“If God stopped saying his Word, but for an instant even, heaven and earth would disappear.”
meister eckhart
Lifted Up (John 3:14)
There was a time in American culture when you couldn’t attend a large public event like a football game or a concert without seeing a handmade poster that simply stated, ‘John 3:16.’ Arguably the most well-known and most beloved verse in the Bible, John 3:16 recounts when Jesus tells the Pharisee named Nicodemus (and us) that God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son so that those who believe in Him may not perish but have eternal life.
That is the good news, the Gospel, God’s great message of faith, hope and love. Wrapped up and hidden in John 3:16 are the two great paradoxes of Christianity – the Trinity and the Incarnation. But if we rewind just two verses, paradox smacks us directly in the face when Jesus reveals the mysterious mechanism by which God makes salvation possible.
In John 3:14 Jesus says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” That is the paradox of all Scripture in a nutshell, which we now begin to unpack.
The story of Moses and the bronze serpent (to which Jesus refers in John 3:14) is presented in the book of Numbers in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion, as if it’s an aside to the broader desert wandering narrative and not one of its most pivotal scenes.
To set the stage, the Israelites had just met resistance from an enemy Canaanite clan blocking their way. The Israelites prayed to God for the strength to destroy this enemy, and God listened. Rather than express gratitude for their victory, the Israelites proceeded on their way with impatience.
“The people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’[1] Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”[2]
That’s it; that’s the entire story of the bronze serpent, hardly to be heard of again[3] until Jesus raises it with Nicodemus in a startling and yet somehow matter-of-fact manner.[4]
The snake being lifted up in the wilderness prefigured Christ ‘becoming sin’ while being ‘lifted up’ on the cross. Those who looked upon the bronze serpent lived even though they had the poison of the serpent in them. In like fashion, those who ‘look upon’ Christ crucified are saved from the death caused by sin’s venom.
To understand what ‘looking upon’ means in this case we must consider that to accept the Gospel one must accept ‘The Crucified God.’ We must surrender to the mysterious and paradoxical truth that the victory God won for mankind looks a lot like defeat through our eyes.
The bronze serpent raised on the staff thus becomes the Cross of Jesus, the cosmic bridge that connects heaven and earth, the Tree of Life, the shepherd’s crook, and the rod of Asclepius[5] that even today remains the symbol of healing (see Figure 14).
Figure 14: Comparing the rod of Asclepius and the Crucifix
Like the Israelites who were healed from the effects of the serpents’ poison by looking upon the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up, so we will be healed from the poison of sin by looking at the Son lifted up on the cross, and believing.
Psychiatrists today might call that bronze image of a poisonous snake a ‘pharmakon.’ The idea of a pharmakon is that exposing yourself to a little bit of the poison that could kill you will in fact redeem you. By confronting that which you fear, you will grow and learn and become stronger, ultimately becoming less fearful.
While belief in Christ will bring us comfort and joy, God’s primary interest is not in us being safe and comfortable. God is interested in us growing and becoming better versions of ourselves. He understands that we are made stronger in proportion to our willingness to confront what terrifies us.
This is why Christ became sin to defeat sin, and why we must look upon the image of Christ crucified and believe, so that through believing we may pick up our cross and start up the hill; so that we may gain the strength through Jesus Christ to take the next step.
Notice that the way of looking upon the bronze serpent, and of looking upon an image of Jesus on the Cross for that matter, makes a difference. If gazing upon the serpent’s image focuses our heart’s attention on God’s will, then our hearts are softened in preparation for receiving His healing grace.
Fixating on the serpent as an object of power worthy of worship onto itself, rather than as a reminder of God’s power, turns it into an idol, hardening our hearts against God’s truth. Indeed, the kingdom of Judah would come to do just that, naming the bronze serpent ‘Nehushtan’ and treating it as a god.
