Unashamed with the Robertson Family - Ep 1389 | What Phil Robertson Said About Zeus Will Surprise Odyssey Fans

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Al, Zach, Christian, and John Luke examine why the Trinity is far more than an abstract theological debate and why the Gospel depends on Jesus being fully God. The guys trace the ancient dispute over Arius, the Council of Nicaea, and the scriptural language Christians have used to preserve the truth about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Zach recounts Phil’s unforgettable one-liner response while standing in the ruins of Zeus’s temple. Hear from Phil himself about what it was like to stand among the ruins of fallen gods at https://youtu.be/uzC_Qf6t2HM?si=uZTuoSJ0y1uAUEpV. In this episode: Genesis 1:26-27; Deuteronomy 6:4; Matthew 10:37; John 1:1-3, 14; John 10:30; John 14:6; Romans 1:20; Colossians 2:9; 1 John 4:8, 10; 2 Peter 1:4 Today’s conversation is about Lesson 4 of Theology 101: The Western Theological Tradition taught by various Hillsdale Professors. Take the course with us at no cost to you!  More about Theology 101: Examine the great questions of Western theology from the ancient Hebrews through today. The gift of speech, or reason, given by God to man, enables us to think about God and to worship Him.  This free online course pursues this purpose by examining the nature of God as revealed in the Bible, exploring the great theological questions and controversies of the early Christian church, studying the history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and much more.  We invite you to join us and explore the nature of the relationship between God and man, and how a proper understanding of this relationship can lead to a free and happy life. Sign up at ⁠http://unashamedforhillsdale.com/ Listen to Not Yet Now with Zach Dasher on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or anywhere you get podcasts. Check out At Home with Phil Robertson, nearly 800 episodes of Phil's unfiltered wisdom, humor, and biblical truth, available for free for the first time! Get it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and anywhere you listen to podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-home-with-phil-robertson/id1835224621 Chapters 00:00 Theology 101 Quiz Scores Get Brutally Honest 07:09 Knowledge Without Real-World Application 12:02 Scripture, Tradition & Church Authority 17:41 The Ancient Heresy That Denied Jesus Is God 24:36 Did Jesus’ Age Undermine His Message? 27:20 So Long, Zeus! 33:18 Every Trinity Analogy Eventually Falls Apart 37:22 What Creation Reveals About God 42:30 The Trinity Balances Liberty, Mercy & Justice — Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am unashamed. What about you? We are in the Hillsdale episode. We're actually taking a course called Theology 101, which has been actually really good. So you guys can take the course with us for free. And we have a big announcement. We're doing another giveaway on this new course that we're taking now, Theology 101. We're going to pick one listener to come down to West Monroe to watch a live recording of Unashamed. We're going to pay for travel and lodging for you and the guest up to 1,000. dollars each. All you have to do is take the Theology 101 course with us. You've got to finish all the quizzes. You've got to send us your certificate of completion and to sign up, I've got two websites for you. You sign up to take the course for free at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. And then once you finish the course, you upload your certificate at watchunashame.com and you will be entered to win the drawing. So yeah, I hope you guys will jump in on that with us. So are you guys, I just want to make sure you guys are taking the quizzes, right?

Am I the only one that's taking the quizzes? We're all taking the quizzes. Are you passing the quizzes? I didn't take the last quiz. I got it. I do have one confession. Okay. If I am allowed to say.

So like Al said, lecture four was very challenging for me. I made a 40. But I made a hundred the next time I took it. Well, yeah, when you can look at the answers around that. Wow, this is a big. If you miss any of the second go-around, you really are. Well, the problem with the fourth, it was a lot of like all the above or one of the, you know, like, so for example, the Trinitarian controversy was about, I thought it was the practice of worshiping Jesus as God,

because they talked about that. That's what happened. But it was the word relationship to God and Father. Yeah. So it was tricky things like that. But I got 100 the second time I took it. So I only screenshot it to the 100. I deleted the 40.

Zach, you have to take the courses to get the certificate. certificate. And so, and I'm printing all mine, I'm going to have some wallpaper by the time we get through with this Hillsdale experience. But no, it's helpful to me as well. But Christian's right, if I don't do it right after I do the lecture, I'm in trouble because then I get, I forget. Is that actually taking the quiz right now? That's why he's looking at his computer. I am taking the quiz right now. Don Luke is actually taking it right now. We're going to see if he gets 40. We'll see what you do. I'll see what you do. I'd love the next to you. I'm on. question six.

Question six. John Lake is a genius, though. What did you get to? I didn't take the quiz yet. You started by saying, am I the only one that takes the quiz? Yeah, so you busts me.

I mean, I'll take them. But it does, I will say this. I've always, I felt like it makes it feel more like you're taking a college course to have a quiz. So I do think it elevates the game. We used to do a leadership training program at our church.

