God vs Jesus: Are God and Jesus the same person?

I want to warn you about something before we get into this article. The Trinity is probably the most difficult concept to understand in Christianity. People don’t like that. When people ask questions about Christianity, they tend to want simple answers that are easy to understand. If it isn’t easy to understand, people easily get frustrated and dismiss Christianity. Many people assume that if something doesn’t make immediate sense, then it must make no sense. But of course this is not really how the world works. Physics, math, programming, and even things like painting, poetry, and language are all very difficult topics. Life isn’t simple; the universe is complicated and while we employ a lot of simple answers for surface-level explanations, if you want real answers to things, you have to do a bit of work.

Warning! Real thinking ahead!

At Holy Ground we aim to provided academic, authoritative answers to your questions rather than the simplistic, childish answers that you were perhaps put-off with in Sunday school as a child. To really understand that Jesus and God are the same, and to understand what that means, is going to require some effort.

At the same time, there’s only so much you can get into with a short article. I’m going to give you the “quick” version of these ideas, as accurately and clearly as the space allows but with the understanding that this article cannot be a complete explanation. If you’re interested in a more complete explanation written in a very approachable style, I highly recommend Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age.

We’re going to start with the idea of God, then discuss the idea of the Trinity, and then we’ll be able to understand how Jesus can be both God and man—and why.

Is there a difference between God and Jesus?

The word “God” is a weird word in English that is fairly ambiguous and causes a lot of problems. “God” is the general way that we refer to deities like Zeus or Thor—beings with distinct personalities, limitations, and even moral weaknesses like anger or lust. Such gods are very like humans, they simply have a lot more power.

But when Christians refer to “God”, they don’t mean just another one of these personalities. What the early Christians and ancient Israelites meant by “God” was something more like “being itself” or “life itself”. Far from any created or existing thing, their concept of God was that he was the source of all life and being. Yet they also didn’t mean that he was merely a “force” or a principle, they also believed that he was personal—more than that, that he was three persons. One supreme God who is life itself and also three persons—this is the idea of a “Trinitarian” God.

The Holy Trinity

You’ve probably heard Christianity referred to as one of the three “Abrahamic” or “monotheistic” religions—along with modern day Judaism and Islam. It’s fairly normal for people to group these three religions together on the basis that they believe in only one God rather than a whole pantheon of gods. This is a surface-level reading of Christianity, however. The reality is that modern rabbinic Judaism and Islam are much more similar to one another to one another than either are to traditional Christianity. They are very much “monotheist” in the sense that they firmly hold to a divine oneness within God. However, it’s not really correct to say that Christianity is monotheist in this same sense. Christianity is different from these other two religions because it is not really monotheist as much as it is Trinitarian.

Christianity believes in one God who is also three persons. You may have heard the phrase, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”. These are the three persons within the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Each one of these persons is distinct in that he has his own will and his own personality.

You might think that this sounds like we’re talking about three different gods, like Odin, Zeus, and Loki—all of whom are distinct and have their own personalities. However, this is not the Christian idea. The Christian idea is that we aren’t talking about three different gods, but about one single God who exists in three persons. The way that the ancient Christians articulated this was that God consisted of “three persons and one essence”.

You might think that this sounds like we’re talking about one God with three different faces or “modes”: when he’s being fatherly and authoritative, we call him “the Father”, when he’s inspiring us we call him the “Holy Spirit”, and so on. But this also is not the Christian idea. The Christian idea is that God is both three persons AND one God, with neither the threeness nor the oneness being higher than the other.

There are many analogies that people have made for the Trinity over the last several thousand years, but none of them are perfect. One example that you might give is that the Trinity is like a family. A family consists of many different, distinct people but they all share the same biological essence—the same DNA. They’re one body in a very real sense because they share this same biological make-up, but they remain distinct people.

Again, this is not a good analogy for the Trinity, because while the Trinity does in fact consist of distinct persons, they share a single essence in a much more full and complete way than a family shares their DNA, so much so that we call the Trinity one God.