The Hebrew name ‘Nehushtan’ means ‘bronze serpent,’ and is a play on the name of Nahshon, who led the tribe of Judah during the desert wanderings in the times of Moses and Aaron. Nahshon features prominently in the lineage of Jesus, being a direct descendant of Judah’s son Perez, as well as being the grandfather of Boaz (who begat Obed who begat Jesse who begat David).
Nahshon, whose name derives from the words ‘serpent,’ ‘bronze,’ and ‘oracle,’ was selected by God to lead Judah many years before God instructed Moses to fashion the bronze serpent. Thus we see that, even from the earliest days of ancient Israel, God was already laying the groundwork for His appropriation of the weapons of sin and death for the ultimate destruction of sin and death.
One of Chesterton’s favorite juxtapositions is the circle and cross, which may be exemplified via serpent imagery. We’ve seen how the bronze serpent on the pole represents the cross, but perhaps the better-known serpent image is the ouroboros (see Figure 15), which is a snake swallowing its own tail, thus representing the continual cycle of death and rebirth, of creation and destruction.
Figure 15: Comparing the ouroboros to the bronze serpent
The ouroboros traces its origins back to ancient Egyptian paganism. Perhaps the Israelites whom God ransomed from captivity in Egypt recognized that, in lifting a snake on a pole, something new was being done by breaking the familiar snake’s circle. Nature’s never-ending circle of life symbolized in the ouroboros was broken (or broken out of[6]) by the cross that extended infinitely in all directions, from East to West and from North to South, between Heaven and Hell.
The ouroboros loop is a simple, self-contained loop without transcendence. It’s the flattening that results by attempting to be rid of the paradox through explanation, thereby removing everything strange about the strange loop and leaving just a plain old loop.
The cross is what twists the flat circle into a transcendence, just as it twisted the serpent that once swallowed its own tail and put it on a pole for all to see and be healed. Whereas the ouroboros is a single, limited tautology, the cross is a unity of eternal orthogonalities; it is a conflict stretching out into infinity to encompass everything in its offer of mercy and salvation.
Unity is Trinity (Exodus 3:14)
When God called to him from the burning bush, Moses, this same man who claimed to lack the confidence and speaking ability to address Pharoah on the Israelites’ behalf, displayed the utter temerity to ask God a question normally reserved for peers or between those who are to become intimately familiar; Moses asked God for His name.
Astonishingly, Moses got an answer. In Exodus 3:14 we discover with Moses that God’s true name, always and forever, is “I AM WHO AM.” In Hebrew, that phrase is: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (or Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh), which is simplified to “Yahweh,” meaning “I am.”
What kind of a name is that?
Was this just another of God’s non-answers, like He gave to Job? The ancient Hebrews would have understood “I am” not just as a statement of God’s eternal existence apart from the universe and outside of space and time, but as something much more intimate and personal. To them, this name that God claimed meant that God was with them, present in their midst.
As such, the name Yahweh is indeed reminiscent of the answer God gave to Job because it is an assurance of God’s power and abiding presence – that He continually breathes life into each one of us, cradling us both collectively and individually in His hands, all despite our inability to comprehend it.
Yahweh is a God of ever-present action, of doing, and of being. Yahweh is the Creator who continues to create in each of our lives. And while He continuously and dynamically works, He remains eternal and never changing.
If always acting and never changing sounds like a paradox, that’s because it is; it is the paradox of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is the mystery that Yahweh is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that each of these three persons is fully God. It’s not just that three become one, but that in each one all three are present. Trinity is Unity, and Unity is Trinity.
We are used to the concept that a team is a unit formed out of individuals working in concert toward a common objective. What seems strange is the concept that the whole team could in turn be present in each individual. It’s strange because we see the team as a plurality made up of singular objects. But God is not an object or any created thing.
When God told us that Yahweh is His name, that He is the great I AM, He was telling us that He not only exists, but that He is Existence; that He is not a being, but that He is Being. With this in mind, perhaps the mystery of the Trinity is easier to accept by thinking of God as action rather than entity. And what other actions better capture God’s nature than loving and creating? By examining these, we may begin to better appreciate the necessity and the simplicity of the Trinity.
