to work together is not the Trinity either. The LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). Paul keeps the Shema and places Jesus inside it: one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 8:6).
Oneness keeps the unity and loses the Persons. Witnesses and Unitarians keep a distinction and lose the deity. Three gods keeps the Persons and loses the unity. The Trinity is simply the refusal to drop any of the three.
This changes how you pray. If Jesus were the Father under another name, His prayers would be a performance. Because the Son is truly Someone with the Father, love was already moving inside God before there was a world to love. Jesus says to the Father in John 17:24, you loved me before the creation of the world. God did not need us in order to be love. He invited us in.
That is where you come in. The Spirit brings you into the Son's own place, so that you can say what He says: Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). You pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, joining a conversation that has always been going on.
And when you want to know what that Father is like, you do not have to guess. Look at Jesus. Anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father.
For the wider picture, read the Trinity in the Bible, who the Holy Spirit is, whether the Holy Spirit is God, the incarnation of Jesus and what Abba Father means. If you would like to talk it over in person, plan a visit to Sound of Heaven in Deer Park.
God and Jesus are not the same person: the Son shares all that the Father is, one God with the Father and the Spirit, and He is still His own Someone, which is why He could pray to the Father, love Him, and show Him to us.
Whether this touches your family, your church background or your own prayers, send your question in and someone at Sound of Heaven will talk it through with you.
No. Jesus is fully God, but He is not the same Person as the Father. The Bible teaches one God in three distinct Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They share one divine nature, which is what God is, and they are three Persons, which is who God is. That is why John 1:1 can say the Word was God and was with God in the same sentence, and why Jesus can pray to the Father without praying to Himself.
No. Jesus is God the Son. He speaks of the Father as someone other than Himself again and again: He is sent by the Father, prays to the Father, obeys the Father and returns to the Father. In John 8:17 to 18 He counts Himself and the Father as two witnesses. What Jesus does say is that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father, because He reveals the Father perfectly. Same nature, perfect image, different Person.
Oneness Pentecostals believe God is one Person who has revealed Himself as Father, as Son and as Holy Spirit, and that Jesus is the name of that one God. They hold firmly that Jesus is fully God, and they baptize in the name of Jesus. Many are sincere, Spirit-filled believers. Where we differ is that we believe the Father and the Son are distinct Persons, because the Gospels show them speaking to, loving and glorifying one another.
In John 10:30 Jesus uses the Greek word hen, the neuter form of one, with a plural verb: I and the Father, we are one. He is not saying He and the Father are one person, which would call for the masculine form. He is claiming unity of life, will and work with the Father, so close that His hearers picked up stones, taking it as a claim to be God. He later prays for His disciples to be one in the same way.
He was praying to the Father, a distinct Person within the one God. The Son took on a full human life and prayed as a real man, but the relationship He prayed out of was not new. In John 17:5 He asks the Father to glorify Him with the glory He had with the Father before the world began. The Son was with the Father before there was any human nature to do the praying. Prayer is what that eternal relationship sounded like on earth.