Is the Trinity in the Old Testament?

In the church’s early days, controversies erupted over what books of the Bible were truly authoritative. Marcion of Sinope is a famous example.

Born around the time the last New Testament books were being written, he argued that the Old Testament portrayed a different God than the New Testament. The Old Testament described an angry, spiteful God; the New Testament revealed a kinder, more loving God in the person of Jesus. Marcion was so committed to this idea that he even made his own copy of Luke’s Gospel, cutting out the Old Testament quotes and allusions.

In his famous work, aptly titled Against Marcion, the great theologian Tertullian of Carthage points out that Marcion wouldn’t have a New Testament without the Old. The New Testament, he rightly reasons, depends on the Old for its foundation. One of his most common arguments is that “one and the same God” is revealed consistently across the biblical storyline.

Seeing the Trinity in the Old Testament often feels difficult, largely because we do not see the names “Jesus” or “Holy Spirit” like we do in the New Testament. We wonder if the Trinity is something new introduced in the first pages of the Gospels. We may be tempted to think Marcion was right—maybe we have two different Gods at work. At our best, though, we know better; we sometimes just need good interpretive principles to make sense of it.

To see the Trinity in the Old Testament, we need to hold two fundamental principles: (1) Scripture reveals this God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and (2) Scripture is the unified revelation of God from Genesis to Revelation. We will not see the Trinity in the Old Testament unless we affirm who God is and how he reveals himself in Scripture.

These two principles will help explain that the God who created all things in Genesis 1 and the God who promises to make all things new in Revelation 22 is the same triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Our Perfect, Unchangeable Triune God

The doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery of faith, but Scripture nonetheless teaches it clearly: We confess one God in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We worship one God who alone can save us and into whose name we are baptized (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 44:6; Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14). In our triune God, we have three distinct persons described in uniquely divine ways: a Father who desires to save, a Son who puts on flesh to live and die in our place, and a Holy Spirit who seals our inheritance and adoption as sons and daughters (Gal. 4:4–7; Eph. 1:3–14).

“Salvation belongs to the LORD,” says Psalm 3:8, and yet this salvation is only possible through the one Lord who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To be faithful to Scripture, then, we must affirm the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without arguing there are three gods or only one divine person.

Notice a few points from the explanation above. First, both the Old and New Testaments testify to God alone as Creator, Savior, and the One worthy of our worship. Scripture is a unified revelation of God, not merely a bunch of disconnected books patched together over time.

So, the same God is described in different ways, depending on issues like Scripture’s various genres (e.g., poetry uses different wording and images than Paul’s letters). Second, descriptions and actions reserved for God alone (e.g., creation, salvation, and reception of worship) are applied to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit equally and without apology. In short, these three persons are each God but they are not each other.

These three persons are each God but they are not each other.

If God truly is eternal, perfect, and unchanging, then he does not—cannot!—“become” something he was not before, including becoming a Trinity. The psalmist declares, “Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God” (Ps. 90:2, CSB).

This understanding of God’s eternal, perfect, unchanging nature should govern how we read Scripture, since that same God is the One who tells us about himself in Scripture. Therefore, since God doesn’t change, then we shouldn’t expect a different God in the New Testament than that revealed in the Old.

Two-Testament Witness to the Trinity

Matthew 1:21–23 tells us that Jesus (“God saves”) is Immanuel (“God with us”). These names are packed with significance about Jesus’s identity: Mary’s child, conceived by the Holy Spirit, is the Son of God himself in the flesh (see also John 1:14). In these three verses at the beginning of the New Testament, we get a glimpse into the doctrine of the Trinity. Not only that, but both these names intentionally bring to mind the Old Testament—Joshua and Isaiah, respectively.

Scripture constantly quotes and refers to itself. The Old Testament refers back to other stories and forward to future stories; the New Testament does the same. This is relevant for how we think about the Trinity, because the New Testament’s claims about the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit rely on the Old Testament in the first place. Jesus and his apostles describe the Son’s and Holy Spirit’s divinity using Old Testament texts and themes.

Let’s consider one obvious example: Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees in John’s Gospel. In John 5, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath and the Pharisees rebuke him. Why? “Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (v. 18).

Jesus doubles down on this claim in 8:58 when he tells them, “Before Abraham was, I am”—a reference to God’s name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. The Pharisees tell Jesus later, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33).

These Jewish leaders—those who know the Scriptures the best—understand exactly what Jesus is claiming about himself. And Jesus never backs down from their claims but rather rebukes them for not believing. If they knew the Scriptures (in this case, the Old Testament), they would know he really is God in the flesh.

John sets up Jesus’s identity at the beginning of his Gospel. He starts with a familiar phrase: “In the beginning . . .” and describes God’s creation of all things, in which he gives life and light to the world. Amid this retelling of the creation story, we glimpse the Trinity: “The Word [Jesus] was with God, and the Word was God. . . . The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him” (1:1, 18, CSB).

How is Jesus God and also with God? Once again, this is the mystery of the Trinity: There is one God, and yet this God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To simplify John’s commentary on Genesis 1 here, we can say this: When the Father (“God” in this instance) spoke all things into existence, the creational Word was the Son, even as the Holy Spirit was God’s presence over his creation (Gen. 1:1–2). As a bonus, the Holy Spirit is often associated with God’s “breath”—adding to the idea that the Holy Spirit was active at creation when God spoke.

Jesus and his apostles describe the Son’s and Holy Spirit’s divinity using Old Testament texts and themes.

In this case, then, we are not forcing the Trinity into the Old Testament, nor are we saying the Trinity is only a New Testament idea. Instead, John connects the stories explicitly.

Genesis 1 does not use the words “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” nor does Exodus 3:14 say, “I, Yahweh, am Trinity.” The promise in Isaiah 7:14 that God would dwell with us did not say, “This child will be the eternally begotten Son of God,” but nonetheless pointed to the Son of God who would be born of a virgin for us and our salvation.

So the idea of the Trinity in the Old Testament is clear because the two Testaments rely on each other to make the claim. The same God is revealed and described in different ways.

Worship Our Triune God

Yes, the Trinity is in the Old Testament. Our triune God has always existed in a communion of love, long before the world began (John 17:5). All of Scripture teaches us this beautiful mystery: that we worship the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Word who gave life to all things is the Word who gives us new life in himself. The Holy Spirit whose presence assured creation of its Creator is the Holy Spirit who dwells in us as new creations.

The triune God who made all things is the triune God who will make all things new.