If you were to ask believers to describe God with one word, perhaps the most common response would be “love.” But do we really understand what we mean when we say that God is love?
If God is love, then God has been love for all eternity, back even before the beginning. But what was there to love before the beginning? Love is not the activity of isolation. Love is a relationship that unites a lover and a beloved. Thus, when we say that God is love, we are saying that for all eternity God has been a lover (the Father) and a beloved (the Son) bound together in a relationship of shared love (the Holy Spirit).
Each of these ‘persons’ is infinite, eternal, and perfect. None of these could exist apart, and thus are indivisible. None of these preceded another, and so are equal. If all are equally perfect, infinite, and indivisible, then we are left to conclude that they are the same; that God is a Unity of three persons, and that each of the three persons contains the entire Unity.
Unity is Trinity, and Trinity is Unity. That is the simplest formulation possible for eternal, infinite, and perfect love.
Moreover, there cannot be more than one such Unity, because if there was then God’s Unity would not be maximal, infinite, and perfect. If there was more than one Unity, then God would not be God. If the Unity of God was less than a Trinity, then God would not be God.
Whether or not we can understand it, we are left only to conclude that a God who is perfect, eternal, and infinite must be one God, and a God who is love must be three persons co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial in that one God.
God as Creator flows from God as Love. Because God is love, He created the universe to thereby share in that love, and He is ever-present with His creation. As the perfect, omnipotent Creator, God needs only to speak His word, and it is so. God’s word calls things into being and makes things happen.
In this way, Creation is the manifestation of the unfolding of God’s mind. God’s will is formulated as God’s word, the word is spoken, and through God’s spirit the will comes into being. This again is the Trinitarian formulation. Take, for example, the first three verses of Genesis:
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”[7]
In the first verse, the Hebrew word used for “God” is “Elohim,” which is a plural noun even though it appears with a singular verb “bara,” meaning “to create,” leaving the implication that God is somehow both singular and plural.
In the second verse, the wind sweeping over the face of the water is the spirit of God, which is a poetic way of saying that the presence of God’s spirit brings order out of the chaos.
In the third verse, God speaks His word and produces light where once only darkness existed, indicating that all things will come into being through His word, which the apostle John identifies with Jesus, the Son.[8]
These first three verses of Genesis, and of the whole Bible, reveal that the one God creates as a singular unity of three persons, namely a moving “wind” (the Holy Spirit), a speaker (the Father), and a spoken word (the Son).
Jesus confirmed that He is one with the Father when addressing those who sought to kill Him as a blasphemer. He told them that “before Abraham was, I am,”[9] unambiguously claiming for Himself the sacred name of Yahweh, the great I AM.
If Jesus was not one with the Father, and not one of the three persons of the Trinity, then His astonishing statement would have constituted the most egregious violation of the commandment against misusing the name of God that the Jews of that time could imagine.
This was one of those instances in which Jesus meant us to understand him plainly, not allegorically or in parables, because to understand Him otherwise would be to agree with those who wanted to stone Him.
In addition to claiming He was one with the Father, Jesus spoke of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as the one who would bring peace and understanding to His followers after Jesus was to leave them, clearly calling to mind the spirit of God that sweeps over the chaotic turbulence of darkness. During His last night together with His disciples before His torture and death, Jesus told them, “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”[10]
This is how the Triune God loves. This is how the Triune God creates. Just as Moses witnessed in the burning bush that called him to his adventure, the Father sends to us the Spirit to make present the Son. In abiding with us, He shares the eternal Spirit of love emanating from the relationship between the Father and the Son.
