In the article, “Will God Punish Me for Praying to Jesus?“, you say that God is the same as Jesus. I have always had difficulty understanding the trinity. I heard someone say it is sort of like water…Water can have three forms, liquid, gas and ice. They are all different, but they are all water. The same is true for God. He has three forms, Himself, the Holy Spirit and Jesus. Would you say this is a good example of God’s trinity?
Why must we pray to God and ask “in the name of Jesus Christ?” Is this simply to acknowledge what Jesus (God) done for us and that we trust in it?
Everyone has trouble understanding the Trinity because it exceeds our intellectual capability. As humans, we exist in something called the space/time continuum. That means that we’re subject to certain laws, one of which is that only one entity can occupy a given place at a given time. It’s all we know. So how can God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit be One, yet Three? All in the same place at the same time in one instant, three vastly different places in the next, and then back to one again? They talk to each other and yet they are each other. It’s beyond our comprehension.
Saying that the Trinity is like the three forms of water or like the three parts of an egg really doesn’t help because the water can’t be all three parts at once (at least not for long), and the egg, once separated, can’t ever go back to being one.
And yet, the Bible states that God is that way. How this can be is never explained, so we’re not asked to understand it. We’re just asked to believe it.
By the way, the same is true of several things we use every day and take for granted. For example, no one can completely explain how gravity, electricity or the engine in our car works. But we use them anyway, even though we don’t understand them.
As for prayer, we aren’t required to pray only to God, but Jesus did tell us that whatever we ask for in His name would be given to us. (John 14:13)