Strathalbyn Church of Christ

Augustine, while puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity, was walking along the beach one day when he observed a young boy with a bucket, running back and forth to pour water into a little hole. Augustine asked, ‘What are you doing?’ The boy replied, ‘I'‘m trying to put the ocean into this hole.’

Then Augustine realised that he had been trying to put an infinite God into his finite mind.’

Does that mean then that we can’t understand the doctrine of the Trinity at all? No, we can understand some of it, but because we are finite creatures and not God, there will be things that we do not fully understand, but we would expect that; because God is greater than us!

A man said, ‘My wife was trying to get across a doctrine of the Trinity to her Sunday school class. Somewhat laboriously she dragged out Bible references to God the Father, and God the Son, but was getting nowhere with the third Person of the Trinity, until one youngster volunteered, a bit uncertainly, ‘God the Wife?'.

Yes, there have been misunderstandings and errors concerning God the Holy Trinity - for example, that there are 3 Gods!

How then might we state the doctrine of the Trinity? We could say this: ‘God eternally exists as three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and each Person is fully God, and there is one God.’ W.Grudem " Systematic Theology”

This morning I’d like to think about that - God the Holy Trinity, with you.

We will think about two things in particular -

What does scripture say about this belief?

What is the significance of this belief?

We live in times when people are perhaps more aware of other world religions than in the past, maybe because of

multi-culturalism. If so, then it is important to ask ‘‘what kind of God do we Christians believe in?” Christians believe in the Three in One God, who is a trinity, or triunity - the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God.

Sometimes we might refer to a married couple as saying ‘the Smiths’ or ‘the Baintons’. That is what we might call a double unity, where two become one, or 2 into one. The word ‘one’ is used in the book of Genesis for the married couple where two become one flesh. They are still two persons but their flesh has become one, in harmony. They are one couple, a double unity.

Well, God is a triple unity of 3 into one - 3 conscious personalities within the one God, who are in perfect harmony, and think and act as one. Jesus, the Son could say “the Father is in me, and I am in the Father. " And Jesus could say ‘I and the Father are one’. ‘One’ - not one Person - the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father - not one Person, but two in perfect harmony, sharing the same nature, the same attitudes, the same attributes.

And Jesus told the disciples about the Holy Spirit. He called the Holy Spirit ‘he’, not ‘it’.The Spirit is spoken of in personal terms and not just as a force.

On the last night he was with his disciples, Jesus said ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth.’

The Greek language had two words for another; another Counsellor’.

One is ‘another like’ something, and the other word is ‘another unlike’ something.

Say you have got one person in a room and then another person comes in and he is just like the first, because he’s his twin. That’s the word used here ‘another’ just like me; ‘another Comforter’ - that is a Comforter just like me.

And so this points to the Personality of the Holy Spirit.

He is going to be just like Jesus to the disciples.

Again, Jesus said to them, ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me…’

And so, the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is divine and personal. “He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears…he will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.” Jn 16.13,14.

John begins and ends his gospel in calling Jesus ‘God’.

At the beginning he doesn’t use the name ‘Jesus’ - for that is the name given when he was born of Mary; not ‘Jesus’, but

‘the Word’. John calls the Son of God ‘the Word - ' perhaps because he is God’s self - expression.

Anyway we read ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory of the only begotten of the Father,[ or the Father’s one and only Son.'] John 1:1,14

And so the Son is fully God - and also now fully human.

At the end of John’s gospel we read of a disciple Thomas who wouldn’t believe the others who told him ‘we have seen the Lord’ - that is, the Lord appeared to us after being crucified and buried.

Thomas told them, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.’

John 20:25.

Well, 8 days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, ‘Peace be with you.’

Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!'. John 20:27-28

The disciple Thomas is the first to say ‘My Lord and my God’, to Jesus.

Thomas was Jewish, and Jews believed there was only one God, and yet here Thomas ‘spontaneously’ as it were, recognises the Lord Jesus’ divinity.

Now John immediately goes on to write ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in his name.’ John 20:30,31

And so, we notice that Thomas addresses the risen Jesus as ‘my Lord and my God’ and Jesus accepts it; and then John calls him ‘the Son of God.’ And the same thing was said at the beginning of this gospel of John, as we heard earlier.

“The Word was God’, and ‘we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.’ John 1:1,14

And so, the same person is called ‘God’ and ‘the Son of God’. This tells us that the Son is fully God, he is God the Son.