In speaking His word, His creation springs forth and receives His blessings so that by returning them back to Him, His creation receives them again in greater abundance. This is the upbuilding strange loop that the Holy Trinity continuously creates and re-creates for us through love, always doing God’s will. As said through the prophet Isaiah:
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”[11]
Throughout this section, I have avoided trying to explain the Trinity through direct analogy,[12] and I did so for (you guessed it) three reasons. First and foremost, the exercise of this book is in learning to embrace paradox and mystery by resisting the temptation to resolve or explain. Retreating to analogy would work against that objective.
Secondly, while all analogies are imperfect, the analogies for the Trinity all seem to fail to capture that most difficult aspect of the Trinity, namely that each of the three constituent persons of God are the whole God. Yes, analogies break down, but they should be their strongest, not their weakest, when elucidating what is most difficult to explain.
Thirdly, the Trinity is a powerful and foundational mystery of the Christian faith that shouldn’t be lessened by attempts to reduce it down to a simple analogy. While the Church teaches that reason and faith go hand-in-hand, it is an act of appropriate humility to recognize that our reason is limited and that some things can be known to us only by God’s revelation.[13]
That all being said, many depictions of the Trinity in art can help us contemplate its mystery without succumbing to the need for explanation. Two examples are provided in Figure 16.
Figure 16: Depictions of the Holy Trinity present in the burning bush and at the Crucifixion
Incarnation and Condescension (Isaiah 7:14)
The Bible tells of two men named Joseph, each begotten of a father named Jacob.[14] Both had dreams foretelling their stewardship over what would become the life-giving food for countless souls. Both were called to extraordinary trust in the fulfillment of God’s plan for His people.
One was sold into slavery in Egypt by his ten older brothers who were jealous of his status as the favorite son; but he would not remain a slave, eventually becoming the most powerful man in Egypt next to Pharoah.
The other one fled to Egypt with his young wife, Mary, to protect their infant son from a murderous king, after receiving a warning in a dream. This (other) Joseph was a carpenter who hailed from the lowly backwater town of Nazareth, despite his royal pedigree that traced back to King David.
Both Josephs experienced the tension of life’s extremes, and yet were able to embrace the paradox, exemplifying servant leadership and remaining faithful to God. One Joseph accomplished this by commanding nations with words and deeds; the other by steadfast and silent surrender to his Savior.
Both Josephs arrived on the scene ahead of a great condescension; one preceding his people’s descent into slavery, and the other preceding his God’s descent into manhood.
While it may be said that all saints embrace paradox at some level, none have embraced paradox more completely, more regularly, and more literally than Joseph of Nazareth, if only because he embraced the greatest paradox every time he physically embraced his adopted son, Jesus.
In Isaiah 7:14, the prophet gave king Ahaz a portent of a virgin who would conceive and bear a son named Immanuel,[15] which means “God with us.” That portent became a prophecy fulfilled in the birth of Jesus, as Joseph of Nazareth learned in his dream.
“An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).”[16]
The name ‘Jesus’ comes from ‘Yeshua’ (in Hebrew יְשׁוּעָה), which means “Yahweh saves.” This baby that Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit was not to be an ordinary messiah (or ‘anointed one’), or even a typical hero-like savior. This baby called Jesus was God Himself,[17] which is the great paradox of the Incarnation when God condescended to become a man.
And since it is a great paradox, it should not be surprising that the Incarnation is really a dual paradox. The first and more familiar paradox of the Incarnation is that the person named Jesus could be both fully human and fully Divine. The second paradox of the Incarnation is more subtle, and may be phrased as such: the act of God becoming a man is so humiliating and so unbefitting of God that it could only be accomplished by God.
By now we should realize that this paradox is not meant to be resolved, but we can certainly grapple with why the Incarnation was necessary; and the second part of the Incarnation paradox holds the key to understanding the why.
God is our Creator. There is nothing we have that is not a gift from Him. Therefore, we already owe everything back to Him. Even before we sinned, even when we are in a state of grace, even in the Garden of Eden before humanity succumbed to its concupiscence, our debt to God was everything. But we do sin, and we do desire things apart from God. And while, with God’s grace, we can seek and obtain His forgiveness, it is impossible for any of us to repay our sin debt since we are already indebted by everything.
