I'm John Collins and this is the Bible Project Podcast. We're in the final stretch of a conversation

about the betrayal of God as a character in the Bible. If you've been following along,

you know that all these conversations have been leading up to a video that we wrote and

produced on the character of God. It's been a long conversation. We've started at the

beginning of the biblical story and we've looked at many of the surprising ways that God has

described in the Bible. How his identity is complex and now we've made it to the Apostle Paul.

Last week we looked at a number of passages where Paul wrestles through how Jesus is connected

to the identity of God. And this week we'll continue to look at some of the writings of Paul

and how he connects the identity of God's spirit to the Father and to Jesus.

So people sometimes call these the Trinitarian texts in Paul. It's not the word Paul uses this,

but these are the passages in the Apostle's writings that were recognized and were later described

in the history of the church as the Trinity. So in this episode we'll look at a couple of passages

of Paul, including this one in Romans 8. You are not in the flesh, but in the spirit. If in fact

the spirit of God dwells in you. And anyone who does not have the spirits of Christ is not

belonged to him. But if Christ isn't you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is

alive because of righteousness. The spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you.

This is a pretty dense passage. Paul takes a category we're familiar with from Hebrew scriptures,

the spirit of God, and connects it to both the Father and to Jesus in a very tightly intertwined way.

This is very similar to the Shema we're using in Old Testament, Shelf. Here the Shelf is the spirit

of God. So to think the first sentence is of Genesis, in the beginning God created the heavens and

the earth. Now the land was tov of a who formless and void, darkness of the surface of the deep,

but the spirit of God was there. So it's God and it's a way of talking about God's immediate

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