²²Men of Israel, hear these words! Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God to you… which God did by him… even as you yourselves know, ²³him, being delivered up by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by the hand of lawless men, crucified and killed… (Apostle Peter, Day of Pentecost, Acts 2:22–23)

¹…An apostle of Jesus Christ, to the chosen ones… ² according to the foreknowledge of God the Father… ¹⁸ knowing that you were redeemed… ¹⁹…with precious blood, as of a faultless and pure lamb, the blood of Christ; ²⁰ who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of times… (1 Peter 1:1–2, 18–20)

All his works are known to God from eternity. (Acts 15:18)

This chapter will demonstrate that God’s foreknowledge is biblical. Foreknowledge means knowing something before it comes to pass. The opposite view, which comes from pagan philosophy, is literal preexistence. This refers to something or someone actually existing (typically in the heavens or spiritual realm) before being known, or making an appearance, in our world.

According to historian Adolf von Harnack (Adolf von Harnack, “On the Conception of Pre-Existence,” in History of Dogma, Vol. I, Appendix I), ancient Jews held the view that God foreknew everything that He planned that would ever come to pass on earth. That is, everything in God’s plan existed in God’s “foreknowledge.” This truth is clearly spelled out in the NT:

…as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’… God… calls those things which do not exist as though they did… (Romans 4:17–18, NKJV)

Paul explained that God talks about things that do not actually yet exist, in a manner as if they already do exist. That is the biblical explanation of God’s foreknowledge and the key to understanding how God speaks of what He foreknows. The key words are not so much the words “as though they did”; rather, the key words are “which donotexist.”

This NT passage is an explanation of something we see acted out in the OT. Paul was explaining the meaning of God’s word when He said this to Abraham:

Neither will your name any more be called Abram, but your name will be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. (Genesis 17:5)

God told this to Abraham before he even had a child. Abraham’s future children were just as real to God in His foreknowledge as they would be when they finally came to be. But that doesn’t mean they actually existed…yet. That is why the key words really are “things which do not exist.” People often have a hard time accepting that God talks like this. So they imagine that any time God speaks of something as if it already existed, they feel they can conclude that it must already exist and that is the only acceptable way to understand it. Some people even falsely assume God would be lying by speaking from His position of absolute foreknowledge. That would be imposing our understanding on how God is supposed to be and speak. It is also a way of denying the understanding of God from a biblical Jewish view.

To further muddy the waters, pagan cultures did have theories of literally preexistent deific beings. Such ideas seem to fit God’s speaking in the past tense of things “which do not exist as though they did.” So rejecting the Jewish view necessarily includes adopting a pagan view in its place.

Let’s look more closely at the biblical concept of God’s foreknowledge, and then we will compare it with the pagan view. To do that, let’s examine some examples of things that were in God’s foreknowledge, but which we know did not exist at the time God spoke of them. Harnack pointed out some examples, saying, “So the Tabernacle and its furniture, the Temple, Jerusalem, etc., are before God and continue to exist before him in heaven, even during their appearance on earth and after it.” Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/harnack/dogma1.ii.iv.i.html.

Harnack derived his list, in part, from Exodus 25:9, 40, when God told Moses to build all things according to the pattern that was shown to Moses on the mountain.

Again, what we saw acted out in the OT is explained for us in the NT. The writer of Hebrews tells us:

¹Now in the things which we are saying, the main point is this. We have such a high priest, who sat down on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, ²a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man. ³For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices. Therefore it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer. ⁴For if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, seeing there arepriests who offer the gifts according to the law; ⁵who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, even as Moses was warned by God when he was about to make the tabernacle, for he said, “See, you shall make everything according to the pattern that was shown to you on the mountain.” (Hebrews 8:1–5)

Let’s try to follow the train of thought here. The writer emphasizes that we now have Jesus as a high priest of a heavenly tabernacle. Then he goes on to explain that the heavenly tabernacle had a copy and a shadow, or example, in the earthly tabernacle. The reason the writer gives is that the first tabernacle was to be made according to the pattern Moses was shown in the mountain. That is to say, the first tabernacle was made to pattern the heavenly tabernacle that was to come, which in turn was in God’s plan. But it was more than just a plan: it was foreknown before the very foundation of the earth. More on that in a moment.