In the early centuries of the Christian Church, the 4th, there was a Creed agreed upon - (Creed, from the Latin word ‘Credo’ which means, ‘I believe’), and it is called the ‘Nicene Creed’.

It was written to defend the church’s belief in Jesus’ full divinity, because there was a man at that time called Arius, and he claimed that Jesus was a creature rather than creator, and was somewhere in between God and man, but was not fully God.

Here are some of the opening words of this Creed.

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; through him, all things were made.”

And so the Creed is saying that God did not make Jesus, that Jesus was not a creature, but that he always was the Son of God, and did not become the Son of God.

Alas, the wrong teaching of Arius way back then that led to the Church defining the faith in the Nicene Creed, re-emerged in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs today.

Now later on, around 400AD there was another Creed put together - the Athanasian Creed - and it was named after a great defender of the Trinity named Athanasius. He was particularly concerned about the people teaching that there were 3 Gods, not one.

And so, in this case, the church was particularly concerned not to divide God into three. And this comes out in the Creed.

It reads “The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God but there are not three Gods, but one God.”

And so they are not the same Person, but they are the same God. And ofcourse, that is difficult for us to fully grasp.

It has been said, its not like 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, rather 1 x 1 x 1 =1.

There is one more important Creed of the early church called the Chalcedonian, because of where it was written about 451AD.

Its main concern was to stress that the divine and the human combined in Christ, that is, that Christ the Son is truly God and truly man, that there were two natures, divine and human, brought together in perfect harmony.

Well, that’s enough with the Creeds, but they were written up by the early church to defend the belief in the Trinity and in the deity of Jesus the Son of God.

Now we might expect that if God is Trinity then there might be ‘hints’ of this in the Old Testament.

While the big emphasis of the revelation of God in the Old Testament scriptures is that there is only one God, yet there are hints that God is more than one Person.

For example, there is a verse in Deuteronomy chapter 6 which says, ‘Hear O Israel: The LORD our God is one."

That is at the heart of the Jewish faith.

Now the word ‘one’ here is important. In Hebrew there are 2 words for one. One word means -one single thing or person; but the other Hebrew word means ‘many but who are one in harmony in mind, one in thought.’ That is the word used in this verse.

So that tells us that they believed in a harmonious God.

On the first page of Genesis God calls himself ‘us’. “Let us make man in our image.” Gen. 1:26

Who’s God talking to? to angels? But we are not made in the image of angels. No, this is a hint that God is more than one Person. The ‘us’ is repeated in Genesis 11 too, which talks about the Tower of Babel - ‘Let us go down and see what man is doing.'.

And then there is the word ‘God’, which in Hebrew is ‘Elohim’, which is a plural word. ‘El’ is the word for one God. “Eloha’ is the word for two. But ‘Elohim’ is a word meaning more than two.

Throughout the Old Testament, the word used for God is ‘Elohim’.

And so, the first verse in Genesis 1 reads ‘In the beginning, ‘Elohim’, created.' That’s a plural word for God.

And Yahweh appeared to Abraham - and he saw 3 men Gen. 18:1,2.

Now, coming back for a minute to Jesus the Son of God.

Although he did say “I and the Father are one"Jn. 10.30, he also said ‘the Father is greater than I,‘Jn.14.28, and ‘I have not come of my own accord; he who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.‘John 7.28,29.

And again Jesus said ‘the Father who sent me bears witness to me’.Jn. 8.18

And so, ‘I and the Father are one’ tells us, points to, their sharing of one being and nature.

‘The Father who sent me’, points to a certain relationship between the Father and the Son, namely, the Father sent and the Son came; the Father initiated, the Son executed; the Father purposed, the Son obeyed.

Wayne Grudem, in his book ‘Systematic Theology’ helpfully explains or states it like this: ‘There was a Father - Son relationship before Christ came into the world. The Son did not become the Son when the Father sent him into the world. Rather, the great love of God is shown in the fact that the one who was always Father gave the one who was always his only Son.’

Again he writes ‘there are no differences in deity, attributes, or essential nature between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Each person is fully God, and has all the attributes of God. The only distinctions between the members of the Trinity are in the ways they relate to each other and to the rest of creation.’

This truth about the Trinity has sometimes been summarised in the phrase ‘equal in being but subordinate in role.’

