My First Enlightenment Moment

Many times over the past 40 some odd years, I have started to read the Word of God, and sat down with my Bible and began.  Where?  Genesis.  Do I make it far?  No, not really.  Chapter 1, V. 26-27.  I know, I know, this is so sad.  Being hung up on ONE little word, to the point that I let myself stall and stay stuck there.  Yes, I have read on through Adam and Eve.  I've read on through Noah.  Noah is about as far as I would make it, before my overwhelming quirked out factor kept me from proceeding.

Now don't get me wrong here, I AM NOT OPPOSED TO THE CONCEPT OF THE TRINITY.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  However, I am opposed to that being a satisfying answer as to my questions about the use in these two verses of  "us", "our" and "ourselves".

Let "us" make humankind.  Who is He referring to?  It's just Him, right?  In the likeness of "ourselves"... HUH????  what a minute... Read it for yourself, I have included the Jewish version here, but check them all, they are all the same.  "us", "our" and "ourselves".

The Jewish Bible

26Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth." 27 So God created humankind in his own image; in the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. 

Yes this could very easily be referring to the Holy Trinity.  It could.  EVERY one that I've discussed this with, says so.  BUT... the concept, the idea, the explanation of Trinity, is not mentioned here, it's not explained here, it's not really (if you think about it) alluded to here.  So no, for some reason this bucked me right off track, That answer to This question, didn't satisfy me in any sense.  

Now... I know why.  
And I've included that explanation here for you.

The true God is introduced to us in the first verse of Genesis and we are also given the first of what will prove to be many of the unchangeable, sometimes inscrutable, characteristics and attributes of God. The Hebrew word that our Bibles translate to “God” is Elohim.  First we must understand that Elohim is NOT God’s name; we won’t be advised of God’s name until much later in the Torah. Rather Elohim is a title and it is a plural title (plural as in more-than-one). Elohim and its various usages is a complex matter that we are only going to barely touch upon today. However we need to know for the moment that Elohim is a word that is not only used in the Bible to refer to the one true God, it is also used occasionally when speaking of the false gods; as we talked about in the introduction last week, context is everything when dealing with Hebrew language and culture.

So with the introduction of this plural title for God, Elohim, instantly the door is opened to dealing with this incredible truth and paradigm: God is one but He also is many.  The “I-M” at the end of the word Elohim makes this word a masculine plural noun. In fact as a basic Hebrew lesson, whenever you see the letters “I-M” ending a Hebrew word you can know that it is speaking of more than one (plural). Yet there is another usage in Hebrew of the “I-M” ending and it’s called the “plural of Majesty”. That is adding the “I-M” at the end of a word can also denote greatness rather than plurality.

Christians, rightfully so, take the word Elohim as indicating BOTH greatness AND plurality, and from this eventually grew our uniquely Christian concept of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…..3 gods in one. Or better a single God consisting of 3 persons or essences or manifestations. The use of the word Elohim does not in and by itself prove that God is plural. Rather there are several more critical pieces of evidence that we will encounter to show that God is indeed a plurality.

http://torahclass.com/old-testament-studies/34-old-testament-studies-genesis/57-lesson-2