This next passage speaks of the heavenly tabernacle in the past tense, which for us is still actually in the future (just as Abraham’s offspring would be in the future). Thus, it is one of “those things which do not exist” that God speaks of and sees “as though they did.”

¹⁸For you have not come to a mountain that might be touched, and that burned with fire… ²²But you have come [perfect tense] to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable multitudes of angels, ²³to the general assembly and assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, ²⁴to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better than that of Abel. (Hebrews 12:18–24)

We know that the city of the living God, the heavenly New Jerusalem, is a city yet to be revealed. That is, it is for the future. And yet the Scriptures talk as if we’ve already arrived. In one sense we have because of its assurance in God’s plan, but it has not been actualized yet. The New Jerusalem exists as one of “those things which do not exist” that God speaks of and sees “as though they did” exist.

Now here’s an amazing thing. Having faith in the coming future city of the living God is to share in God’s foreknowledge of that which is to come. This is something we learn from the following Scripture:

⁸By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he went. ⁹By faith, he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he looked for the city which has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (Hebrews 11:8–10)

Our faith is very much related to God’s foreknowledge. Our faith is a faint “reflection” or “image” of God’s foreknowledge of what He has in mind for our future. And that future is a city whose builder and maker is God, a city which we look for by faith, just as Abraham did.

Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

²²For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. ²³Not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body . ²⁴For we were saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees? ²⁵ But if we hope for that which we don’t see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:22–25)

So we see that although Hebrews 12:18–24 had told us we “have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” here in Romans 8:22–25 we are told we really are still hoping for something we do not yet see. In other words, our hope for the coming city, whose builder and maker is God, is also one of those things of which “…God… calls those things which do not exist as though they did…” Just as Abraham, by faith, looked for a city whose builder and maker is God, so the same goes for us.

Romans 8:22–25 also shows us how foreknowledge by definition excludes the possibility of preexistence. You can’t foreknow something that currently exists any more than we can see what we hope for at the same time we hope for it. Thus “foreknowledge” means knowing of things that are not but shall be, in the same exact way that “God… calls those things which do not exist as though they did…”

All of this means that you and I, and everyone who ever lived, already existed in God’s foreknowledge. That isn’t to say we actually existed before we were born. It is only to say that God knew exactly who, what, and when we were to be before He even set creation into being. This is what Peter was telling us in the very start of his letter to the assemblies:

¹Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the chosen ones… ² according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. (1 Peter 1:1–2)

The Lamb Slain from the Foundation of the World

Before we contrast God’s foreknowledge with the pagan belief in preexistence, there is one more powerful piece of evidence showing just how real God’s foreknowledge is to God.

All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. (Revelation 13:8, NKJV)

Now, there are a great many theories about this verse put forth by a lot of different voices. We’re not going to chase down every proverbial rabbit hole trying to make our case. Suffice it to say, for example, that we are not talking about Calvin’s version of “predestination,” which is another jumped-to conclusion to be dealt with in a different study.

But there is one false idea that we do want to address here because it should help clarify the topic of God’s foreknowledge. Because of passages that speak as if Jesus actually did preexist (e.g., Revelation 13:8), some people believe that Jesus literally existed before he was born of Mary. Keeping with the topic of God’s foreknowledge, let’s look at some passages that utterly refute that jumped-to conclusion of Revelation 13:8, and also indicates how it should be rightly interpreted with the understanding of God’s foreknowledge.

We are talking about the scriptural truth that in actuality Christ only died once for sins. This is very clearly explained in the following passages:

¹Now indeed even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service, and an earthly sanctuary… ⁶Now these things having been thus prepared, the priests go in continually into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the services… ¹¹ But Christ having come as a high priest of the coming good things… ¹²… entered in once for all into the Holy Place, having obtained eternal redemption… ²⁴For Christ hasn’t entered into holy places made with hands, which are representations of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; ²⁵nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest enters into the holy place year by year with blood not his own, ²⁶or else he must have suffered often since the foundation of the world. But now once at the end of the ages, he has been revealed to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. ²⁷Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this, judgment, ²⁸so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, without sin, to those who are eagerly waiting for him for salvation. (Hebrews 9:1, 6, 11–12, 24–28)

