Moses and the Triune Nature of God in Theophany
Question
When Moses met with God, was he meeting with the first or second person of the Trinity?
Originally published in Vol. 1, Number 9, September 2026, Ask The Theologian Journal.
Answer
When we ask whether Moses met with the first or second member of the Trinity, we are bringing later theological categories back onto a text that does not itself articulate them. The Hebrew Scriptures do not present a developed doctrine of the Trinity. They present God as one, with occasional hints of plurality that only become clear in light of later revelation.
That means we must be cautious: God has always been who he is (Father, Son, Spirit), but Israel was not given a full trinitarian explanation. So the question is legitimate, but Scripture may not give an explicit, final answer.
I prefer to speak of the “members” of the Trinity rather than “persons,” because in modern English “person” usually connotes a full human composite of body, soul, and spirit. Humans are one person comprised of body, soul, and spirit. A body alone is not a person, nor is a disembodied soul or spirit, strictly speaking. The old Latin persona likely carried different connotations than our word “person.” For clarity, I will speak of three “members” in the one God.
Re‑reading Old Testament theophanies in trinitarian light
In the Old Testament, God is simply “God,” “the LORD,” or sometimes “the angel of the LORD.” Our trinitarian reading comes from the New Testament and is then read back into those texts. That is not wrong, but it goes beyond what an Old Testament reader would have inferred.
We assume God was triune in Moses’s day. The question is whether the text itself distinguishes between Father, Son, and Spirit in Moses’s encounters. It rarely, if ever, does so in an explicit way.
The burning bush: Exodus 3 and Acts 7
Consider Moses’s first encounter at the burning bush.
“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.”
Exodus 3:2
Then:
“And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.”
Exodus 3:4
We have:
“the angel of the Lord” appearing,
“the Lord” seeing,
“God” calling out of the midst of the bush.
The simplest reading is that “the angel of the Lord” in verse 2 is identified with “the Lord” and “God” in verse 4. This is more than a created angel; it is a theophany.
Stephen recounts this in Acts 7:30–32:
“There appeared to him in the wilderness of mount Sina an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight: and as he drew near to behold it, the voice of the Lord came unto him, Saying, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
Stephen speaks of:
“an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire,”
“the voice of the Lord,”
identifying himself as “the God of thy fathers.”
By the time of Stephen, the early believers understood the Son as the one who uniquely reveals the Father. Yet Stephen does not explicitly say, “This was Christ.” He simply narrates the theophany as “the Lord.”
Still, we have several clues often used to associate Old Testament visible manifestations of God with the Son:
A visible manifestation (“appeared … in a flame of fire”),
A speaking presence (“the voice of the Lord came unto him”),
Self‑identification as the God of the patriarchs.
Visibility, speech, and trinitarian roles
Many theologians (and I am sympathetic to this) suggest an analogy between the human composite and the triune God:
Body → Son,
Soul → Father,
Spirit → Holy Spirit.
In this analogy:
The soul is the “I” that wills and purposes,
The spirit is the animating, expressive principle (breath, word),
The body is the visible manifestation.
Romans 1 indicates that visible things teach us about God’s invisible nature, so this analogy is not absurd. If it is valid, then:
The Father (as “soul”) is never directly seen;
He is made known through the Son (as “body”);
He speaks through the Spirit (as “breath”/“word”).
Thus, whenever God is seen, one could argue it is always “through” the Son; whenever God’s word is heard, it is “through” the Spirit. Yet it is still the one God acting; we must not think of three separate deities taking turns.
Face to face with the LORD: Exodus 33 and John 1
In Exodus 33:11 we read:
“And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.”
Later in the same chapter Moses asks:
“I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.”
Exodus 33:18
God responds:
“Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”
Exodus 33:20
And again:
“Thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”
Exodus 33:23
Here:
Verse 11: “face to face” must be an idiom for direct, intimate communication, since,
Verse 20: no man can see God’s face and live.
This aligns with John 1:18:
“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
No one has seen God (the Father) at any time. The Son “declares” him, that is, makes him known. On the analogy above, the Father as “soul” is never directly seen; he is seen only as manifested in the Son, and heard only as expressed by the Spirit.
Thus one could say:
Moses did not see the Father as such;
He encountered God as revealed in a theophany, which, in trinitarian terms, is “through” the Son and “by” the Spirit.
Christ in the wilderness: 1 Corinthians 10
1 Corinthians 10:1–4 adds another piece:
“Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; …And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.”
Paul states that “that Rock was Christ.” This shows Christ present and active with Israel in the wilderness. It strongly supports the idea that the second member of the Trinity was personally involved in Israel’s history, including Moses’s day.
It does not prove that every theophany is exclusively the Son, but it shows that Christ is not absent from these events. The Rock providing spiritual drink is identified with Christ, not merely with an impersonal symbol.
Can we decide between “first” and “second” member?
Putting this together:
The Old Testament does not explicitly say, “Moses met the Father” or “Moses met the Son.”
The New Testament says no man has seen God (the Father) at any time, and that the Son declares him.
Paul asserts Christ was present with Israel in the wilderness.
Many visible manifestations of God in the Old Testament are reasonably identified as appearances of the Son.
Therefore, from a trinitarian, New Testament vantage point, the best we can say is:
Moses truly met with God—the one God, not a lesser being.
In terms of the members of the Trinity, the manifestation is most naturally associated with the Son, who is the fullness of the Godhead bodily and the one who makes the unseen God known.
At the same time, any such encounter is inseparable from the Father and the Spirit. God does not divide himself into parts when he appears or speaks.
So, “Was Moses meeting the first or second member?” Theologically, one can say: Moses encountered the one God, and that encounter, as a visible and audible manifestation, is most fittingly understood as God revealed through the Son, by the agency of the Spirit, while never excluding the Father whose presence and purpose underlie the whole event.