And because we had all graduated, we had a school associated with it, seminary. And I went through the school and Jast did as well. And so then not too long after that, the school ended, but we still had a lot people around that taught in it. And then we were fresh graduates. And so we wanted to do it like a leadership training run for probably 10 years. And the guys that taught me were the main teachers. but then we got to teach some as well. But it was fun because you were teaching Bible at an elevated level

the way we learned it, where you were having to come and we would do quizzes. And, you know, it just felt like you were sort of not just going to sit in a Bible class on a Sunday morning, but you were actively involved in that. So I do think there's something to that, which is very powerful. That's what I've really enjoyed about Hillsdale and glad they're out there because I've learned a lot, you know. And so you figure you get to.

61 you taught Bible as long as I have and we do this podcast now for the last eight years where we're doing nothing but Bible study but it just shows you can always learn you never stop and my mentor Zach and he mentored you as well he told us never stop studying the Bible because you grow and that's why it's a double-edged sword that hits you in different ways at different times because you're growing and the Holy Spirit is doing things in your life and that's why you can grasp new concepts that you hadn't seen before, you didn't notice before, or that impact you.

And you teach other people. This is, we are, we are a clearinghouse of spiritual information. Because, you know, guys are doing things in us. And so, uh,

you got to be interesting and you got to be dynamic and, you know, you got to share it with other people. So, all right, what did you make that? All right. I made,

it's a 10 question, Chris. I made a 70. I missed three questions. And two of them were the, uh, I got the dates mixed up. So I missed a,

two date questions. Oh, yeah. And you got question four right because we said it. Well, I didn't hear, I actually didn't hear you talking about. And he was taking a quiz while I was talking about that. I was not listening to that one. But in my defense, I have to take quizzes with my grandkids talking my ears off at the same time. And I missed the all of the above one. So that was a freebie for y'all too. Yeah. The date ones are because that was all of the above. Well, that's the beauty of what we're doing here. Nobody's an expert. We're average. Phil always said he was. was a, what do you say, the C plus gospel?

Solid C, C plus, man. I'm a C man. So he said, look, I was, I was smarter. I was dumber than half, but I was smarter than half. C man. C plus man. So John Luke, you're a C man. So there's no shame in that game.

Well, hopefully with my 40, I got an F and not a Satan. We're going to get that up. Yeah, you were an F man who became an A man. You were a zero man because you didn't even attempt it. No, I'm what they call a N.A. or what is it? Incomplete. I'm on the report card minus an I. Incomplete. You need the additional time. You're in the classroom. I don't know about y'all, but I felt like college itself, like when I was in school of preaching, I was all in. It was the Bible. I was serious. But college, to me, I mean, I learned some stuff. But it was more just really about navigating the system is what I felt like that. like figuring out how to, what I could take, what I had to take, what things that, you know,

and finally later, I just took stuff that interested me because I didn't, by now I'm preaching and I didn't even care. But I just felt like that's more of a working of a system and then you're going to get a job somewhere and you're going to learn how they do it. And about 90% of all that stuff you learned you don't even ever use again. That's what I feel like. Is that accurate? Oh, I totally do.

Well, I think that, I mean, I think that what college does and what these courses do is gives you kind of like the baseline where to look for the information. But I think where I felt like I've learned the most, and I'm sure what we all have is in the like practical application and they're like talking about it in the real world. I mean, I think that's like, I think that's something that, I mean, this is for all the, all our listeners here is like you can listen to this, these, take these courses and listen to this stuff. But until you actually like apply it into the world. It's just, it's just like knowledge in your head. And for, I think that is a problem that I think a lot of pastors, particularly really like youth ministers or like young guys get into,

is they, if you spend so much time learning and preaching, you, but you're not like actually sitting down and talking to people about this stuff like one and one, or you're not like, counseling someone or walking through someone's life is like you're you're really just missing kind of the whole point of it right and this stuff is is is like this is heady this is you know what we said in the beginning of this course is like high theology but there is stuff that actually does really apply to our everyday lives when you kind of get into it and start teaching and you probably see that through your work at camp right i mean because you're you're not only you go down to the lowest level of people learning kids and some young, really young day camper age kids

where you're expressing truths that they can grab. But you're also teaching and leading college students who are then the ones that are leading them. So you're right. It's that you have to have a flow, whatever it is. And some people, some people listen to our podcast, started their own podcast. I was like, way to go. You know, whatever your followers are or whoever's going to tune in to listen to you,

it allows you a platform to do that. You know, maybe it's not be a Sunday school teacher to church. Yeah, it's been great, yeah. Yeah, I think for me, college was, college for me, was less about curriculum and more just about responsibility

and, you know, how to delegate tasks and how to actually, because college, it is what you make of it. It's like if you potentially go to after school office hours, you can get extra credit. Or if you don't show up to class, you might get docked a couple points. So I think for me it was more so,

like how to actually become responsible for when you do into the real world. And I think most of the time when you see people neglect the responsibility aspect of what college is, you can kind of see that bleed into when you actually go get a job. So that was what I feel like college for me was the most beneficial. Yeah, I think the university setting is important. You have, for example, like Hillsdale, I mean, even this course in this particular lecture is important. I mean, I just had a conversation yesterday with a guy.

