Most people, when they hear the word God, don't think of the storyline of the Hebrew scriptures.

Hey, this is John at the Bible Project, and today on the podcast, we're beginning a conversation about

God. Who is the God of the Bible? That's what we're going to talk about for the next season

on this podcast, and it's going to be an incredible journey. But before we get too deep into the

story of the Bible, and what it means to experience the God of the Bible, we need to stop and come to

grips with the fact that the word God in English is a terribly confusing, unclear word.

The word God is a confusing word because God is not a name. God is a title. It's a generic way

to talk about any spiritual being. So the problem is that when we use the capital word letter G,

we're using a title to refer to a specific deity or spirit being that has a specific

story and attributes, namely the Jewish and Christian God. But Judeo-Christian belief is that

there is only one true creator God of the universe. There is one chief supreme God, the God of Israel,

revealed Abraham, Christians believe, revealed in Jesus, who has no rivals, but he is the king of

kings and Lord of lords and God of gods. God of gods. That makes it sound like the Bible talks about

there being more than one God. But that can't be true, right? There's only one God. That's what

Christians believe. That's what monotheism means. I'm so fascinated with how did this happen? How

did a modern definition of monotheism come to be? What Christians believe when it's not in fact

at all how the Bible talks about the identity of God? Yeah, if you're like me, this just made you

really uncomfortable. But hold on there, we're going to talk it through and what we'll find is that

all the confusion has to do with what we mean when we use the word God. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

You know, I have all this stuff in my head right now. You've been working on this for the last

five weeks, four weeks? Yeah. I'm just thinking this is like a classic moment where like I have all this

stuff. I want you to own. My goal is to get you to own all of this. I love that goal.

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