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This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Brad Kilthau, Gary Hashley, and Tim Hebbert.
Tim Hebbert
So we're gonna talk a little bit about this - what does it mean that God is a Trinity? And you know, I tell my young teenagers in classes, the first rule when we start talking about God is that He's not human. We can't place any human attributes on Him, because if we do that the concept of the Trinity is almost impossible to fathom. And in truth, it really is kind of hard to wrap our minds around it. Anyway, let's just dig into this and see where the Lord takes us this morning. What is the Trinity? How do we find that? That's the one true God who lives eternally in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I listened to a pastor talk about it and I love the statement he made. He said, "God has been in relationship with Himself for all of eternity." And I guess that's maybe the best way that we can really describe that. What is that relationship? Well, it's a loving relationship that binds and fuses them together as one God existing within three separate persons. So it's hard to understand, but the foundation of everything we believe and who we are as followers of Jesus Christ starts with that foundation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and His word. God doesn't waste any time in sharing with us who He is.
One of the things I love about studying the Old Testament is He reveals Himself through His names. But He makes a statement in Genesis 1:26 where He begins to share, as I like to put it, that "one of a kind nature" because it can't be duplicated, it can't be imitated. Only God can be existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But He says in verse 26, "Then God said, 'Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness'." So He immediately goes into a plurality of who He is as one person. And throughout the Old Testament, each one of them is found and revealed in different scriptures here and there, but in that moment He doesn't define Himself as a triune God. But He does say "I have more attributes than you can fathom in one person." Numbers 23:19 says, "God is not human that He should lie, not a human being that He should change his mind. Does He speak and then not act, does He promise and not fulfill?" We're defining early on in scripture who God the Father is. Isaiah 7 tells us this, it's one of those iconic passages that reveals who Jesus is before He comes into the world. Verse 14 says, "Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Emmanuel," which we know means God with us. And in the second verse of Genesis 1, we're already introduced to the holy spirit, it says, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."
Then when we get into the New Testament, Jesus begins to teach us about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then Paul really lays out the doctrine of how each one of these separate persons in the Godhead. But Jesus has revealed in His baptism, as the atmosphere parts you can see the glory of heaven, the Holy Spirit. And then the father says, "That's my son, the One that I am well pleased in." Later on at His transfiguration, we see the Holy Spirit come in the form of a cloud as Moses and Elijah nestled down into that transfiguration of who Jesus is. And then again, we hear the voice of the Father say to Peter James and John, paraphrasing a little bit, "That's my Son, listen to him." But I love this scripture. And in Romans 8, when Paul is defining the Holy Spirit He gives us that Trinity, starting with verse nine He says, "You however are not in the flesh but in the spirit, if in fact the spirit of God dwells in you, anyone who does not have the spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness. If the spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His spirit that dwells in you." So Paul in those three verses gives us an image of the working agreement, so to speak, between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now Gary, there's a lot of error out there when we try to apply human conditions to that, so why don't you speak to that.
Gary Hashley
Well in Mark 12, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy and says, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord Your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. There are groups out there that say we are monotheists, we believe in one God. And I say, "Well, I'm a monotheist too, but I'm a monotheist who realizes scripture teaches that we have one God but we have three persons who make up that God. And each one, the Father is God, Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God. Jesus is just as much God as the Father, the Spirit is just as much God as Jesus and the Father, and Jesus isn't the Father, and the Father isn't the Spirit, the Spirit isn't Jesus. Some of those errors come because we try and wrap our heads around a concept too big for our brains. Some people believe we must have three gods. And that's what other religions would say, "We're monotheists and you're plural theists. You believe in three gods." No, we don't, but even though we say we don't believe in three gods, there are those who really struggle with that. They go round and round and round with that. And one of the problems is that if you've got three gods, someone's going to want to be king of the hill. And yet we don't find that, we find unity and we find cooperation. You look through the scriptures and you don't find that the members of the Godhead, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, are arguing over who gets top billing.
Another error that comes up - I had a guy in the first church I pastored come to me, he had a friend who had some interesting ideas about the Bible and about God. He came to me one day and he says, "I was talking to my friend and my friend told me that Jesus is less than the Father, that the Father is the big God. And Jesus is sort of a lesser God." And I said to Jack, "Well that's interesting, because Jesus said, " I and my father are One." Jack said, "I can't wait to go tell my friend because he missed that somewhere." How could they be one if Jesus was the less than the Father?
