The Oneness of God

Scripture does not scatter into a thousand unrelated truths. From the first page to the last, it gathers, again and again, into one center: God is one, and he calls his people into oneness with himself and with one another. This teaching traces that thread from the Shema in Deuteronomy, through the life and prayer of Jesus, through the early church, and into what is still unfinished today. The goal is not to cover this truth once and move on, but to let it be taught again and again, the way Jesus himself taught, returning, repeating, building line upon line, precept upon precept.

I. The Foundation: God Is One

The starting point for everything is the ancient confession of Israel, spoken every day for thousands of years, whispered over cribs and carved into doorposts:

This is not simply a statement about numbers. It is the foundation for how Israel was to love God, because a divided god could only receive a divided love. A god of many competing wills, many rival centers of power, could never be trusted completely or loved completely. But because the LORD is one, undivided, whole, and unshakeable, he can be loved wholly, and he asks for nothing less.

This oneness was never meant to stay a doctrine on paper. It was built into the very rhythm of Israel's life. The feasts and festivals were set throughout the year, Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, and others, creating a yearly cycle where the people returned again and again to worship, to remember, and to be near God. Oneness with God was never a single decision made once and shelved. It was a life continually re-centered on him, morning by morning, feast by feast, generation by generation.

The prophets guarded this truth fiercely. When Israel drifted toward the gods of surrounding nations, the prophets did not simply say those gods were inferior. They said those gods were nothing at all, empty, powerless, unable to save.

This is the bedrock beneath everything else in this teaching. Before oneness can be understood as unity among believers, it must first be understood as the very nature of God himself, undivided, singular, and supreme.

II. Jesus and the Two Commands That Hold Everything Together

When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, he did not choose between loving God and loving people. He joined them, and said that everything else in Scripture hangs on this pairing.

This is the simplicity behind the depth. A child can understand: love God, love people. Yet the more that truth is lived out, the deeper it goes, because loving God with everything, and loving others as yourself, touches every decision, every relationship, every motive of the heart. It is simple enough for a nine-year-old to grasp, and deep enough that a lifetime of walking with God still has not reached its bottom.

Notice, too, what Jesus is doing theologically. He is rooting neighbor-love directly inside the confession that God is one. If God were divided, love itself could fracture into competing loyalties. Because God is one, love has a single source and a single direction, upward toward him, and outward toward others, and the two are never actually separate commands. They are one movement of the heart.

III. Jesus' Prayer for Oneness, Still Being Prayed

On the night before his crucifixion, after three years of teaching his disciples, and only hours before he would be arrested in the garden, Jesus prayed his longest recorded prayer. He prayed for himself, briefly. He prayed for his disciples. And then he prayed for every believer who would ever come after them, including every person reading this page today.

This is staggering when it is slowed down. Jesus is not merely asking that believers get along. He is asking that their oneness mirror the oneness that exists eternally between the Father and the Son, a oneness so complete that Jesus can say elsewhere, 'I and the Father are one' (John 10:30). And he ties the visible unity of believers directly to the credibility of the gospel itself: the world will believe because of how the church loves in oneness.

This prayer was not answered once and closed. Jesus is described in Hebrews as one who 'always lives to make intercession' (Hebrews 7:25). That means this prayer for oneness is not a historical artifact from a Thursday night two thousand years ago. It is being prayed right now, in this moment, over every believer, over every church, over every fracture that needs healing.

IV. The Wall Torn Down: Jew and Gentile Made One

The oneness Jesus prayed for was put on dramatic display at the very moment of his death. In the Jerusalem temple stood a massive curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sanctuary, and beyond that, a physical wall separating Gentiles from the inner courts altogether. At the moment Jesus died:

Torn from top to bottom, not bottom to top, showing this was God's action, not man's. The separation between God and his people was ended at the cross. And Paul later explains that this same cross ended another separation, the one between Jew and Gentile:

Two walls, one torn at the same moment as the other was theologically undone. The way to God opened, and the wall between peoples came down. Oneness with God and oneness with one another are not two separate stories in Scripture. They are the same story, told twice.

