This morning, I got to school early and read the first four chapters of Genesis, so maybe this won't be as bad as I'm thinking.
This point was given by a friend a few days ago and I was a bit taken aback because I never thought of it this way.
"And the LORD God said,
Behold, the man is become as one of Us,
to know good and evil: and now,
lest he put forth his hand,
and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live for ever:" (Genesis 3:22)
lest he put forth his hand,
and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live for ever:" (Genesis 3:22)
So, does anyone know what God says Us?
Read that again; and think about it.
It's a classical English language reference, the language of kings and high powers in government. They always referred to themselves in third person as far as I understand. Now granted, I doubt they walked around and said things like "Henry would like some wine." or "James will be going hunting during the next fortnight.", but showing that they were a part of a whole even though they were the King or Queen of the nation.
Now, for those who don't know, third person is described as:
Third-person narration provides the greatest flexibility to the author and thus is the most commonly used narrative mode in literature. In the third-person narrative mode, each and every character is referred to by the narrator as "he", "she", "it", or "they", but never as "I" or "we" (first-person), or "you" (second-person).
So, what are they saying here? Third person may be hard to write in(for some), but it makes for wonderful stories and illustrations.
Outside of the "he", "she", "it", or "they" you can describe third person in four ways, which are explained below:
The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the subjectivity/objectivity axis, with "subjective" narration describing one or more character's feelings and thoughts, while "objective" narration does not describe the feelings or thoughts of any characters. The second axis is between "omniscient" and "limited," a distinction that refers to the knowledge available to the narrator. An omniscient narrator has omniscient knowledge of time, people, places and events; a limited narrator, in contrast, may know absolutely everything about a single character and every piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but it is "limited" to that character—that is, it cannot describe things unknown to the focal character.
So, this makes sense for me to understand the basic reason as to why God used the word Us. It's not because he is more than one God, (Isaiah 45: I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me) but because he is the omniscient narrator at this point in Genesis (if you want to look at it from solely a literature side).
To sum all of this into a single statement, as I know my thoughts are scattered, 'Us' in Genesis 3:22 does not throw out the validity of one God nor does it validate the argument for the Trinity.
