1 Timothy 2:5

1 Timothy 2:5. There is one God. Better, ‘God is one,' as in Galatians 3:20, a passage which St. Paul may almost be thought of as in some sense reproducing. There, as here, the argument is that the Unity of the Godhead is more than the negation of plurality; that it implies oneness of purpose, unchanging and unvarying, as St. James puts it, ‘without variableness or shadow of turning' (James 1:17); and that that purpose is one of an unalterable love.

One mediator. As if the old associations of ideas in the argument of Galatians 3:20 were still present to him, the thought that ‘God is one' suggests that of a Mediator. But the relation of the two is not the same here as it is there. There he thinks of the Older Covenant as made ‘in the hand of a Mediator,' i.e. of Moses, as coming between God and the people; and this is one of its notes of inferiority to the New Covenant, which is in substance identical with that of Abraham, in which God acted in His own essential Unity, promising and giving with out requiring any intermediate agency. Now St. Paul has learnt to see that the New Covenant also has a ‘Mediator,' one who not only comes between the two parties to the contract, but is himself identified with both. Here the stress is laid on the one Mediator. If one only, and that as being ‘a man,' then his mediation must be for all humanity, and the whole human race has been redeemed by him.