God is One

I was blessed to be able to listen to a family of Messianic Jews this evening, and in the discussion it was pointed out that the husband had been raised in an Orthodox manner, going to Synagogue regularly and learning the prayers in Hebrew, etc. However, when he was 30, some Christian friends thanked him as a representative of the Jewish people for preserving the Bible for the world.

This got the Jewish man to thinking, and he realized that although he knew all the Synagogue prayers and such, he had never read the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible, the "Old Testament"). So he started reading from the book of Bereshit (Genesis), and there in the first chapter, verse 26, the scriptures said:

Let Us make man in Our image....

That phrase very much disturbed him, as the Jewish people are very adamant that "God is One", and not three. After all, one of the "prayers" cited often (twice a day by many orthodox Jews) is the Shema ("Hear"), from Deuteronomy 6:4, which says:

Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
(Hear Oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.)

"What's this 'Us' business?" he asked himself. So he started doing a word-study, and to his surprise, realized that the word for "One", echad, as used in the Shema, is used for the first time in the Bible in Genesis 1:5, where it says (Young's Literal Version):

...and God calleth to the light `Day,' and to the darkness He hath called `Night;' and there is an evening, and there is a morning -- day one.

He began to realize that in that word "one" was a duality of an evening and a morning. In some mysterious way, the One was a Unity, not a Singularity.

He then saw the same Unity in Genesis 2:24 (HCSB):

This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.

Again, he saw that the One was a unity, not a singularity.

And even in the first verse of the Bible, the word "God" is literally "Gods" (Elohim, plural of El, "God"). But interestingly, although the noun is plural ("Gods"), the verbs are all singular (such that in English, which doesn't always have plural-vs-singular verbs, it might be something more like "In the beginning, Gods, the One, He created the heavens and the earth").

And he saw a distinction between God the Creator in Genesis 1:1, and the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit, in verse 2. (It's also interesting to note that the phrase "Ruach HaKodesh" is feminine. Isn't God interesting on so many levels?!)

And it was this simple reading of the scriptures for himself as opposed to listening to the doctrines of mere men (even though they were respected rabbis), that began this man's journey toward accepting Jesus as Messiah.