Equality

What Is It?

Is it the very word of God come down to us from heaven above? Is it the pure and holy truth of a mysterious equal worth bestowed upon us all?

No.

Equality has a precise and unambiguous meaning: identity, exact sameness. To be emphatic or tautological, self-identity. This definition holds in all areas of comparison, except apparently, that of persons. When it comes to persons, equality is stripped of its clear and unambiguous meaning, and then gets filled with whatever it is the speaker wants it to mean, and the hearers fill it with whatever they want it to mean. Everyone just knows that somehow equality of persons is a good thing and we should treat everyone as equals. But no one can say exactly what the equality of persons means and have everyone agree. And so down through ages we get all the different ways that enforcing recognition of equality of persons ultimately plays out: the horrors of godless fascism, communism, socialism, and capitalism; the horrors of the holocaust of hundreds of millions of unborn children; the horrors of sexual abominations, abuses, and slaveries of countless depraved kinds that arise from the grasping at equality with God with regard to His design and purpose for human sexuality and the new life that should arise from it. Whenever tried, equality always eventually fails as an organizing social, civil, and governmental principle. The collapse of Western Civilization (Christendom) can be blamed almost single-handedly on equality, that poison pill formally inserted into the Christian understanding of the fundamental nature of God in the aftermath of the early 4th century when a pagan Roman emperor decided that Christianity from now on was going to be the official religion of the empire.

Equality is clearly used to try to imbue humans with some kind of equal worth that requires us to treat all humans in some kind of fundamentally equal way, whatever that means. It is not a gnostic concept of equality that dictates how we should relate to each other, it is God Himself Who does so, and His commands are clear. Appealing to equality adds absolutely nothing to this. The world has substituted equality for God. Equality is a false god. Grasping at equality always leads to death and destruction, without fail.

Christians, the words and concepts you use in your biblical teachings and discussions, whether from the pulpit or otherwise, should only bring light and clarity. Your use of equality obscures and confuses; it opens the door for your hearer and your own self to be deceived in a myriad of ways. Unless you explicitly define equality of persons each time you use it, you have not engaged in any actual meaningful communication, because everyone has their own idea of what it means. So why traffic in this word and concept at all? For a statement of equality to be true, it must be a tautology or it must be qualified.

Equality of persons, divine or otherwise, is not taught in the Scriptures. The equality of God the Father and God the Son is explicitly contradicted by the Scriptures. God the Father, the Supreme, Almighty, All-Knowing One, declares unambiguously and irrefutably that He has no equal (Isaiah 29:16, 40:25, 46:5). In John 5:18, the enemies of Jesus Christ, the Jews who were trying to kill Him, accused Jesus of breaking the Sabbath and of making Himself equal with God because He healed on the Sabbath and called God His own Father. However, the declaration out of Jesus’ own mouth is that “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). And the Apostle Paul makes it unambiguously clear in Philippians 2:6 that Jesus did not grasp at equality with God. Jesus Christ the Nazarene, the Son of God, is the only person who never has and never will grasp at equality with His God and Father, Who is also our God and Father (John 20:17). Nowhere in the Scriptures are the Father and Son declared to be equal. This false idea and doctrine is a post-apostolic innovation.

The Bride of Christ has been deceived by the false god of equality and by the gnosticism of the Trinity and the Godhead. The early Christian churches of the first and second centuries had to battle various forms of gnosticism. It is clear now that gnosticism won with regard to this issue of the equality of persons, and the Bride of Christ has been overwhelmingly deceived since early on, grasping at equality with Her Lord, and declaring “truths” about Him and His God and Father that are explicitly contradicted by the Scriptures. This was done by Her from a place of good and pure, but fully deceived, intentions. Eve being deceived in the garden by the serpent Satan, the father of lies, is a type, a picture of the eternal and spiritual truth that unfolds with regard to the Bride of Christ.

We sing and most definitely should sing “Christ the True and Better Adam” because it is gloriously true. From the biblical type of Adam and Eve, we should also see more fully that Christ and His redeemed Bride and soon-to-be Wife are the True and Better Adam and Eve. This more complete understanding of the grand story of reality that God has brought forth is what I have tried to describe in A Parable For The Blind.¹

Equality is the forbidden fruit, and grasping at equality is the original sin. Take the beam of equality out of your eye, take the false god of equality out of the Trinity, let the plain reading of the Scriptures and the forthright reasoning from it reign supreme, and a clearer understanding of our Lord Jesus Christ should come into focus. Without equality, the Trinity of divine persons resolves into the thrice Holy Triune One, Jesus Christ the Nazarene, who unites His God and Father to and in Himself, and unites His elect Bride and all the rest of creation to and in Himself by His eternal life-giving Holy Spirit (John 17).

1.