Trinity: how can God anoint and be anointed?

Waldmark, 27 June 2008

The Trinity teaches that God the Father and Jesus the Anointed One are persons of equal rank. This teaching ignores that anointment revolves around rank differentiation.

The name ‘Jesus Christ,’ the name of the son of God, is made up of two parts. The first part is a regular name. We read in the Bible how his earthly parents were instructed to call him Jesus (or Yeshua). The word Christ, however, is not a surname but a title, like king or doctor.

This word Christ means ‘the Anointed One,’ as explained in Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897):

‘anointed, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word renedered “Messiah”, the official title of our Lord, occurring five hundred and fourteen times in the New Testament. It denotes that he was anointed or consecrated to his great redemptive work as Prophet, Priest, and King of his people. He is Jesus the Christ (Acts 17:3; 18:5; Matt. 22:42), the Anointed One. […] Jesus the Christ is Jesus the Great Deliverer, the Anointed One, the Saviour of men. This name denotes that Jesus was divinely appointed, commissioned, and accredited as the Saviour of men (Heb. 5:4; Isa. 11:2-4; 49:6; John 5:37; Acts 2:22). To believe that “Jesus is the Christ” is to believe that he is the Anointed, the Messiah of the prophets, the Saviour sent of God, that he was, in a word, what he claimed to be.

Anoint means to smear or rub with oil (‘anoint’). But one is not anointed for the purpose of becoming greasy. The application of oil stands for and effectuates something else: consecration, crowning, investiture, ordination, empowerment, authorisation. Anoint covers a wide range of applications, but the important thing I would like to point out is the objective of any form of anointment which is change. Always. Change from one function to another, from one position to another position. From which follows that the status a person had before being anointed is always different from the status after.

An example. When a person is anointed king, this means that he becomes king. Which, in turn, means that he was not king before he was thus anointed. One cannot become king when one already is king.

The same is true for consecrated. Consecrate means ‘to make or declare something sacred’ or to ‘ordain (someone) to a sacred office’ (‘consecrate’). It is impossible to consecrate a bishop to the sacred office of that of bishop: only someone who is not yet a bishop can become a bishop.

The third point of note is this: anointing always involves a person who is being anointed, as well as one or more other persons with the authority or the position to anoint. A person can only appoint someone else, another person, to be his or her successor. A king is always crowned king by someone else. Even when priests consecrate themselves, they ‘set themselves apart from’, which can only happen if they were not ‘apart from’ before they consecrated themselves.

The final implication of anoint and consecrate is that they involve hierarchy and/or special ordination. Those of higher rank anoint those of lower rank, or are anointed by people who are specially ordained for the task. Whenever anointing takes place there is unequal rank.

This anoint and consecrate always revolve around changing a person, meaning a different position or status before and after, and always requires other people in relation to the person being anointed, and always the relationship between the anointed one and those ‘doing the anointing’ is one of unequal rank and status.

Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Anointed One. He was appointed to be the saviour of mankind. But it is not possible that Jesus Christ anointed himself. It is not possible that he appointed himself to the task of becoming the saviour of mankind. And he did not, indeed, God the Father did. Acts 10 vs. 38 states ‘How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth…’ (KJV).

How, then, would God the Father have anointed Jesus if both God the Father and Jesus are of equal rank? The doctrine of the Trinity instructs mankind to lay aside the notion of hierarchy and to accept, in the face of every ounce of logic that mankind possesses, that a son is coequal with his father and that God is of equal rank with him whom God anointed.

More than 500 times in the New Testament does the Bible testify to the fact that Jesus Christ is the Anointed One. Not a single time does the Bible mention the man-made Trinity or Triune Godhead nor ever alludes to equality between God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son of God. Jesus Christ, the one who was born to rescue us, was anointed by God the Father and of necessity of unequal rank to God the Father.

What makes a Christian decide to cast aside the teachings of the Bible and follow man-made fabrications? It is beyond my understanding. Because if the Trinity is true, then the Bible, which strongly denies that anyone is coequal with the Most High God, is wrong. But if the Bible is indeed true, then the Trinity is a deception. A deception aimed at making us worship Jesus Christ as if he were God, thus causing us to violate the first of the Ten Commandments. There is only one God who exists and he is God the Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The God of the Ten Commandments is a jealous God: there are consequences for not worshipping only Him. My reason for writing about the Trinity in the way I do, is to urge Christians to think carefully about where they put their loyalty: with God’s Word, or with creeds and doctrines that are the product of human intelligence.

Notes and References

“anoint.” New Oxford American Dictionary.

“Christ.” Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary. 28 Jun. 2008. Dictionary.com

“consecrate.” New Oxford American Dictionary.