And we were talking about the idea of the Trinity. And he's like, who cares? And I'm like, well, it actually does have incredible implications. I mean, he was like basically all that matters is that they confess Jesus is Lord. Did they say that the only way that the father is through Jesus? And if they do, then that's all that matters. I'm like, well, I disagree with that. I mean, because I want to know who is this God that we're getting access to.

I mean, what if I call this couch in front of me, God, and say Jesus is the only way to get to God, but what I mean by God is a couch. That matters, because we're not talking about the same God. And so, you know, the controversy of the Trinity, which is what this lecture is on. And it was, I get it. If you watched or listened to this lecture, it was, I mean, it was a little bit complex. And, you know, when you start talking about a doctrine such as this and the history that goes around it. But I think we have to preserve this about who God is because when you read scripture, yeah, the Bible says God is one.

there's the Lord your God is one but it also you do see throughout the entire Bible old and New Testament you see a lot of passages about the sun being God as we talked about in the last episode you know John one in the beginning was the word the word was with God the word was God all things were made through him without him nothing was made the word became flesh you've got all kind of passages in the Bible that you can't make sense of and there are a serious implications for us if Christ was not in fact God. And so that was a heresy that kind of emerged in the fourth century that the Council of Nassia met on to essentially establish a doctrine of who is God. And I found that to be a great explanation the way that he described doctrine. I don't

know if y'all picked up on that or not because had you all historically thought, when someone says the word doctrine, you kind of roll your eyes, okay, you're going to. we go again, you know, that kind of thing. Because a lot of people fight over doctrine. But doctrine is essential for the preservation of God's scripture. So we got to have it. And so I don't know if that hit hit you guys at all. So sign up to take the course with us for free at Unashamed for Hillsdale.com.

Yeah. I actually want to make a comment before we really get into the meat of this lecture. I was reading the comments on YouTube, which is always a, dangerous game, but I wanted to hear from y'all in what you were to say. And one of the, the first lecture that came out when I was talking about the triangles, and, you know, I was kind of making the point, if you miss that lecture, the idea is like we, any institution has these kind of like, like a hierarchical triangle of like leadership at the top to, you know, your average person at the bottom. And one thing I had said that, I said that for, um,

us evangelicals, Protestants, Southern evangelicals, that, you know, scripture is the highest authority, and then I kind of like filled out the hierarchy. And I also talked about Catholicism, and one of our Catholic viewers said, just wanted to be clear, scripture is also our highest authority. And I wanted to say, like, I did not mean to imply that it wasn't at all. What I was saying is that we as evangelicals think that, like, if you said, like, who's, you know, the head of the, like, the highest word in the church, like, any of us or any, you know, most people who could go church, it might be like, maybe the pastor in and above the pastor is, like, scripture. Like, we're going to the source of scripture. but the actual human leadership who is influencing our thoughts about scripture is this whole

category of people who are professors and theologians in these colleges like Hillsdale or Liberty or Dallas Theological Seminary or Grand Canyon University like wherever all the seminaries it's like this class of people who are the theologians who are writing the books about interpreting scripture and how we understand the language and how we understand these things. that then trickles down the pyramid to us in the way that we understand. And some of those theologians, to your point, are Catholic and a lot of different. Oh, yeah. Totally.

Right. To be fair, though, to be fair, that Catholics do not hold to the authority of Scripture alone. So they would hold that through apostolic succession, the church is teaching and the tradition. so they kind of hold them in tandem where we're Protestants, so we're products of the Reformation. That's one of the key tenets of the Reformation is through Scripture alone.

So we do, and I'm not, look, I mean, it is a difference in an approach. I would hold the scripture alone as the final authority. Although I love a lot of Catholic writings too, so I'm not like anti-Catholic.

No, correct, no correct. And what I'm saying is on a practical level, level, it's, I'm not talking about scripture as far as like the authority in the church. I'm talking about like the human leadership, like the people we're learning from and the passage are learning from as we've, you know, walk through our life. And the, I'm saying for us, Protestants, like typical southern heartland, like what our culture that we would think about, we also kind of have this like almost invisible history of tradition that we are learning from

and pulling from that I think that most people in the church like don't realize and don't understand and saying that to say that these courses from Hillsdale and learning getting this kind of like basic knowledge about like what we what we say is like high theology is I think important for all Christians to know and have an understanding from of like this is kind of where we're getting our police from. Like this is how we're forming like our theology. And like yes, it is ultimately from scripture. But there's also, there are books that we are reading, people that we are learning from that's like influencing our thoughts. Yeah. And the reason why he mentions this in the doctrine thing you were talking about is that because just the idea of teaching because he said we have to have a common