⁵Therefore when he comes into the world, he says, “Sacrifice and offering you didn’t desire, But a body did you prepare for me…” ⁷ Then I said, “Behold, I have come (In the scroll of the book it is written of me) To do your will, God.” ⁹…then he has said, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He takes away the first, that he may establish the second, ¹⁰by which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. ¹¹Every priest indeed stands day by day ministering and often offering the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, ¹²but he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God; ¹³from that time waiting until his enemies are made the footstool of his feet. ¹⁴For by one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified… ¹⁸Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin. ¹⁹Having therefore, brothers, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh. (Hebrews 10:5, 7, 9–14, 18–20)

No less than six times (as underlined above, plus once in the negative at verses 9:25), this passage teaches and reiterates that Christ only died once, and it was not before the world began! But that isn’t to say that this didn’t happen in God’s foreknowledge. Revelations 13:8 is one of those examples where “… as it is written… God… calls those things which do not exist as though they did…” (Romans 4:17–18, NKJV).

All this points to the simple truth of God’s foreknowledge. God foreknew absolutely that Christ was going to have to die for our sins; in fact, God planned it that way from before the foundation of the world. This was God’s plan, His “logos/word/plan,” which was made flesh when Christ was born and lived out this plan. This view of Christ remained in God’s foreknowledge before Christ was born, during the time that Christ lived on the earth, and continues ever afterward. In a manner of speaking, we could say that Christ’s life and sacrifice is forever etched into the forefront of God’s mind!

The following graphic is a representation of God’s foreknowledge. In the top half, we see that in God’s mind’s eye, He always sees what is in the future in a manner that is just as clear as our view of our world. This graphic illustrates how Jesus could say, “No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended out of heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven” (John 3:13). It is through the biblical concept of God’s foreknowledge that Jesus could quite properly say that the Son of Man, literally, the “offspring of humanity” (himself) was both in heaven and had come out of heaven at the same time.

In the top view we see God’s foreknowledge expressed in Revelation 13:8. In the bottom half, we have the actual scene wherein Christ was crucified “once at the end of the world,” according to Hebrews 9:12, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14.

This is how Christ could be said, without contradiction, to have suffered before the foundation of the world and yet, in actuality, only suffered once at his crucifixion. It is because Jesus himself, and the crucifixion, were always in God’s foreknowledge and became a reality in our world only on that fateful day some 2,000 years ago. God has the same foreknowledge of each and every one of us.

Foreknowledge is a biblical word and is mentioned or described in Romans 4:17–18, Acts 2:1–23, 1 Peter 1:20, and Acts 15:18.

The Pagan Idea of Preexistence

Now then, to present the opposite position, that of actual preexistence, we’re not going to spend a lot of time introducing examples. We’re just going to point back to Harnack and let the great historian of Christian dogma tell us what the difference is.

According to the [pagan] Hellenic conception, which has become associated with Platonism, the idea of pre-existence is… based on the conception of the contrast between spirit and matter… In the case of all spiritual beings, life in the body or flesh is at bottom an inadequate and unsuitable condition, for the spirit is eternal, the flesh perishable… In the case of the higher and purer (spirits)… if they resolved for some reason or other to appear in this finite world, they cannot simply become visible, for they have no ‘visible form.’ They must rather ‘assume flesh ,’ whether they throw it about them as a covering, or really make it their own by a process of transformation or mixture. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I, Appendix I, 320.

If you ever wondered where the saying, “God robed Himself in flesh” originated, here we have it. The Oneness doctrine of Jesus being “God incarnate” who “robed Himself in flesh” has its basis, not in the OT schoolmaster, but in pagan mythology, just as the concept of the Trinity of three persons in the godhead does. They both originate from ultimately the same source, they have just reached slightly different positions, neither of which is actually spelled out or explained in the Bible.

Let us try to simplify what Harnack has said. In classical philosophy, spirit and matter were incompatible. (This is known as “dualism,” which is the philosophic idea that only that which is spirit can be good, while that which is flesh can only be evil or corrupt.) Spirit beings were, of course, believed to be invisible to us. Therefore if they wanted to show themselves, they would have to do one of two things. They either would have to “robe themselves in flesh” (which is a common, unbiblical “Oneness” description for God in Christ), or somehow mix with flesh. The point is, in the pagan view these spiritual entities, or gods, preexisted in one form and then had to change form in order to become visible in our world.