Another error that can come up, and I heard this from an adult Sunday school class in a church in southern Michigan where one of the deacons of the church was teaching the class. And he said, "Let me explain the Trinity to all of you. The trinity is like this - God gets up in the morning, and some days He puts on His God the Father suit, and He does God the father stuff. And then another day He might get up, assuming God sleeps, He might get up and put on His Jesus outfit, and He goes and does Jesus things. And then there are times where it's more appropriate when God gets up and puts on His Holy Spirit costume." And so He pictured this as God having three different outfits, and whatever day the One God had on either His God the Father suit or His God the Son suit or His Holy Spirit suit. There are a lot of errors out there, and some of it is because we really want to understand it. And I don't fault people for wanting to understand, because I want to understand. People trying to explain the Trinity, like it's like an egg, with the shell and the white part of the egg and the yolk being part of the egg. And that sort of helps us think through it a little, but the shell isn't the yolk and the yolk isn't the white and they're not coequal or coeternal. So, you know, any explanation that I've heard people come up with always comes up a little short of the perfections of the Trinity. But Pastor Brad, tell us why it matters.
Brad Kilthau
I think something you brought earlier is that anytime we do any teaching, especially on the doctrine of scripture, we have to ask why does that matter? How does it help me out? And the truth that God has triune is of utmost importance because it impacts our lives in several ways. One of those ways is through authentic worship. Since God has revealed Himself to us as triune, the Bible says in John 4:23 that we are to worship God in spirit and truth. And we cannot truly worship Him apart from regarding who he really is. And so it is good that when we worship Him, we comprehend what that means when we talked about our God is a triune God. I think even more importantly, the Trinity is vital for salvation. For our salvation to be possible, there needed to be a perfect sacrifice of infinite value to pay for the sins of the world, and if Jesus is anything less than fully and eternally God and He had limitations, that would prevent Him from accomplishing the work that we needed for Him to do on the cross and the resurrection. And when you think about our salvation, in scriptures the Father initiated salvational work, the Son completed the salvation to work in the cross, and it's the Holy Spirit who opens up our understanding and even gives us the ability to believe in the work of Christ. So all persons in the One God are vital in our salvation. And then there's also the thought about a healthy and personal relationship with the Father and the Son and the Spirit. We need to accept and embrace the fullness of God as it's been revealed to us in the scriptures. You can't ignore that, just as you were saying, it's all throughout the scriptures that he is a triune God. You can't throw that away and then have a intimate relationship with Him.
I think about this too - we need to get into the throne room of the Father. We want to go to the throne room to speak to the Father, well who makes that possible? Well Jesus opens the door and allows us there. And then it's the Holy Spirit that gives us the ability to even speak because we don't even know what to say and how to say it in the presence of the Father. So in order to have a healthy relationship we need this triune God of ours. And here's a fourth one that I was thinking about as I was contemplating this question - without the belief that our God is triune, there's a personal relationship problem for us as believers, because Christian relationships are to be modeled after and reflect the perfect unity and love that exists between the three Persons of the Trinity. Just as Jesus said as he was praying for the church in John 17, he said, "that all my followers may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I in You, and that they may be one (speaking of the church) as We are One, I in them and You in me." And so when we think about our God who is love, there's this eternal active love that's always gone on among the Trinity Persons, infinite love, even before we were created. And so we're to reflect that kind of love for one another, and we're commanded to do that in Philippians 2:2, it says, "Being like-minded having the same love, being in one spirit and of one mind." And so it even affects our relationship as we look at our God and understand who He is and how we can relate to one another.
And so really the doctrine of the Trinity is a precious truth. And I know it blows our minds when we think about it, we have to sit back and go, "How can that be? I can't understand it." I think as you were saying Gary, we make a big mistake if we try to bring it down to some analogy that we can all comprehend - we can't comprehend all of our God. He's above who we are, but it is good to sit back and think about our triune God, because again it shows us how amazing He is and how wonderful and magnificent He is. And so it's a practical truth that should impact the lives of us Christians in a lot of different ways. So this is a good question, a good one to think about and constantly thinking about as believers in Jesus Christ.