V. The Seven Ones of Ephesians Four

Paul later gathers this entire theme into one of the most concentrated passages in all of Scripture, seven ones in three verses, each building on the last:

One body, the church, all believers joined as a single living organism. One Spirit, the same Holy Spirit indwelling every believer everywhere. One hope, the same future promised to all who trust Christ. One Lord, Jesus, with no rival. One faith, the same gospel, not a different one for different people. One baptism, the same entry point into Christ for every believer. And one God and Father of all, above all, through all, and in all. This is not redundancy. It is a crescendo, each one echoing the same note until the whole passage rings with a single truth: God's people are meant to be undivided because God himself is undivided.

Before this passage, Paul gives the command that makes all seven ones actionable, not just theological:

The unity already exists spiritually the moment someone is joined to Christ. What believers are called to do is guard it, protect it, and live in a way that does not fracture what God has already made one.

VI. Oneness Poured Out: The Church Born United

The book of Acts shows what this oneness looks like when it moves from doctrine into daily life. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit fell on a gathered, waiting church, and almost immediately, Luke describes their life together:

With one accord. That phrase appears repeatedly throughout the early chapters of Acts, describing a church that prayed together, gave together, and suffered together as one body. This was not utopian idealism, it was oneness in Christ working itself out in ordinary, practical, sacrificial ways. It is the visible fruit of the invisible unity Jesus prayed for and Paul described.

VII. Living Water and the Woman at the Well

Rick has often pointed to another thread woven into this same story of oneness: the living water Jesus offers, first to a Samaritan woman at a well, and later to the crowds at the temple. In John four, Jesus crosses another wall, this one between Jew and Samaritan, centuries of hostility, to offer a single woman something no religious system could give her.

This is oneness reaching into the most unlikely, most divided places, a woman with a broken past, a people considered outsiders, and offering the same living water available to anyone who trusts in Christ. Later, at the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus makes the invitation public and universal:

The same Spirit who makes believers one body is the same living water promised to anyone who thirsts, Jew, Samaritan, Gentile, insider or outsider. There is no separate well for separate people. There is one source, and it is Christ himself.

VIII. A Nation Threaded Into the Same Story

Rick has also connected this thread of oneness to the founding conviction that a nation, like a person, flourishes when it is rightly centered on God rather than fractured from him. Scripture does not teach that any modern nation stands in Israel's covenant place, but it does teach a principle that echoes across every nation and generation:

A people undivided in their devotion to the one true God, loving him with all their heart and their neighbor as themselves, reflects on a national scale the same oneness Jesus prayed for on a spiritual scale. When that center is lost, division is not surprising, it is the natural fruit of a people no longer gathered around one unshakeable truth.

IX. Why This Thread Matters Today

Division is not a modern invention. It has always been the enemy's oldest and most effective weapon, first against the unity of the Godhead in the human heart's imagination, then against families, then against nations, then against the church itself. But Scripture's answer has never changed. It does not offer a program to manufacture unity. It offers a Person, the one true God, and a truth, that in him alone, division finds its cure.

This is why the thread of oneness deserves to be taught, and taught again. Not as a single sermon filed away and forgotten, but as the lens through which every other teaching can be seen freshly, the Shema, the two great commandments, John seventeen, the torn veil, the seven ones, Pentecost, the living water, and the blessing of a people centered on God. One thread, one God, one truth, running unbroken from Genesis to Revelation.

A Closing Prayer

Lord, you are one, undivided, unshakeable, and worthy of a whole heart.

Answer the prayer your Son is still praying, that we would be one as you are one.

Tear down every wall that separates your people from you and from each other.

Let living water flow from us to a thirsty world, until the world believes because of our love.

In Jesus' name, amen.