My preaching schedule will have me completing Genesis 1 this
Sunday. Since chapters 2 and 3 are ahead, I’m re-reading Herman Witsius’ The
Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man (1677). It was reading this
three years ago that first got me excitedly thinking about preaching through this part of
the Bible.
Most of us are familiar with the passage in the creation
narrative in which the singular God refers to Himself with plural pronouns: “Then
God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over
the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth’” (Genesis 1:26).
If you’re an especially observant biblical student, you’ve
probably taken note of the other places where this curious singular//plural
language occurs: Genesis 3:22; 11:7; 18:1-33; Isaiah 6:8.
Witsius notes several other places where the Creator-God,
Who is One (Isaiah 37:16; 44:24; 45:18; 1 Corinthians 8:6), is identified with
a plural noun. I include this quote for our edification, since our English
translations don’t usually reflect the plural in these places: “It cannot
certainly be without design, that the scripture, when speaking of man’s
Creator, so often uses the plural number: as Is. liv.5 בעליך
עשיך, which literally signifies, thy husbands, thy makers, Psal.
cxlix.2. ישמח ישראל בעשיו, Let Israel
The Bible is full of references to a plurality in the one
true God. On the same page as the above quote, Witsius reflects on the
importance of knowing, confessing, and worshiping God as Trinity: “And it may
justly be doubted, whether he does not worship God entirely unknown, nay,
whether he at all worship the true God, who does not know and worship him, as
subsisting in three persons. Whoever represents God to himself in any other
light, represents not God, but an empty phantom, and an idol of his own brain.”
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