For example, if the Son is not eternally subordinate to the Father in role, then the Father is not eternally ‘Father’, and the Son is not eternally ‘Son’.

‘Equality in being but subordination in role.’ In other words, the distinction between the persons is not a difference in ‘being’, but a difference in ‘relationships’.

Let me quote from another teacher, Thomas A. Smail, in his book ‘The Forgotten Father’.

‘Within the one divine nature, equal and identical in Father and in Son, there is nevertheless an ability of that nature to express itself in different functions, to be first and to be second, to send and to be sent, to be glorious in the heavens and to be humble and small in the womb of Mary and on the cross of Calvary. These are functions of God himself, a divine obedience and subordination. That God himself should be able and willing to humble himself and become obedient is the possibility of his incarnation and the very foundation of his grace.’

Well, that’s a lot to ponder on! But I found it a helpful insight.

Let me now draw our attention to two things in particular that lie at the heart of our Christian Faith, namely God is Father, and God is love.

Has God always been Father? Is fatherhood part and parcel of God’s being?

Yes, God has always been Father and always will be because He always had a Son, and always will have. God doesn’t change.

How do we know that God has always been Father?

We know because the way his Son is described in the bible tells us that the Son was not created, but always was. Now I’m a son and I had a father, but he wasn’t always a father and I wasn’t always a son. But we can’t say that of God or of the Son of God; and that’s one way God is greater than us.

I can’t understand that, but then I can’t understand how God is ‘from everlasting to everlasting’ either, but I believe He is what the Bible says.

Jesus drew a distinction between himself and ourselves when after he was resurrected he said he was ascending to ‘my Father and your Father.’ John 20:17.

Notice ‘my’ Father - that’s because he is the only begotten Son.

But now, through Jesus, and his death and resurrection, you and I who have faith in him, can call God ‘our Father’.

In John’s first letter, he tells us ‘God is love’. 1John 4:8

Now has God always been love?

Is love part and parcel of God?

When did God ‘become’ love?

God has always been ‘love’, because the Father always loved his Son and his Holy Spirit, and they loved Him.

You can’t ‘be’ love all on your lonesome as a solitary person!

Love is relationships. And God has relationships within himself, God is relational.

Interestingly Islam doesn’t call God ‘Father’ nor that God is love.

Someone has said ‘salvation is being invited into God’s love’, brought in to share the love the three have together.‘D. Pawson.

Now how is that possible? We humans are sinful, and God is holy. That’s a basic incompatibility - a moral one.

How can light and dark co-exist? and “God is light in whom there is no darkness at all’ 1John 1:5

Well, the good news is that God in his love, grace, mercy has acted to bridge the incompatibility by sending his only Son and giving him up to death on a cross, to pay the penalty for man’s sins.

‘He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him!' Rom 8:32.

And now those who trust in Jesus are treated as good, as in the right with God.

‘Since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Rom 5:1.

We can now, through faith in the Lord Jesus, have a relationship with God the Father - this is his doing.

But he doesn’t even stop there, because the Holy Spirit, given to those who believe in Jesus, sets about to make us good, just like Jesus.

‘And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.’ 2 Cor 3:18

Therefore, the three persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the one God are involved in our salvation.

We can say the God above us, beside us, and within us.

God the Father is above us, and we can worship God in heaven.

But God the Son became ‘Immanuel’, God with us,

Matt 1:23 ‘and his name shall be called Immanuel (which means, God with us)’ ;

God beside us, God sharing our nature.

And God the holy Spirit is God within us, another Standby.

That’s what the word ‘Comforter’ means.

‘And I will pray the Father and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…he will be in you.’ John 14:16,17

And so, God is not a single solitary person above us, as he is for Muslims. No, He is above us but He is also with us, and within us; therefore, we can have a ‘beside’ and ‘inside’ relationship with God.

Let me end with a prayer of Jesus. He prayed for us who would believe on the Apostles’ doctrine, ‘that we may be one as he is one with the Father.’ John 17:20,21.

The loving unity of the Three in God is a pattern for our relationships with fellow Christian believers.

And God’s big plan is to bring together all things in Christ.

Eph 1:10. He wants us to know and have the same harmony he has already and always has had.

God is love, he always was love, and wants to share that love with us, and he wants us to now share it with each other and reflect his own loving unity!

Let us pray