Gospel Guidebook: Getting and Keeping It Right 
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No God-Spirit Binitarianism in the Old Testament
by Robert P. TerryReviewed January 5, 2025
Trinitarians often say that the Trinity wasn't fully revealed until the New Testament, and therefore, it is necessary to read the Old Testament references to God through the lens of New Testament Trinitarianism. In recent years, they attempt to do this by supposing that there are "two powers in heaven" (an idea made popular by Michael Heiser), and after finding what they think is some evidence of this (in obscure passages where the LORD could very possibly be using illeism or "the angel of the LORD" is acting as an agent or vicegerent, or where circumlocution was used to avoid speaking the name of the LORD directly), they go full throttle and assert that these "two powers" are two distinct LORDs (or as Heiser liked to say, "two Yahwehs") who are co-equal and co-eternal. Next, knowing that it is virtually impossible to prove a negative claim, they reverse the burden of proof and demand their opponents prove that they are wrong, and since their opponents cannot easily prove a negative claim, they just declare victory, thinking they just proved the Trinity in the Old Testament. Despite all the bluster, I have come to realize that this is just a red herring designed to obfuscate the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is that much is said about God and His Spirit in the Old Testament, and yet we don't find the Old Testament presenting God and His Spirit as two distinct god persons, nor do we find the Jews developing a system of Binitarianism for God and His Spirit. This is exactly the point that Frank Stagg made in his book The Holy Spirit Today when he said, "The terms 'God' and 'Spirit' are there in the Old Testament, but they do not imply two Gods or one God as two persons, a divine 'Binity.' The absence of a 'binitarian' doctrine in the Old Testament should caution us against any 'trinitarian' doctrine implying division within God as three Persons" (see p. 12 here). This is highly significant because if the Old Testament Jews never developed a Binitarian view of the nature of God, then this means that the Jews in the time of Jesus didn't hold to any co-equal co-eternal distinctions in God either, and this also means that the apostles never held to any distinctions in God, for we never see them being persecuted for introducing some novel view on the nature of God. Rather, what we see is tens of thousands of Judean Christians being permitted by non-Christian Jews to worship in the synagogues and in the Temple in Jerusalem, all of whom were zealous for the law and recognized the presence of the Holy Spirit without creating any novel distinctions in the nature of God. In other words, the first generation of Christians believed just as the Jews believed concerning the nature of God; otherwise, they would have been persecuted and excommunicated from the synagogues. More to the point, this means that the first generation of Christians could not have believed in a Binitarian or Trinitarian god.