This idea of a preexistent being “taking on a change” is one of the big reasons it is the opposite of the biblical concept of God’s foreknowledge, because God sees in His foreknowledge that which is to be on earth exactly as it is to be without any change. This is a very important distinction that betrays the pagan influence or not of the two views. In the pagan view, the preexistent entity has to change forms somehow; in the biblical view, what appears on earth is exactly as it was in God’s foreknowledge. In the Oneness view, God had to robe Himself in flesh to appear to be something He really isn’t. That fact of a “change” alone is enough to betray its pagan influence and source. In a previous chapter we brought up wolves in sheep’s clothing as a method of deception. That analogy would be very fitting here also for what we’ve just described as the pagan view.

Even after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, the “only wise God” (referring to the Father) is still said to be invisible (1 Timothy 1:17). In the Bible Jesus is said to be the “ image of the invisible God…” (Colossians 1:15). An image is something completely different than an incarnation of a preexistent being. An image is like the picture of President Lincoln we see on a US penny. If we carry a penny in our pocket with the image of Lincoln on it, it specifically means that we don’t have Lincoln himself; we have an image of him.

How someone views the Scriptures’ descriptions of God and Christ depends on the influences upon that person. The first step in being able to see this involves being honest with the biblical information and with history. It also means being able to accept that we can be and have been preconditioned with biases that are not in line with the OT Schoolmaster and will not bring us to the correct view of Christ.

Unfortunately, many people feel they have a more special relationship with God than others do. They seem to feel that, since they know God called them, they couldn’t possibly have been led to believe a lie. This attitude is clearly shown to be wrong through the Jews who believed in Jesus in John 8:30–47. They were not willing to allow Jesus to point out to them they were in bondage to sin. Rather, they seemed only interested in having him justify their supposed “right-standing” with God and expected him to recognize their assumed relationship with God. This is one of the main stumbling blocks that keep “believers” from rejecting errors and advancing into greater truth. Paul explained it by saying, “when I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Possibly no other area has held Christians in more bondage to error than their pagan-influenced, pre-conceived notion that Christ is literally an incarnation of “preexistent” deity.

Harnack pointed out that the pagan ideas of preexistence, incarnation of deity, and such were clearly and absolutely contrary to the biblical, Jewish view of God’s foreknowledge. The two concepts, he observed, were “as wide apart as the poles.” The biblical Jewish view contained no assumption of the flesh or mixing of spirit and flesh.

Harnack had this to say about the Jewish view of foreknowledge in contrast to the pagan view of preexistence:

In becoming visible to the senses, the [Jewish] object in question assumes no attribute that it did not already possess with God. Hence its material nature is by no means an inadequate expression of it, nor is it a second nature added to the first . The truth rather is that what was in heaven before is now revealing itself upon earth, without any sort of alteration taking place in the process. There is no assumptio naturæ novæ, and no change or mixture. The old Jewish theory of [foreknowledge] is founded on the religious idea of the omniscience and omnipotence of God, that God to whom the events of history do not come as a surprise, but who guides their course. As the whole history of the world and the destiny of each individual are recorded on His tablets or books, so also each thing is ever present before Him. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I, Appendix I, 318.

To believe “God is one” is to believe, not only that He is one in personality, but that He is also one in nature. Where Trinitarians destroy the truth that “God is one” by assigning Him multiple persons; Onenessians destroy the truth that God is one by making Him out to personally be Christ whom they define as a dual natured individual. Neither is biblical oneness. They are both based in pagan ideas rather than in Jewish Biblical categories of thought; in particular God’s foreknowledge.

The basis and effect of the two contrasting views can be seen in this table:

The biblical Jewish view was based on God’s omniscience, which is His ability to know all things even into the future. The pagan view was based on the idea of the incompatibility of spirit and matter. Recall from Genesis that, “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Thus, God views His physical creation as good, which is the opposite of the pagan philosophic view called “dualism” which has been adopted and modified into the unbiblical Oneness doctrine called “Dual Natures in Christ.”

From the perspective of Trinitarian dogma, just as with the pagan view of preexistence, the Son of God was an actually preexistent, spiritual person, who joined to a lower, human nature. From the perspective of Onenessianism, it was the Father Himself who “robed Himself in flesh” and thereby joined Himself “hypostatically” (or personally) to a lower, impersonal human nature, but kept his deific personality. Of course, another problem with the Oneness theory, beyond the fact that it is a pagan concept, is that it negates the Scriptures that describe Jesus as being a separate personal individual from the Father even after his resurrection and subduing of all things under him.

