Every illustration people reach for to explain the Trinity — ice, water, and steam, a three-leaf clover, even "one times one times one" — ends up breaking down somewhere. In this episode, we take on one of the most difficult and most argued-over doctrines in church history: three persons, one Godhead.

We walk through the biblical evidence, starting in the Old Testament with "let us make man in our image," the tower of Babel, and Isaiah's "who will go for us," through the New Testament's baptism of Jesus and the explicit naming of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We talk about why first-century Jewish believers weren't blindsided by the doctrine of the Trinity the way we might assume, why doctrine actually matters for everyday faith, and how a misunderstanding of the Trinity helped shape a religion that's endured for fifteen hundred years. We close by naming a few of the classic heresies — modalism, Arianism, and Oneness Pentecostalism — so you can course-correct if you've picked up a wrong idea along the way.

0:00 – Why Every Trinity Analogy Breaks Down
5:03 – Old Testament Evidence: "Let Us Make Man"
10:26 – The New Testament Makes It Explicit
15:30 – Why This Wasn't a Shock to First-Century Jews
20:41 – One Substance, Three Persons: The Actual Definition
25:00 – Why Doctrine Matters (And How Islam Distorted the Trinity)
30:00 – Common Heresies: Modalism, Arianism, and Oneness Pentecostalism

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth from nothing, and that detail matters more than it might seem. If God had used pre-existing material, the real question would just shift to who made that material. Creation ex nihilo points to a Creator who needs nothing outside Himself.

In this episode, we continue our Systematic Theology series by digging into the doctrine of creation: why Scripture points to Jesus, not just "God" in the abstract, as the one who created everything, why God created us at all when He didn't need to, and how even Adam's brief loneliness before Eve was created points back to something true about God Himself.

0:00 – God Made the Heavens and the Earth From Nothing
5:00 – Did Moses Once Hold a Throne in Egypt?
10:24 – Why Creation Ex Nihilo Matters
14:26 – Jesus: The Creative Agent Behind Everything
19:56 – Sin, the Fall, and Why Jesus Had to Die and Rise
22:43 – Why Did God Create Us If He Doesn't Need Us?
27:48 – Adam's Loneliness and the Creation of Eve

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Every episode of Clearview Today is special, but not every day do we get to hold in our hands the culmination of fifty years of scholarship. In this episode, Dr. Abidan Shah welcomes back his mentor and professor, Dr. Maurice Robinson, to celebrate the release of the Robinson-Pierpont 2026 Byzantine Textform — the Jubilee Edition, marking fifty years since Dr. Robinson and the late William Pierpont first began this work together in 1976.

Dr. Robinson walks through what makes this edition different: a hardback, library-quality volume that lies flat and can withstand real study, an updated preface, English subtitles running through the Greek text to help readers navigate, and a full apparatus comparing the Byzantine text against the modern critical editions, down to the smallest variant. He explains why, even as the critical text continues to shift under newer computational methods, the Byzantine text has remained remarkably stable — only six changes since the 2018 edition — because it reflects a consensus preserved by scribes across sixteen centuries of transmission.

Dr. Shah also shares the story of how this all began for him: a scheduling conflict in his first year of seminary in 1996, and a professor who walked him straight to the registrar's office to make sure he got into the class. Thirty years later, that student is holding a Greek New Testament he helped bring into print. The two also address a question many Christians quietly carry — do textual variants mean the Bible has been corrupted? — and make the case, clearly and pastorally, for why the answer is no, and why every believer, Greek student or not, should own a copy of God's Word in its original language.

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How do we dig into who God actually is? In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Systematic Theology series by moving from yesterday's question — does God exist — to today's: who is He? Our inner sense tells us there's a God out there. It doesn't tell us His name, His character, or what He wants from us. For that, Scripture is essential.

We walk through why the Bible simply assumes God's existence from its very first four words — "In the beginning, God" — and why nature itself, according to Romans 1:20 and Acts 14:17, testifies to a Creator without ever naming Him. Then we take on one of the hardest questions people ask: what about those who've never heard the gospel? Dr. Abidan Shah reframes the whole question — humanity does not seek God; God seeks humanity, knocking on every heart since Eden, and His plan for reaching the person searching in one century was often set in motion generations earlier.

The episode closes with a story Dr. Shah has never fully told on the show before: his own father's search, growing up Muslim, watching his devout great-grandfather weep because Islam offers no assurance of salvation, wandering through Hinduism and Buddhism looking for answers, and finally opening a secondhand Bible to John 3:16 — where, as a student of mathematics, he saw the cross as a plus sign, the place where fallen humanity is attached to a holy God.

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Does God exist? It's the question that's been plaguing mankind since the very beginning. In this episode of Clearview Today, we launch a brand-new series — Systematic Theology — where over the next couple of months we'll dig into what we actually believe as Bible-believing Christians: God, sin, humanity, salvation, and the end times. And we start exactly where we should: does God exist, and how can we know?

Dr. Abidan Shah lays out two reasons we know God is real: our inner sense, and Scripture. Romans 1:20 says God's invisible attributes are clearly seen in creation, so that no one is without excuse — meaning even the most convinced atheist knows, deep down, that God is there. We talk through why someone might suppress that knowledge, how one honest question can turn a self-proclaimed atheist into an agnostic in thirty seconds flat, and why the reason a thief can't find a policeman is the same reason someone actively avoiding God will never find Him.

But an inner sense alone was never meant to save you. The episode closes on the harder truth: you can't get to God around Jesus, only through Him — because sin has broken the image we were made to bear, and only Christ can stand as the mediator and restore it. Scripture alone tells us what that inner sense cannot: that we need a Savior, and that Savior has already come.