language, which is why the Logos word is about language. It's about us understanding. And Jesus is that for us when he came. But you do have to figure that out. And so we can talk about it. And I love going back and studying the history of this, because you see it begin to pop up the early tenets of it, even in the first entry writings, right? Because you get into this kind of narcissism and questions about Jesus. And so even John brings it up, right? And so we know that the underpinnings of that are there. And then they were dealing with that. When we took the early church deal, we talked about this. We talked about Arias. Remember, we talked about Constantine and the son and how they felt about it. And there was a back and forth. And so what we're seeing

is the culmination of this sort of 200-year-old. I mean, literally from the late first century, forward that this was a big question that they were grappling with. What struck me was interesting because it was definitely he does a back and forth and he sort of puts on his area's hat because he says, you know, I want you to understand the language. And I found that to be helpful because a lot of what he said sounded good in some ways, you know. I mean, it wasn't right, but it sounded good. Oh, yeah. When he was talking about the areas police, the first five minutes or so, I'm like, I think I believe that. Did I believe? Did I believe this. I'm like, I'm down to that.

I was so confused because we just did the other lecture and then he was, it was like for five minutes I was like, wait, is this the same guy that like the council and I see had the whole thing with? And then he kind of took a turn. And then he took a turn. Yeah, but I was like, wait, I think that was the same person. So I was. But I felt like the

smoking gun to me on areas, I'll just start with that. And then we can back through and talk about the importance of it was, I felt like he he started with a false premise because he was based on everything off of false gods. I mean, in other words, when you start an argument, any argument or any doctrine,

with the idea that, well, you know, we can't, God can't be this because look at Zeus and look at this, look at that, look at that. But you're looking at it from the wrong, the minute you start out by saying, God can't something. Right. You have to be very careful where you're going because you may go right off a cliff because you're based on something that's not real to be. begin with. And so he really built the whole argument as an anti, you know, anti-look at all these,

you know, monotheism and all the different things that come as a result of that. That's what I felt like. No, and it's not, to your point, it's not new. I mean, it's a new emergence of a heresy, I guess, that the church felt at the time that they needed to address and to preserve for future generations, which would be us, so very thankful. But you even see the, the New Testament. I mean, think about the Pharisees. I mean, why do they kill Jesus? Why do they, why do they hate him? What did he say that was so controversial? He said, I'm God. I mean, I'm pretty much. I mean, that was what that, that was the blasphemy that they called. They said they, they were, this is always been the assault on, on Christianity is actually

typically an assault on the Trinity. It's either to deny that Christ was fully man, which is your Gnosticism or to deny the Christ is fully God, which is what, you know, Arias was up to. And so you still see this today. I mean, you still have heresies like this in the, quote, unquote, broader Christian church of people that hold to what's called oneness doctrine or like modalism or different. So there's all these different heresies that have popped up. And I think what, you know, what the lecture was graded identifying as in the first century, I mean, this is probably, I shouldn't say that one this doctor is a little bit different,

but than what Arias was, because they're actually saying that Arias was like, Jesus is not God. And if he's not, then, and he's a created being, then that does have severe implications for us, because I would argue that if he's not fully God, then we're so dead in our sins. because I don't think his sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice would have been sufficient, right? The atoning sacrifice has to be a sufficient sacrifice that can truly cover the weight of the world's sins, that can truly cover the weight of my sins against an eternally good God. And if the weight of my sin is of infinite value, meaning that I hold infinite value on the scales

of justice, weighing down the scales, the only thing that can balance out that scale would be, the sacrifice of God himself. He alone can pay the penalty for my sin. And I think it also makes a lot more sense when you think about like Genesis 15 that you saw in the Old Testament where you see that God alone passes through those divided animals and says, I make the covenant that if this happens, if you break this covenant, make this happen to me. Well, you see that in Christ. Christ takes that on. And so when you get the passages like Colossians with the fullness of deity, jollas in bodily form, That's the whole point of the New Testament. That's the whole point of the coming of the Christ.

But what Arias was coming in to say, well, you got these verses like the God was, Christ was begotten. He's the begotten son. So that clearly means that he was created or that he's a firstborn overall creation. So he's trying to make sense of these verses. I think what he, where his mishap was, was that he engages in what's called isogesis. He wants to read into the text as opposed to reading. ex of Jesus, I want to pull out of the text.

What does the broader text say? What is the broader teaching of the New Testament? And when you get to the New Testament, there's just too many verses that you can't make sense of when it talks about the deity of Christ. I want you to sign up and take the course with us for free at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. Well, and the other problem, Zach, is, I mean, Jesus, if he's not God, then he lied because he said in John 1030, I and the 5. father or one. I mean, like you said, you have to do something with that what he said about himself.

