The only possible solution that I can think of here is that every single work of God in creation, and so, necessarily, in redemption, is at one and the same time the work of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

My first thought was, “Did God the Father hang on a Roman Cross?”

Hi Craig,

No, God the Father didn’t die on the cross.

But God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. And, it was the will of God the Father that the Jesus should die.

So in both these senses, and possibly others I haven’t thought of just now, God the Father was fully involved in the redeeming work of Jesus on the cross.

Hi Gordon,

A pike was basically a big spear between 3 to 6 metres in length. A pikestaff was the pike without the metal pointy bit on the end.

They were popular with the ancient Macedonians, until the Romans worked out ways to get around their formations. It was then revived in the Middle Ages, and was especially popular in the 16th century. It fell out of popularity as guns became more powerful and accurate.

I suspect the origin of the expression “as plain as a pikestaff” came from the fact that the pike was a weapon of the peasant & mercenary, who didn’t have the money to bling up their weapon as aristocrats could.

Gordon, I would suspect there is a much easier “solution” [not that I see this as a problem in any event] than what you mention.

I think you have fallen prey to the tendency to read things too much in terms of trinitarian categories and found by doing so a conundrum that does not exist.

When we read in our English translations that the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters and then ascribe an understanding of the word “Spirit of God” that is common in modern dialog but would have had no place whatever to the audience of the Torah, we are simply asking for interpretive problems.

What does Genesis 1:2 say is hovering over the surface of the waters? The ruwach of God.

What is this ruwach of God in the Genesis story? It is most definitely not the “Holy Spirit” of the Trinity, for this ruwach is what gives people life [Genesis 6:3] and when we are told that people will not live forever, it is because the ruwach will not “strive with man forever” [Genesis 6:3].

Since the Holy Spirit could not be received until after Christ’s cleansing death [Hebrews 9:14-17] yet man had this ruwach from the beginning.

In the Jewish conception of life, the “Breath of God” (translated by many English Translations as “Spirit of God,”) is what animated life and caused animals to be alive [see Genesis 6:3,17], and it is this life-giving breath that we see in Genesis 1:2, ready to inhabit all creation, animating all flesh.

Note the parallel of the “Breath of God” hovering over the waters in 1:2 right before Creation and God causing a breath [same word] to pass over the flooded earth in Genesis 8:1 to begin the second major covenantal epoch. And then this same word blew again in Exodus 14:21 preparing the Red sea parting immediately before the third covenantal epoch.