Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Isaiah 45:5–6
“I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other.”
We begin our study of theology proper, the doctrine of God, with one of the most fundamental truths about the God of the Bible. Foundational to our knowledge of God is the truth that there is only one God, the Creator who has revealed Himself in Scripture. Until we come to grasp biblical monotheism, we cannot grow in our knowledge of God.
Monotheism—the affirmation that only one God exists—means first of all that, numerically speaking, there is only one Being who is God. Scripture says this again and again. It was the fundamental confession of ancient Israel that there is only one God (Deut. 6:4). Anything other than the God of the Bible, even if people call it by the name “God,” is not God at all. As we see in today’s passage, there is no other God than the God of Israel (Isa. 45:5–6).
Second, regarding the oneness of God we are not saying that “God” is a category into which God falls. In creation, we have many categories or kinds that contain several individuals. As a category, tree describes many different instances of trees: elm trees, oak trees, apple trees, orange trees, and so on. But the category or essence of tree exists independent of the various individual trees in the world. Similarly, billions of individual men, women, boys, and girls fall into the category of human being. Yet the category or essence of humanity existed (in God’s mind) before any human being came to be born, and that category will continue after a human being dies. This is not true of God. He is the sole instance of deity, both the essence or category of deity and the existence of deity in its fullness. We will talk about that a little more in future studies when we think more about what we call the simplicity of God.
At least two practical ramifications follow from what we have said about biblical monotheism. First, if there is only one God, then nothing else deserves our worship besides God. Any form of worship directed to anything or anyone other than the God of Israel is serious sin.
In addition to outlawing the worship of other so-called gods, biblical monotheism means that we must submit our preconceived ideas about who God is or what He must be like to the judgment of divine revelation. There exists no category or essence of deity independent from the one true God, so we cannot build up such a category and then make the Lord fit into it. Our understanding of God must come only from divine revelation.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Petrus Van Mastricht, a seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologian, writes that “God is . . . most perfectly one. That is, not only one, but also one of a kind.” We are tempted to come up with our own ideas of what God must be like. The Lord is unique and one of a kind, however, so we cannot do that. We must instead humbly submit to what He has said about Himself.
For further study
- Exodus 20:3
- 1 Samuel 2:2
- Psalm 113:5–6
- Romans 3:30
The bible in a year
- Exodus 32–33
- Matthew 22:23–46