And so the implication, again, I think from a false narrative, he says begotten and he immediately says, well, that's like, you know, these demigods and God's coming down and having sex with women and creating demigodot. That can't be right. But he's applying something false back to God. Right. And that's where he ran into his logical problem for me. because, and again, the obvious is Jesus said he was God. And John clearly said he said he was God. So, I mean, you just have to deal with that. Yeah, I did have a quick question because last podcast you brought it up about if I

reached the age of 30 and then I started going around saying, you know, this is actually who I am. You know, no one would believe me because, you know, Christ has already come. But I was thinking about, because last week I was out of Bible study, you know, we were going through Matthew 10, where, you know, Jesus is saying, anyone who loves, anyone who loves Father, Mother more than me is not worthy of me. And I've never just thought about the idea of, like, Jesus being, you know, 30 and, like, making these bold claims. And, you know, obviously we're talking about, you know, the Trinitarian controversy and Jesus was a man and begotten all the things.

But at the time, just because I don't know necessarily in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, if age felt different than it does now. but how much of Jesus's age do you think would have been a hiccup for people of like, you know, like, would there have been any more validity to things he said if he would have been 50 rather than 30? Because I'm thinking about if I'm a 70-year-old person, here's a 30-year-old man saying all these things. Like how much of that is hard to grasp, let alone the claims he made, if that makes sense. Traditionally, I think 30, and correct me if I'm wrong, that was the year. when a per you couldn't even be recognized as a rabbi until you were at least 30 and so but that would have been a young rabbi because you're right i mean i'm sure there was a lot of season guys around there

but obviously there was something unique about jesus in his culture because we get that one little glimpse of when he was 12 and he was holding his own in a bible study at the temple yeah with a lot of people a lot older than him. So obviously, I feel like he was probably, he came across as probably super advanced, even in the moment. Yeah. That is the 30-year-old man. Now, these disciples, since we're assuming that most of them are quite a bit younger

than him, so we're talking about like young 20s, possibly some of these even being teenagers. John was certainly young. And so you look at that and you think, well, they look like a very young group, a rag-tag group that are kind of going around. but then he starts doing these amazing things, right? And so, in his three years, what always gets me is that, like, you know, we just had Charlie Kirk was assassinated. It's 32 years old. He felt like a very young man.

But he also felt like a guy who was pretty sharp and had away with people, and he almost seemed older than that. And I feel like that's the way it would have been with Jesus, you know, like that. Something similar to that. But who knows, now that I'm 61, 31 seems very young. The priest would serve at age 30, numbers four. And then I think King David assumed his role at age 30. So I think that probably the age of Jesus is more related to the fact that Jesus is both the priest and the king. He's a king priest.

And so that goes into what we talked about the last podcast about a priest in the order of Mount Kesadak, who was the king of Salem, but he also was a priest. So I think that there's probably some fulfillment in that. I don't know. But I do think that this, again, back to this controversy, when he said that the God, so if Christ was begotten in the way that Arias understood it, meaning that almost like he was like a demigod, you know,

it reminds me because I just watched this movie, which I didn't like, we called Muana. But it was, I mean, it was like, I did not like it. It was so horrible. But the whole thing is like you're, it's like these, these gods that you're passing on and they got to be made gods by other gods. And it's like an infinite regression of gods. And it's like there's no, there's no like real, like real God. You know what I mean?

And it's so funny because I was thinking when I was watching this, this, it's not animation. It's like a whatever live action. But I was thinking of the time that we went, Al, you remember this, we were in Greece. And we had had this wonderful dinner the night before. And there were the Acropolis, which they light up at night. It's like this, I mean, literally sitting up high above everything else in Athens. And it's, I mean, it's a spectacle. I mean, do you remember how awesome it was that night as we sat down and had to look up?

Yeah, I mean, they have it lit in such a way that it literally just shines over the whole city. It's very pretty. Yeah, you just feel like it, like you just are transparent. ported back in time and it was such a surreal moment for us. And then the next day, me and our wives, you and our wives and Phyll and Kay, we went up to tour the Acropolis and we were filming there. And I remember a couple things about that instance. One was they had all the columns, but do you remember how they were guarded and you couldn't touch anything because they said the oil from your hands with all the tourists repeatedly coming by touching things that would

like erode them over time. Yeah. And as great as it was, you did. I mean, it kind of wasn't ruins. It wasn't like, it wasn't near anything of what it was probably in its heyday. Still very impressive. Still amazing. And then we went down to the Areopagus, which is where Phil stood up on top of Mars Hill.

I've got a photo of it. In fact, I might put that in that. I'll send that photo to you. Maddie, you can put it up for people to see. It's a photo of Phil, and he's just basically reciting the whole sermon that Paul gave in Acts chapter 17. And so the Ariopagus, which was the place where all the Greco-Roman philosophers would come and discuss all the latest ideas. It was all like the intellectuals. Paul comes in, and he says, the Lord your God does not dwell in temples built by man's hands, as if God is served by anything.

So he gives that whole sermon, and that was kind of the money line of the sermon. Then we go down to the Temple of Zeus, which is basically a couple columns stacked on top of each other. I mean, it's like there's nothing there hard. Just a barren hill with a couple of columns. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember what your dad said? He said something like, he said something like, there lies Zeus or something.