The reality is that there is no really good analogy for the Trinity, not because it’s unexplainable, but because the thing we’re talking about is fundamentally different than anything else. Remember that when Christians are talking about God, they don’t simply mean some supernatural being that has all sorts of superpowers—as though God were like an omnipotent Santa Claus who spies on people and punishes or rewards them. God isn’t really an “entity” in the sense that you or I or a dog or a rock are entities. You and I have life, but God is life (“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, John 14:6). A rock and a dog have existence, but God is existence. He is the source of all existence and reality. This means that any analogies we make about God—such as trying to explain the Trinity—are ultimately going to be inadequate because analogies are about comparing one thing to another, but God in a Christian sense is not really a thing—he is the source of all things and therefore can’t be a thing himself in the same sense.

But the family analogy has an important lesson for us: the idea of “interdependence”. Sometimes you can’t understand certain things until you understand other things. You can’t really understand what a dog is until you understand what a mammal is, and you can’t really know what a mammal is without understanding what an animal is. Each of these things is “definitional” on the other. But sometimes things are what we would call “mutually definitional” or “interdefinitional”. Take the idea of “father” and “child”. To be a father means to have a child, and to be a child means to have a father—it goes both ways. The two definitions are mutually defined by one another. You’ll notice that there is the same thing going on with the Trinity: “Father” and “Son” are the names of two of the persons of the Trinity, because they are intrinsically a part of one another—this is part of what it means to have the same essence.

As I warned, there’s a great deal more we could say about the Trinity, especially at a much more technical level. For now, let’s see how the concept of the Trinity applies to explaining the difference between Jesus and “God.”

God vs Jesus: the difference is incarnation

Who is Jesus? Jesus is the name that God the Son took when he became incarnate as a human being. God the Son had always existed, eternally, as part of the Trinity, but it wasn’t until two thousand years ago that he became a human being. “Incarnate” literally means “to take on flesh”. God the Son took on the flesh and blood of human nature the same way that every other human being does: by being born of a human female. The Virgin Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit and gave birth to Jesus.

If you want to understand Christianity it’s important to get this part right. It’s not that Jesus is God putting on some sort of “human mask”—he was fully and completely a human being. But neither is Jesus primarily a human being who God created or who became so mighty and holy that he became a god. Almost every ancient religion had the idea that certain people were sons and daughters of various gods. Hercules was a half-human, half god. The emperors of Japan were understood to be descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu This is what “demi-god means”, a derivative of “semi-god” (which literally means “half-god”). The founders of ancient pagan cultures were, for the most parts, sons of gods. This was a very normal claim in the ancient world.

But again, this is not the Christian idea. God the Father did not have physical sex with Mary to produce a half-God, half-human offspring (as Zeus so often did). Jesus was not half God and half man. He was both fully God and fully human—God the Son who had fully taken on human nature while remaining fully divine. This was a brand new idea in the ancient world. No prior religion—and no religion since—has ever really made a claim like this.

So why does this matter? This concept was extremely significant for ancient people because if God fully and completely took on human nature, then that meant that human beings could truly connect to God in a more complete, intimate way than ever before. Most ancient cultures, and all the great religions traditions, have had some idea of a God who was “being itself” or “life itself”, but they often viewed such a power as entirely beyond human comprehension, unapproachable, untouchable, maybe even unable to be interacted with. But with the incarnation of God the Son as Jesus, human nature become completely connected to divine nature. Jesus bridged the gap, in his own personhood, between these two natures, completely uniting them in the person of himself. And it wasn’t in some abstract sense, but as something physical and concrete, something that could be touched and interacted with physically. This is why, in the New Testament, St. John is so emphatic about describing Jesus as, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1).

The implications of this are staggering, and more than we can get into in this one article (again, check out Journey to Reality for more detail), but now you may have some sense of why Christianity—unique among all other religions—became the most influential and wide-spread worldview in the history of the world. It made the most mind-blowing, powerful religious claim in history.