But God made a way for us to be saved from sin and the resulting corruption and death. That way, which God began to teach us through his chosen people, was sacrifice. From the very beginning, even though God was owed everything, He asked only for a tithe of first fruits.
Later, when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, it was not just a test of faith, it was a demonstration of the call to radical sacrifice and of the concept of substitutional sacrifice. God demanded everything from Abraham and Isaac, namely Isaac’s life, and then demonstrated how that impossible demand could somehow be fulfilled through by the sacrifice of another. And so God stayed Abraham’s hand and provided a spotless ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead.
Later still, God taught the Levitical priests how to offer sacrifice in atonement for the sins of the people, and showed how the Levites themselves were the ransom for the first born of Israel who were consecrated to Him.
These things first introduced and then reinforced the idea of substitutional sacrifice. But of course that was just practice. It took the sacrifice of Christ Jesus to fully realize what it means to say that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend.[18]
The sin debt that was owed by mankind had to be repaid by mankind, but because that sin debt was unlimited, no human, whether alone or collectively, was capable of paying it.
God’s eternal justice demanded that mankind be restored, and thus rescued from sin and death. That required a man to do what only God could, which was literally to descend from heaven into hell and come back out.
This is why God became a man, so that as a man His sacrifice would be acceptable and as God His sacrifice would be possible.
In so doing, He demonstrated that the greatest expression of love is voluntary self-sacrifice. Any shred of selfishness is incompatible with the true expression of God’s love. Although God knows this is impossible for us, we are nonetheless called to imitate Christ by loving others the way He loved us, which is the same way the Son learned to love from the Father in the eternal Trinitarian embrace.
“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”[19]
In creating, the Creator separates Himself from His creation. The Incarnation, then, is a re-creation in which the Creator enters His creation as a creature and thus achieves a Unity within it through Him.
Creation is the unfolding of God’s mind to form the universe, and re-Creation is the unfolding of God’s Word to reform humanity. God adapted the revelation of His way, His truth, and His light to our limited capacity by clothing His Son in human nature by means of the Holy Spirit.
When the supernatural and the natural merged in the Incarnation, that event became both the mechanism for grasping the transcendent and the reason why the transcendent will always remain a mystery. This is the nature of paradox – to be at the same time the way of understanding and the veil that prevents it. We cannot penetrate the veil, but we are given enough glimpses through it so that we can come to faith in reason.
Re-Creation escapes the pull of entropy and corruptibility. It frees us from the bonds of sin just as the Israelites were freed from the bonds of Egypt. And yet we must follow God out of the prison door he has opened for us. He does not force us to leave. We must leave willingly.
In John 3:13, Jesus tells Nicodemus that, “no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” When Jesus refers to Himself as the ‘Son of Man,’ He means that He is a man, but not just any man. He is THE Man, the archetypal Man, the Man in the image of whom all humans were made.
He also means that He is God, the one true God who has now descended from heaven to create a path to salvation for His beloved creatures. He is the Son of God who became the Son of Man so that men could become sons of God. This was prefigured by Jacob’s ladder.
Jacob, who was the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, and who would become the father to that first Joseph, once dreamt of a ladder that connected heaven and earth, and upon which angels descended and ascended.[20] Such a connection between heaven and earth could not be erected from the earth,[21] but must have been lowered from heaven.
Once lowered, the ladder became available not just for heavenly creatures to descend, but also for earthly creatures to climb. This vision foretold of what the Son of Man would accomplish. What ascends must first descend. Jesus the Christ humbled Himself to share in our humanity so that we could be perfected.
By first descending from heaven to suffer and die, and then resurrecting and ascending into heaven, Jesus created a way for us to do the same. What we learn from this mystery is that nothing goes up that has not first gone down.