He said, he'd come up to me behind me. I don't know if we got this on camera. I can't remember. I was like, did we get that on camera? And he goes, it was a typical Phil because he said, hey, he said, hey, Dash. He said, you want to know the evidence for Paul's argument up there on Mars Hill? And I was like, I was like, what's that, Bill?

And he pointed at that rubble. He said, so long Zeus. So long as that's what it was. And he like walked on. Like, this guy, he was a money line. But that is the problem with these created demigods is that, like, I mean, you're looking at the argument, and the argument that the Apostle Paul in the Whole New Testament is making is that there is a God who has existed eternally as Father, Son, and Spirit. And now, through Christ, the incarnation of the Son, we now have access into the divine life of God.

We get to participate in the divine qualities of God now through Jesus. And so profound implications. Christ is not a demigod. He is the way, the truth, and the life, and nobody comes to the Father except through him because he is God's eternally begotten son. No, that's good, Zach. And that's exactly right. You know, when you think about it, you see the fallacy, and I think that was Eris's

problem. But again, he was the culmination because. this began far earlier than that about this questioning. And we talked about in the last podcast, even the people around Jesus, and certainly those that wanted him crucified, they just couldn't get it. They could not accept the idea of him being who he said he was,

that he was God, and ultimately got him killed. What was interesting to me is that they talked about him being cursed and that you couldn't, you know, he was hung on a tree, he was cursed, he was crucified. But they were the ones wanting to crucify. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? The people around him were like, well, he can't be the, he can't be God because he was

hung on a tree. I was like, yeah, you did that. I mean, like, you were wanting to do that. Of course, what they did know was he came to do it anyway outside of them. But that was part of it. I think that's all part of this idea that Zach's talking about, about rising above, is that Jesus is above any civilian power. He's above any claimed God.

He's above anything that's created. in man's image because he is the image of God and beyond. I want you to take this course with us for free. You can sign up at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. Then the response that came in from this heresy was just to bring some clarification to the language because it is true the word Trinity is not in the Bible. That's the in people, oh, it's not in the Bible.

That's not in the Bible. There's a lot of words that are in the Bible that we would use to describe things that are in the Bible. So when the council met Athanasius that he was responding and really just kind of framing out the language. So, you know, he would say something like that the father is eternal. The father has always been and the son is begotten, but the son is eternally begotten. There was never a time when the son wasn't, didn't exist. I heard a philosopher.

Yeah, and you always have to be careful, by the way, when you start to think about how to explain the Trinity, because the Bible says to whom will you compare me, right? So you can't really make comparisons about, I mean, you can make a couple, you can make some attempts maybe, but at the end of the day, a lot of those analogies are going to fall flat because you can't compare the God of the universe or something that's been made. So when someone says, the Trinity is like an egg, you know, it's got a yoke, and it's got the white stuff, and it's got the,

and it's got the shell. Well, no, that's, that's, that's, that's not the Trinity. Are the trinity's like, uh, water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a vapor gas, you know, then it's like, ice.

Yeah. And then it's a liquid. And then it's a, it's a solid depending on what it is. So that basically the, it just, he shows up in different forms. No, that's not, there's, there's, you can't make a comparison. Um, but I did hear this kind of did help me understand the idea begotten is that like the, the son raise, they proceed from the sun. But they're like, they're two and they're one of the same.

They're not like, so you think that the son is always coming out of the father, but it's always been this way. There wasn't a moment when the son began to exist. And I mean, the S-O-N. He's always existed. He's preeminent. And he's always existed as the son of God proceeding from God. And this helps me understand even the very nature of God because what it shows us is that if God is actually three persons that have eternally existed in a perfect relationship, that God, when the Bible says God is love, 1st John 4, 8, 1 John 410,

now we actually have a context for that. But God can't be love in his very nature if he has to create other persons in order to be himself, right? So he's loved because he's eternally exist. existed as father, son's spirit, loving himself, not in a narcissistic way, but in a life-giving way, in a fountain that pours out kind of way. It really is the basis for everything that we see in Christ is actually flowing from the very nature of God. Yeah, a couple of things. Just thinking, first on the understanding what the Trinity is, that we're limited in our language because we have to use

analogy to say something about God, that's all we have. Like, we have to compare them to something. And that's kind of what we've determined as the church is, and kind of what we see in scripture, is the closest analogy we can get to what the Trinity is and how they're interaction between God and Jesus is, is father and son. Yeah. And spirit. Yeah. Which, like, we don't even really have a context for that. We can't even understand that because we don't, we can't see spirit. So like the spirit just kind of throws in there, kind of throws the analogy, but that's like all we got. And when you try to add something else in there, like the egg analogy or the water or the different modes or the sun, like all of those analogies just break down at some point because it's what God is is beyond what we can understand. Yeah.

