To Whom Did Jesus Pray?

The Trinity is a mystery God does not fully explain to us; at the same time, we know that God is One and that all three persons of the Trinity share the same substance. Jesus claimed to be God the Son—a claim then Jews well understood as claiming the identity of God. 

Adventism, however, does not teach that the persons of the Trinity share substance. They teach that Jesus does not have omnipresence since His incarnation, for example, and Ellen White denied the truth of the classic Christian Trinity to the end, asserting instead that God is a Heavenly Trio or the Three Worthies of Heaven. 

The Adventist confusion about the nature of God and especially its denigration of the identity of the Lord Jesus leads many Adventists and former Adventists to feel confusion about Jesus’ relationship to the Father. Just this week we received a letter from a former Adventist who was speaking with an Adventist parent about this subject. 

“We got stumped on who was Jesus speaking to when he was in the garden of Gethsemane,” this person said. “I know He was praying to the Father, but in this case wouldn’t that be like he was talking to himself?”

Following is our answer to the writer.

Three In One

The Trinity is a mystery we can’t explain. That being said, there are still things we know. For starters, Jesus Himself said God is spirit to the woman at the well (Jn. 4:24). So, unlike what EGW told us, God does not have a body, and our being in His image is not physical looks. Rather, we are created as spirit beings with bodies. Our spirits are in His image, and we worship God in spirit and in truth (Jn. 4:24). It is our spirits that are born dead in sin (Eph. 2:1-3) and must be born again.

Jesus never stopped being God. When He became incarnate, He had two natures: God and man, and that is now His eternal identity: God the Son and the Son of man. 

The inexplicable mystery is that God is one Being, but He is expressed in three persons. In other words, there is one Being called God, and the three persons share SUBSTANCE. All of the attributes of God are equally in each person. As an Adventist I thought that Jesus, for example, was “all God”, but that he was one-third of whatever God was. For example, if I pictured an apple pie, I saw it as composed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father might have a seed or two in His piece; Jesus might have a bit of peel, and the Holy Spirit might have the tiniest bit of core.

What I finally came to understand was that all three Persons all have ALL the things in them. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit all have the SAME seeds, the same peel, and the same bit of core. 

I learned as an Adventist that Jesus no longer had omnipresence because He took a body. Therefore, He had to send the Holy Spirit to be everywhere at once because He couldn’t be. But that is wrong. Jesus still has all the attributes of God; if He doesn’t, He is no longer God. Jesus is still omnipresent as is the Father and the Spirit; He is still omniscient and omnipotent. The members of the Trinity, though, have different roles. Jesus, for example, is the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things are held together. (See Col 1.)

The Holy Spirit is the One who teaches us Scripture and reveals the truth about Jesus. And so on. 

All three Persons share the SAME substance, yet there are three Persons within the one Being. This is a mystery, but Jesus demonstrated that He prayed to His Father in John 17. You should read that amazing passage and see how Jesus prayed for His disciples just hours before going to the cross. 

In John 14, Jesus said He was sending the Holy Spirit to be with His disciples after He left, yet He also said that He and His Father would make their abode with those who believe. You can’t separate the Trinity while concurrently each person has His own role in the  Trinity. 

The “one substance” idea is hard to explain, but Jesus makes it clear that He is the I Am—Yahweh—God, and the Jews knew He was claiming to be God. At the same time He identified Himself as distinct from the Father and said He did only what the Father did, and He said they were one. He WAS praying to the Father in Gethsemane.

There is mystery there, but Jesus, the Son of Man, was experiencing the agony of facing becoming sin for us—becoming what the Father hated—and as a man He struggled with the assignment the Father had placed in front of Him. He prayed to the Father.

It’s not totally comprehensible, but we believe what the Bible says. Adventism’s problem is that it doesn’t believe Jesus to be Almighty God possessed of all the attribute of God. They see Him more as part of God. But this belief is heresy and makes our Savior weak and incomplete—which the Adventist Jesus actually is!

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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