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The book of Ephesians is a treasure trove of doctrine — and in this special episode of Clearview Today, we're joined by Dr. Clark Bates, a textual critic and scholar-missionary serving in Italy, whose recent work is a study on an ancient commentary on the very book we've just begun preaching through.

Dr. Bates walks us through his research on the pseudo-Ecumenian Catena on Ephesians — a "chain" of church-father voices linked together into a single commentary — and a striking pattern he uncovered: again and again, the early fathers quietly changed Paul's "in Christ" to "through Christ." What looks like a tiny swap of prepositions turns out to be a deliberate guarding of the Trinity, marking out who was orthodox and who had drifted into heresy. It's a fascinating window into how carefully the early church thought about the nature of God.

From there, the conversation opens up to a question every believer eventually asks: Why should I care what the church fathers thought? Why not just read the Bible for myself? Dr. Shah and Dr. Bates make the case that a faith with no history is no faith at all — that we are not spiritual orphans or lone rangers, but heirs of a living tradition that runs all the way back to the New Testament. Scripture remains our only infallible authority, but the fathers help us see how it's been read, where the church has gone wrong before, and how to course-correct today. The episode closes with Dr. Bates's mission in Italy, where Protestants make up less than 1% of the population, and how he's helping train pastors who will train others.

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Everybody wants to be loved, and everybody wants to feel loved — but too few of us can even define what love actually is. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with one of His most familiar and most misunderstood attributes: the love of God.

We talk about why the pictures of love we absorb from movies, music, and novels are an incomplete picture at best — good writers who know how to pluck our heartstrings — and why the only place to find both the definition and the demonstration of real love is Scripture. Working through Ephesians, 1 John, and Jeremiah 31, we look at a God who chose us in love before the foundation of the world, who loves not because of anything we perform but simply because He is love, and whose love is everlasting — not infinite in quantity but in chronology, reaching back before time itself began.

Along the way, the guys share personal stories of learning what love really is: Dr. Abidan Shah on the handshake with Nicole's father that showed him a love he couldn't explain, and the season in 1993 when his life fell apart and he surrendered it back to God; and a youth-camp night at fifteen when the words "God loves you" landed for the very first time. The episode closes where it has to — love is a commitment, not a feeling. Facts come first, faith follows facts, and feelings follow faith. Don't wait to feel it before you come to the God who has loved you all along.

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We treat grace and mercy like they're the same thing — but they're actually very different, and understanding the difference changes everything. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with the grace of God, one of the communicable attributes He shares with us and calls us to reflect.

We break down the three tiers of God's justice in the simplest possible terms: justice is getting what we deserve, mercy is not getting what we deserve, and grace is getting what we don't deserve. Grace is the good we never earned; mercy is the bad we never received. Dr. Abidan Shah illustrates it with a disobedient son who deserves discipline but gets lunch bought for him anyway — and then a milkshake on top. That milkshake is grace. We also tackle why grace is so hard for us to accept: we're raised to earn our keep, to never take a handout, and we carry that same works-based mindset straight to God, where it simply doesn't work.

From there we go deeper — what it means to be "dead in trespasses and sins" and still able to receive the free gift, why grace was every bit as present in the Old Testament as the New (Noah, Moses, and the same unchanging Christ), and how the cross was the plan before Genesis 1:1. The episode closes on the most practical question of all: how do we live by grace, and extend to others the same grace God has lavished on us?

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If you struggle with fear, anxiety, stress, or worry, there's an antidote — and it's the sovereignty of God. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with the truth that God is in control of everything: nothing happens that He does not either directly cause or consciously allow.

We talk about why that truth, which should calm us, so often makes us uncomfortable instead — because it means relinquishing control and handing over the reins. We work through the antinomy of God's sovereignty and our free will, two parallel rails that run side by side without colliding: God is completely sovereign, and yet your choices genuinely matter. Dr. Abidan Shah shares the motto that carried him through 2020 — you cannot stop God from getting where He wants to go, so the only question is what you'll look like when He arrives — and we look at Job as the man who held onto God's sovereignty when everyone around him told him to let go.

The conversation also tackles the hard questions head-on: if God is sovereign, do my prayers even matter? How do sovereignty and human responsibility both stay true, as they did at the cross? And why does tacking "according to Your will" onto every prayer sometimes reveal weak faith rather than humble submission? Through it all, one truth holds — God is sovereign, we are responsible, and His will is not something to reluctantly accept but something good, beautiful, and worth stepping toward in faith.

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God's wisdom isn't just some ethereal force floating out there for its own sake — it has a goal. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our conversation on the wisdom and knowledge of God by asking where all that wisdom is actually pointed, and how it grows in the life of an ordinary believer.

The answer starts in Romans 11: everything God does in His wisdom is ultimately to glorify Himself — not out of selfishness, but because there is no one greater to please and no one more worthy of praise. We work through why that truth puts us in our proper place, using the picture of the sun and the moon: God is the source of light, and we are simply reflectors. The more we look into the face of Jesus, the more we glow — and that reflected light is exactly what draws lost people to Him. We also talk to the believer who feels dim and smudged, unable to reflect much of anything, and how to get back to shining.

The episode lands on one of the most freeing distinctions you'll hear: small decisions are knowledge decisions, but the big decisions of life — honesty, integrity, loyalty, self-sacrifice — are wisdom decisions. If you're connected to Christ, you already have that wisdom, and you're growing in it, even when it doesn't feel like it. Dr. Abidan Shah closes with the words his own father once spoke about him: "In the small decisions he's made mistakes — but in the big decisions of life, I've never known him to make one."

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