And a lot of things I think we can, we can understand through analogy. We understand sacrifice of a lamb and then sacrifice of God. Like we can get that. That's a pretty like one to one. But the concept of how God is interacting with Jesus and with the spirit is beyond what we can even describe or understand. So it's we're all just kind of like grasping at it. And we say the Trinity because that's something we can kind of understand. although that falls short at some point.

Right. Which, like, I think people would be like, well, are you denying the Trinity? Are you going against the Trinity? And I'm not going against the Trinity. I'm not saying that's not true. I'm saying that it's what our conception of what the Trinity is is not going to be what it actually is. Like when we get to heaven and we see God and the Spirit

and we see the Father, Son, and Spirit together with our eyeballs or whatever we have, whatever we end up having, is we're going to say, oh, we were way off. Like, we only understood, like, a fraction of what it actually is. Well, that'll always be the case. You're never going to know. Yeah, that's what that's what I mean. I think that's the point about, like, yeah.

I think Calvin would say that, like, you can only, the only thing you know about the nature of God is what God is revealed. Mm-hmm. Like, we're not going to come up with more than what he's told us. And so, and what he's revealed about himself. And so I even think even, you know, after we are in glory, we're not going to, like, get to heaven

and at the second coming and fully exhaust who God is. You'll never fully exhaust the glory of God, which makes Him God, right? I'll continue, for the rest of eternity, we're going to continue to get a greater revelation and experience of the triune God and his goodness and his beauty and his power. And that is kind of the definition of heaven, right? is that we're in his presence,

continuing to grow in our relationship with him. But, yeah, but you just got to go what's been revealed. Yeah. And primarily through the scriptures. And that's a, and that's what I want to add on to that is that it, even though we don't understand it, we still have to try. And some analogies are worse than others. And some ideas can be dangerous to people in the way we think about God.

And I think that's like what this whole, Athanasia's first area and controversy is and why, like, it's so important because we have to understand that Jesus is God in some level. I was, this is just a funny thing. I was reading through the Athanasius orations against the Aryans, book one, this was like from our course. And what I've loved about all these hills or courses and reading all these like early church fathers is they have the like nastiest roasts

against these people when they have these arguments. Like they put some words down on paper that's like that is, they got them.

That's a burn. And this one I thought was really funny and he's right against area and he gives a sign against the idea that Jesus is not God. Because the devil

suggested this to you, you have said and think that there was one once when the sun, there was once when the sun was not. It is necessary to strip off that first lay of your thinking. Tell them, oh, evil and impest ones. What was once when the sun was not? And I just love that lot of like, oh evil and impus ones. Like, that's like the devil part. That's a little, it's a little, it's a little harsh. Yeah, it's a little,

it's a little harsh. Yeah, I loved how they just, like, they put it like that. And this is literally 10 pages of that. Of just him roasting. I love what you said, Zach, about the idea about revelation because you know from Romans 1 too, part of God's revelation is what he's created for us to see things in him. So we are able to, in our limited way, make some analogies about what he's made, what has been made? Because he said clearly Paul did in Romans 1, that's one of the ways we see him.

But then the other revelation, the only one that really does it, for us is that he became flesh. And Jesus said over and over, if you want to see the father, look at me. I'm the father one, which was the whole point. I mean, I am that revelation to you. And even the scriptures, what are they all about? Jesus. Yeah. It's what he told him. He's like, from the beginning, it's always been pointing to me and you guys see him me. So it does prove its own point. But I think the Holy Spirit is, he is kind of the wild card factor. And he's the hardest one. And even Jesus said, you know, like trying to figure out where the wind came from. You start trying to figure out the spirit. So he even said, it's hard for us to grasp that side of it. And yet we

know that it's there. And I've always thought, we want you to sign up, take the course with us for free at Unashamed for Hillsdale.com. I've always thought the closest analogy. And again, the minute you say an analogy, you know, it's flawed, so it's not the same. But the closest for me, in my mind, is us. You know, we're our command. We are. We are. components of three, because the Bible calls it body, soul, and spirit with the idea that there is our flesh, there is our animating force, our spirit, and you have to have those to be alive. But then there's some soullish nature of us that's yearning for more, and I think that's because we're creating God's image. So you have those three components, and you sort of see that at Jesus'

baptism when you see Jesus the man, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the anointed one, and you hear the voice of the father, and you see something that comes down and it says it looks like a dove, so we don't even know something for them to physically see in the moment happen. But those three you see together. And so I've always thought that was the since he made us in his image, we're the closest thing to them because he made us to one day be like him. And guess what the wild card factor is for us that connects us to. the divine, the Holy Spirit, that lives in us now. So it communicates with our spirit and with our soullish nature.

So that's always been the connecting point from me. And he didn't get into that in the lecture because he didn't talk a lot about the Holy Spirit. And again, I understand why. Jesus has a ton of stuff we can dig into. Holy Spirit's much more of the wild car factor. But he's also the way of the heresy. Well, the heresy he was dealing was particularly about Jesus. So that's why he didn't get into the Spirit.

