Allah or the Trinity: which shall it be?

Many times, my Muslim friends ask me, "Why do Christians worship three gods?" So, I will attempt to answer that question.

The truth is, Christians do not worship three gods. They worship only one God (Allah) who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three are one, so that is why we use the term Trinity to describe who God is.

More specifically, however, Christian scholars, just like Muslim scholars distinguish between the attributes of God and His Divine essence. For example, traditionally Muslims attribute 99 names to Allah to describe His attributes; yet no one that I know accuses a Muslim of worshiping 99 gods. Christians also ascribe many attributes to God; yet, these Divine attributes only flow or emanate from who He is. So, when we Christians refer to The Trinity we do not talking about His attributes—that is, His names or what He is like; but rather Who He is—His Divine essence.

Christians believe that He is in essence One, just as Muslims do; and that essence is who He is. Stop and think for a moment. Since God in essence is self-sufficient and has never had to depend on anyone or anything for his total existence, does it not seem reasonable to believe that He had the capacity to communicate before creation?

Now, if this is true, then to whom did He communicate prior to the creation? He must have communicated with someone other than His creation. The Bible (the Holy Injil) and the The Qur’an clearly tells us that God is the Creator and that absolutely nothing was created without Him. How then is God complete unless He is fully capable of communicating both within Himself and to us His creation?

The answer is, of course, that He is so great and His essence is so unfathomable that we will never be able to fully comprehend or exhaustively describe Him; however, we must be careful not to limit Him, either. Therefore, we must depend on Him to tell us Who He is, even when at first we may not comprehend who He says He is. In the Bible He tells us who He is. He tells us that He is the Holy Spirit; He is the Son, Jesus ; and He is the Father. That is these three are the nature of His (Allah) essence.

Do I understand it? No! But, I do believe it because the Bible declares it. For easy reference, here are some of the verses that declare who God is:

So, we see that God has an essence of three personas—or as some Christian theologians say, persons. However, when we use that word, we do not mean three separate individuals; but three personal relationships. This is simply a way of describing the nature of God’s essence. He is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and we relate to Him as such.

The Qur’an also recognizes The virgin birth of Jesus was a sign from God. The Qur’an says, "And (remember) her who guarded her chastity: We breathed into her of Our spirit, and We made her and her son a sign for all peoples." (Qur'an 21:91)

To whom was God referring to when he said, “Our spirit” in the sura above? Christians believe that the Father, The Son (Isa) and The Holy Spirit are the Divine essence of God and, therefore, present at creation and could be the only “Our spirit” worthy enough to form a union with God and man.

Could it be, therefore, that God and Jesus in this instance is the Divine “our” which sent forth their spirit? Why would any creature’s conception be described in this manner unless they were indeed Divine?

God created Adam, the first man. My father and mother are the progeny of Adam, as am I. Whereas, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and is therefore the progeny of God and his mother Mary. Therefore, Jesus is both the Son of God and the son of man (i.e., a virgin called Mary). This is not a mystery; it is rather a miracle. It is a matter of faith based on a matter of fact.

John, one of the early disciples of Jesus put it this way in the Holy Bible, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2)

And, who is this Word? Both the Bible and the Qur’an say that this is Jesus (Isa). So, since this declaration is a fact agreed upon in both the Bible and in the Qur’an, how do we then reconcile this with the contradictions we find in both texts?

Admittedly, we cannot reconcile all of these contradictions, but in this instance, reason alone argues that you cannot have the “our spirit” entering Mary to conceive a child—whom both the Bible and the Qur’an call “the word of God”—without that Word (Isa) being in the form of God.

This fact of reason, however, we must accept by faith. So, although, we may not be able to describe God completely we do know that we can relate to Him personally since the Word became flesh and lived among us. Furthermore, many of us have also experience God’s great mercy in the forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ, the Son or Word of God.

Otherwise, how can we say with any confidence that God is The Most Merciful in Essence, The Compassionate, the Ever Forgiving, or The Loving and the Kind One unless we have some visible proof that He is. Jesus is that proof! He came as God in the flesh; and, although, he never sinned he was willing and did become our Savior by dying on the Cross suffering our punishment for us and was affirmed as such by God the Father when He raised Jesus the Son from the grave by the power of His Spirit.

1. Jesus said, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9), and ‘I am the way and the truth and the live. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6)

2. Jesus also said that “God is a Spirit’ (John 4:24).

Therefore, we must carefully distinguish between what God is like from who He is.