Did the Old Testament Saints Know God as Trinity?

How clearly did people in the Old Testament understand the triune nature of God? Today, Michael Reeves explores how the Old Testament reveals the Trinity and how the coming of Christ brings this truth into even greater light.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Joining me this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast as we record live from Ligonier’s 2025 National Conference is Dr. Michael Reeves. Dr. Reeves, did the Old Testament prophets and saints know God as Trinity, or is this a revelation to His people on this side of the cross only?

MICHAEL REEVES: Well, God is triune and so always acts and shows Himself to be as He is. And so, you read through the Old Testament, and from the very beginning you read of God creating the heavens and the earth, and He does so by speaking His Word. As the Spirit hovers over the waters, it sets up for us that time when the Word will be once again in the waters of the Jordan, as the Spirit hovers, rests on Him, as He’s sent out to do the work of new creation in the incarnation. But in Genesis 1, we see, yes, there’s God who speaks. There is the Word, there is the Spirit.

And then we see when God creates man “in our image,” there’s a plurality used: “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26, emphasis added). And it’s important that God is not speaking to created angels there. We are not made in the image of angels, and nor is this—the old English view would be that this is like God speaking as if He were Queen Victoria: “We are not amused. Let us make man in our image.” But there is no plural of majesty, no royal “we” in Hebrew. So this clearly is telling us about a genuine plurality within God, and that’s something that you continue to see as you go through the Old Testament.

So, if you fast forward onto Genesis 19, at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that, in Genesis 19:24, then the Lord rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of heaven. So the Lord does it from the Lord—there are two Lords mentioned. And this happens a number of times. Psalm 45: “Your throne, O God, will last forever . . . Therefore God, your God, has exalted You” (Ps. 45:6–7). So, there is a God who is anointed and exalted and there is a God who is exalting and anointing. Or Zechariah 2: “The Lord Almighty says the Lord Almighty has sent me” (Zech. 2:8–9).

And you see this many times in the Old Testament. Possibly the classic instance of this is when saints in the Old Testament meet the Angel of the Lord. The angel means the messenger, the sent one. Angel doesn’t necessarily mean created being. And so, they meet this One who is sent from the Lord, and yet He gives His own name as the Lord. He says, “I am the Lord.” In Judges 2, he says, “I am the Lord who led you out of the land of Egypt” (Judg. 2:1). He’s the One who speaks in the burning bush in Exodus 3. It’s the Angel of the Lord who’s there, and He’s the One who is worshiped. Hagar in Genesis 16 says, “You”—to the angel, the One sent from the Lord—says, “You are the God who sees me” (Gen. 16:13). Now, created angels always reject any worship of them and say, “Worship God alone.” But the Angel of the Lord is different. So again, we see again and again in this figure that there is One who takes the name of the Lord, who is sent from the Lord.

So we see the Trinity working in the Old Testament, but in John 1, we read that when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, we see His glory, “glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). And then later in John’s gospel, John 12, Jesus says, “When you’ve lifted up the Son of Man, that will be the hour of His glorification” (John 12:32). In other words, when the Son becomes incarnate, and especially when He’s lifted up on the cross, that is a supreme moment of revelation when we see more clearly than ever who this God always was. And so, what is revealed in the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a truth that was always there, but made clearer through the incarnation and resurrection.