But I think to your point is interesting because I can hear the pushback on that already that you're trying to basically build a theology of God by starting with man. But I will say this, just to defend what you said, is in Romans 1, verse 20, it says that for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made so that men were so that they were without excuse. So I think it's okay, I mean, because the apostle Paul kind of says this, right, that we can look at what has been made and we can actually see, oh, wait a second,

there's like design here. There's like, what about God's divine nature in his eternal power can we see in the creation? And I do think you can see, even in yourself, I think you can see elements where we would bear his image, it bear his tri-new nature. I think that God does give us that through general revelation. Now, it's not super explicit, right? I mean, I think we have to go to the scripture to understand that Jesus is the incarnation of the sun. But we can see a lot of this stuff through just what God's made.

And then there's what's called special or specific revelation that comes through the actual scriptures itself. Then we tie those two together and we can start to develop an understanding of who God is. And we won't even fully know that. until, because we are created. So we won't even fully know until we're then created for eternity in the resurrection to have the full knowledge of all of them. I mean, you know, we're just, we're limited in what we can know. I've always thought it's interesting that most neurologists and scientists will tell you

that, you know, the human brain is only working on about a, depending on how smart or 10 to 15% capacity of what is capable of what. All of even is looking up, yeah, speaking about that, you know, it says if you unravel all the DNA in just one of your cells that would stretch six and a half feet since your body has roughly 30 to 40 trillion cells uncoiling and linking all that genetic material

would stretch approximately 67 billion miles that is enough to reach from earth to the sun and back over 300 times. There's a lot going on here. You can't even fathom, even thinking about microscopic

genes inside my body that can stretch to the sun, 300 times. You can't even, you just talk about the brain. Like, there's things that you can't even fathom with that. It doesn't make sense. We're fearfully and wonderfully made. Yeah, and that's, again, you can't just ignore those things. It's not that, Zach, you're right. It's not that it comes from us, because that was Ari's his mistake. Yeah. He went there. We don't want to go there. God made us, but he did make something pretty awesome. So much so that everything is. else he made, which is also pretty awesome. He got to us, and he was like, now that is very good.

There's been quite a bit written about what's called the one and the many. And so it's like you could look at different understandings of who God is. And depending where you land, God's one, God is many. You're going to have like real world implications of how that plays out. For example, if God is one, and when I say one, I mean like not triune. He's just one. Then, then, then that God looks a whole lot like Islam, which is very authoritarian. A lot of, you know, you look at how Islam plays out in the world. It's all about conquering by power. And then on the other side, well, is he many?

It's just like, I mean, just put him on the shelf, you know, like the Hindus or the Buddhist or whatever you want him to be. Well, then it gets to be chaos. And so you can see, like, in nature itself is like, okay, one is law and order, but it's like tyranny. That's the one. but the many can be freedom, but it looks like just chaos and anarchy. And so how do we balance, how can you truly balance, you know, law and order and also liberty? How can you balance form and freedom? How can you balance mercy and justice, all these things? It's only in the triune nature of God that you can actually find this. And so this argument of the one of the many is a,

it's like a false dichotomy that you have to chew or a two-horn dilemma you've got to choose between the two and what we actually see in the scripture is the very nature of God is that he's triune. And you actually see this, by the way, even in the Hebrew. I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but, you know, in John 1, whenever it says that in the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word was God. And then I think in John 117, I think it says 117, and the Word became flag. So it dwelt among us. That word that is used for word is logos.

Well, I find it very interesting that when they would have these Targamous who would create essentially versions of the Old Testament, they would translate it into Aramaic. They found in the Hebrew, they found these places in Scripture, like Exodus 3, where you would have a reference to Yahweh, and then in the same passage, they would have the reference to the word of Yahweh. And without even knowing about Jesus yet, they were just like,

it seems like there's like another person. Like there's the Yahweh, but then there's this other character called the word of Yahweh. And when they would translate the one that's called the word of Yahweh, do you know what word they would use in Aramaic? Logos,

the same exact word that was used to talk about Christ in John chapter 1. And so I think even in the Hebrew language, you see Christ. And you also see it in verses like Genesis chapter 1, when it moves between the singular and the plural, when it says, let us make man in our image in the image of God. He created them both male and female. And so you see it in these passages all throughout scripture. So by the time Christ comes, the revelation of Christ comes, you're like, oh, that's who that was.

Yeah. That's who was that. Okay, now this makes a lot more sense. then now we get integrated into that reality and we get invited into the into the inner life of God. We participate or become partakers according to Peter of the divine nature. Which is that idea of love, which you mentioned Exodus three. He did too. God to Moses, I see, I hear, I know, I come for you. Even way back then. Same concept. The clock on the wall says that's all, y'all. So it's been great discussing this. We'll see you next time. Sign up to take the course with us for free.

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