²⁵For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶The last enemy that will be abolished is death. ²⁷ For, “He put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when he says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is evident that he is excepted who subjected all things to him. ²⁸When all things have been subjected to him, then the Son will also himself be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:25-28)

Passages such as this clearly maintain a permanent state of personal separation and distinction from God and Jesus. Only by dishonestly negating what passages such as this clearly teach, can Onenessians empower themselves to adopt the pagan doctrine of incarnation and dual natures.

In the final analysis, both of these “isms” (Trinitarianism and Onenessianism) have been spoiled by philosophy and traditions of men and have rejected the truth of God’s foreknowledge of His Son that He foreknew and foresaw before He ever set one piece of creation into motion. The son that the Bible talks about did not assume any nature that God in heaven did not foresee that he would have on earth.

Hence, there is no scriptural basis for the Oneness concept that Jesus Christ was “God in creation, Son in redemption, and Holy Spirit in sanctification” as they often say. John doesn’t say that Jesus’ human nature would have a different will; rather, Jesus Christ spoke this of his “own” will:

⁴¹He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and he knelt down and prayed, ⁴²saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:41–42)

Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” He didn’t say, “Not the will of my human nature be done, but the will of my deific nature,” as Onenessians assume he must have meant. This event of Jesus faithfully submitting his personal will to the Father is the pinnacle and epitome of Christianity! It was this very attitude and action of Christ, which God foresaw and ordained, that made God exalt this solitary individual above all the rest of creation (Hebrews 1:9 and Philippians 2:8–9). But the Oneness view runs roughshod over this whole concept and turns it into a complete sham of a playacting god, making God himself into a deceiver in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15)! The Oneness view isn’t a “high” view of Christ; it is an appalling tragedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the very heart of the gospel: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God to you by mighty works and wonders and signs which God did by him…” (Acts 2:22).

The Onenessian God must have had some form of multiple personality disorder in heaven; either that or Onenessians have been influenced by the pagan doctrine of incarnation of Gods (Acts 14:11)! Trinitarians have the same problem: somehow two of their deific all-knowing persons had conflicting wills throughout all eternity past! In truth, Jesus is perfectly reflecting the Jewish view that Christ is and was the man whom God did always foreknow.

No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended out of heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. (John 3:13)

Jesus stated quite explicitly that “the Son of Man” (that is, the offspring of humankind) was in heaven at the same time that he was speaking on earth! If we interpret this through pagan ideas of preexistence, we would have to conclude there was more than one son of man—the one on earth and the one that remained in heaven! But if we view the verse through biblical lenses, we know that Jesus was referring to God’s plan, God’s foreknowledge. In other words, even when he was in heaven—that is, in God’s foreknowledge—the “will” that Jesus had in heaven was not the will of the Father. Thus, he and God the Father were always separate persons: in God’s foreknowledge, during his time on earth, and after his resurrection. Onenessianism contradicts this truth. Only God had always existed, while the Son was actually made in the process of time (in the fullness of time) and made of a woman (Galatians 4:4)! This perfectly fits the concept of God’s foreknowledge of His Anointed One.

And this is exactly what Harnack said about the Jewish view. Christ was born just exactly as God foreknew he would without any change or admixture or assumption of the flesh or by being “robed in flesh” or any of those pagan ideas. Thus, the biblical Christ is not at all compatible with the pagan view of preexistence. The biblical Christ was made of a woman in the fullness of time, and what he was made into was exactly as God foreknew him to be before that time, when as yet he actually “was not.”

The Jewish view of God’s foreknowledge is what John was talking about when he said the plan (logos/word) was made flesh. Thus it is written,

¹⁹So then you are… ²⁰being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone. (Ephesians 2:19–20)

¹⁹…Christ (the Anointed One) ²⁰…was foreknown… before the foundation of the world… (1 Peter 1:19–20)

Be careful that you don’t let anyone rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after The Anointed One. (Colossians 2:8)

Now let’s take a look at how the plan of God can be subtly changed into something different by Oneness theology. Note in the following passage how David Bernard slipped the idea of “incarnation” into the discussion.