The only path to heaven in the path created by Jesus Christ. Following His example, we must also be humbled, descending from whatever heights to which we have elevated ourselves in our own pride, before we can be raised up into heaven.
The manna that God provided to the Israelites wandering in the desert also prefigured Christ’s descending from heaven to become the bread of life, our spiritual food. As Jesus Himself instructed us, we must consume the sacrifice of His flesh and blood so that our eternal life may be sustained, just as the Israelites relied on the manna that God provided to sustain their bodies.
The manna could not be stored up, and so God provided it every day, teaching his chosen people to rely on Him day-by-day and in every moment. We recall this every time we pray in the Lord’s prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’
In this way, Jesus gave the example of sacrificing our humanity to God’s divinity – of sacrificing our worldly nature to our spiritual nature, which is the opposite of what led to Original Sin. This is what is meant by “he who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life will keep it for eternity.”[22]
Moreover, it is fitting that this manna descended from heaven to be the bread of life would be born of a woman, since it was a woman who chose to eat the fruit that led to death.
Christ became a man not to experience what we experience, feel what we feel, and suffer what we suffer. Rather, Christ became a man so that what we experience, feel, and suffer will be related back to Him in such a way that we can share in a small part of His nature, not the other way around.
The restoring of human nature is more wonderful than the creation of human nature. Through Creation, God made us His creatures, but through re-Creation, God makes us His friends.
“Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of the hand? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is the person’s name? And what is the name of the person’s child? Surely you know!”[23]
Yes, we do know. They are Yahweh.
[1] Referring to the food that appeared from Heaven each day, which they called “manna,” whose meaning in Hebrew is “what is it?”
[2] Numbers 21:5-9 NRSV-CI.
[3] The Israelites apparently kept the bronze serpent with them for 750 years or so until Hezekiah, one of the good kings of Judah, broke it in pieces because the people were worshipping it as an idol during the reign of Hezekiah’s father, the bad king Ahaz. See 2 Kings 18:4.
[4] In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton remarks about Christ’s penchant for saying astonishing things in this way: “There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitivities of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’”
[5] In Greek mythology, Asclepius was a god of healing and prophecy. He is often depicted holding the symbol of medicine, which is a staff around which a serpent is wrapped.
[6] “[T]he cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing.” G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, “The Demons and the Philosophers.”
[7] Genesis 1:1-3 NRSV-CI.
[8] The Gospel of John, which was perhaps the last book of the Bible to be written, begins by echoing the start of Genesis. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” John 1:1-4 NRSV-CI.
[9] John 8:58.
[10] John 14:26.
[11] Isaiah 55:10-11 NRSV-CI.
[12] Examples of popular direct analogies for the Trinity include a three leaf clover, an isosceles triangle, and the three phases of water (solid, liquid, and gas). While these convey how three co-equal aspects can formulate one thing, they fail to capture how each of the three contain the whole.
[13] “The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the ‘mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.’ To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 237.
[14] See Genesis 30:22-24 and Matthew 1:16.
[15] This warning to Ahaz came true during his day. Interestingly, Ahaz was the last king to keep the bronze serpent that Moses made to heal the people (see Numbers 21:8-9). After Ahaz, his son the king Hezekiah destroyed the bronze serpent. That’s interesting because Isaiah’s warning is ultimately linked to the Virgin Mary who, as the new Eve, will crush the head of the serpent (see Genesis 3:15).
[16] Matthew 1:20-23, which quotes Isaiah 7:14.
[17] “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” John 1:14.
[18] John 15:13.
[19] John 10:17-18 NRSV-CI.
[20] See Genesis 28:10-17.
[21] Men once tried to build a tower with a top that reached the heavens, in an act of sheer self-glorification. Such an effort is doomed to fail without God. See Genesis 11:1-9.
[22] See John 12:25.
[23] Proverbs 30:4 NRSV-CI.