Matthew 16:15-16

15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?

16 And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

If Jesus Christ is Yahweh, or Jehova, the God of the Old Testament, as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches, then who is Jesus talking about when he refers to his “Father which is in heaven,” in Matthew 16:17?

Is Jesus’s “Father which is in heaven” different than Peter’s? Is Peter’s “living God” different than the God of the Old Testament?

It seems like in order for Jesus to be both the God of the Old Testament and “the Son of the living God,” that he would have to be the Son of some other God or he would have to be the Son of Himself.

Why would Jesus refer to himself as his own Father? Or, why would Peter refer to Jesus as “the Son of the living God” if he meant any God other than the one from the Jewish scriptures? If both Jesus and Peter are referring to some other God, perhaps they would have been wise to provide a little further expanation to kind of clear things up a bit for future generations.

I would think most faithful Mormon responses to this argument would appeal to some kind of supposedly lost knowledge that didn’t make it into the Bible, or perhaps include a list of comparative scriptures from the Bible that they feel indicate a match between Jesus and Jehova. To me, either type of response would still fail to explain why the Jesus of the New Testament would teach his own Jewish people that he is the Son of any God other than the same living God who is found in their own scriptures, or why he would teach them that he is the Son of Himself.

If Jesus is the God of the Old Testament, as The Church teaches, then what does God the Father, who is supposed to be the all-powerful Master and Creator of the Universe, even do in the Bible? For such a dutiful Son who supposedly was chosen to be the Savior of the world because he was willing to give all glory to the Father, Jesus sure gets an awful lot of attention. Apparently he even got to play the role of God Almighty before he was ever even born, leading his people out of Egypt and doing all kinds of amazing things, but I guess he just never could get them to understand who he really was. If the Mormons are right, then I guess those silly ancient Jews just never could figure out who they were really dealing with for all those years – here they thought they had a special relationship with the boss, and come to find out it was really just the boss’s son all along.