John 1 beautifully teaches the concept of God manifest in flesh. In the beginning was the Word (Greek, Logos). The Word was not a separate person or a separate god any more than a man’s word is a separate person from him. Rather the Word was a thought or a plan, or mind of God. It was with God in the beginning and was a part of Him (John 1:1). The Incarnation existed in the mind of God before the world began. Indeed, in the mind of God the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:19–20; Revelation 13:8). In Greek usage, logos can mean the expression or plan as it exists in the mind of the proclaimer—as a play in the mind of a playwright—or it can mean the thought as uttered or otherwise physically expressed–as a play that is enacted on stage. John 1 says the Logos existed in the mind of God from the beginning of time. When the fulness of time was come, God put that plan in action. He put flesh on that plan in the form of the man Jesus Christ. The Logos is God expressed. David K. Bernard, The Oneness of God, 60.

Neither the word nor the definition of incarnation is in the Bible. It is uncertain how you would even say that in Biblical Hebrew! The onus would be on Onenessians to prove their claim, which they certainly have not. The idea of “incarnation” is just as lacking in the Bible as the Trinity doctrine. But that doesn’t mean people won’t attempt to interject what they think it should say. By interjecting the pagan doctrine of incarnation, Bernard has imposed pagan views of God upon the Scriptures in the same way Onenessians accuse Trinitarians of doing.

The reader may recall how we quoted Carl Brumbach in Chapter Eleven and showed the way he attempted to be technically accurate, and yet changed and omitted just enough details to make what he said totally misleading. Mr. Bernard has done the same type of thing in this passage. As we showed in the last section, there are no OT biblical grounds to believe that the Messiah was to be an “incarnation of God Himself.” What Bernard implied in the passage above is contrary to what the OT clearly taught. The word “manifest” and the word “incarnation” are simply not synonymous. So Bernard simply played a shell game with words and concepts in order to make you think that the Bible refers to incarnation when it really only says that Jesus made God known to us (because he was a human being who emulated God’s attitudes, attributes, and characteristics).

Certainly it is true that God’s plan of Jesus was always in the mind of God, and certainly that plan/word/ logos was with God and in a sense was God (just as anyone else’s “word” communicates who they are). But not until Christianity was influenced by the pagan idea of incarnations of deity was Christ’s birth spoken of as an “incarnation.” The word incarnation embodies in its meaning the idea of a preexisting being coming to be in the world in a different form from which it previously existed. The word incarnation refers directly to the antichristian doctrine of the dual natures of Christ. It is used to represent the act of the preexistent deific nature joining ontologically to the impersonal human nature. So it is not a biblical word, and it does not represent the biblical theme of Christ’s genesis/birth at Bethlehem.

As we quoted above, Jesus said that what God had planned, and was in heaven even while Christ was on earth, was “the Son of Man” that was in heaven. God’s word says that God is not a man, neither the Son of man (Numbers 23:19). The term “son of man” is just normal poetic biblical parallelism of the sort used in Psalms, with the meaning of human being. It is parallel to “man,” and has the same meaning. Furthermore, that “son of man” that was in God’s plan had a different personal “will” than God, which signifies to us God’s foreknowledge of the Son’s will was exactly as it would be in reality on earth. Remember, “God calls those things that are not as though they were.” When we read the Bible, we need to keep the things that it does say in context if we want to hear what it is saying rather than imposing our own ideas upon it, especially when those ideas actually originated in antichristian Gnosticism and the paganism that Gnosticism adopted and adapted to appear to “fit” biblical words and ideas.

We will return to God’s foreknowledge in Chapter Twenty-Seven.

In Closing Section Three

In this section we have attempted to present some very simple, biblical doctrines and show how they have been hijacked through the influence of similar sounding pagan ideas. However, when the Bible is allowed to speak, the impostors can be exposed, and those pagan ideas can be shown to be far from what the Bible actually describes.

Those doctrines are:

• The biblical Christ being made of a woman of the offspring of David versus the antichristian doctrine of dual natures of flesh and deity.
• The biblical Christ being a man approved of God versus the pagan doctrine of gods coming to earth in the form of mankind.
• The biblical doctrine of God’s foreknowledge versus the pagan view of preexistence of deities.

We’ve placed this section of topics here because without first dealing with these concepts, many readers would simply keep reading the pagan views into the NT Scriptures we are going to present in the next section.

We hope we’ve given you, dear reader, enough information that you will be open to reading the words of the NT through lenses that are made clear through the light of Scripture and not darkened through the influences of paganism, which comes from “the gods that are round and about you.”

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