How Many Gods Are There?

Spirituality Column #41
August 21, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

How Many Gods Are There?
By Bob Walters

How many Gods are there?

The correct answer is “One,” of course, but there sure is a lot of lively and also deadly discussion and disagreement throughout history and even today about the number of God. The Number is One.

The Holy Trinity of the Christian faith is one God. God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three manifestations, three persons, of the same one single God. That’s Christian doctrine.

It is very easy to understand how this three-in-one, one-in-three nature of God is difficult to understand for one of God’s children who is outside the Christian faith. The math doesn’t work: three equals one. The grammar doesn’t work: the Trinity is? The Trinity are?

I guess most people accept that God exists, and I would point out that the multiple pagan gods of antiquity (Thor, Zeus, Apollo, et al) have not stood the test of time that the God of the Bible has withstood.

I realize it’s kind of a conundrum to even say that “God” our eternal Father has withstood a “test of time.” After all, He is eternal and He is very different from us. Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us His thoughts and ways are higher than our ways, and 2 Peter 3:8 tells us God’s time is different from ours (a day is like a thousand years and vice versa).

So it’s a mistake to put God into earthly constraints of time, math or grammar, and probably silly to argue about “One True God,” isn’t it? How can there be more than one? And it’s nonsensical to say "my God" or "your God." God is the one who put all of us here. Whatever name you call God, only One God can be the Creator God Almighty.

I’ll go ahead and worship the one God who created me and loves me, and not some random god I created because I love myself. Those gods are called idols, and there are lots of them.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is admittedly non-patronizing toward atheists but believes that if there is no God nothing is important; and if there is a God, nothing else is more important.