(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Mystery of The Trinity”, originally shared on May 27, 2021. It was the 119th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
We believe in one God. We speak of God the
Father, or Creator, God the Son, or Redeemer, and God the Holy Spirit, or the
Sanctifier, the one who makes us holy before God. One God in three persons. The
Holy Trinity.
Martin Luther, the 16th century
Church reformer, once said, “To try to deny the Trinity is to endanger your
salvation. To try to comprehend the Trinity is to endanger your sanity.”
So, which is it going to be?
We filmed a video at Trinity Facility
Services, Inc., a commercial cleaning and janitorial service in La Verne the
other day. That’s actually not a bad analogy for The Trinity. Do we not all
want a “clean heart”, and is there anywhere to turn for that but to the
Trinity?
In the Christian Year, Holy Trinity Sunday
is the only Sunday devoted to a doctrine. There is no place in the Bible where
it says, “There is a Trinity”, yet throughout the Bible God is revealed as one God
in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Sometimes all three persons are
manifest at the same place and time, as in Jesus’ baptism. Jesus came out of
the water, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and rested on him, a voice
spoke from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
(Matthew 3:13-17) The doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons
each of which is fully God.
How to explain that? I’d say it’s pretty
much impossible to describe the Holy Trinity without slipping into heresy. The
whole idea of heresy brings to mind the bad old days of torture, war, and hypocrisy,
right? Yet it also points to a time when the truth mattered, when it was
literally a matter of life and death, not just for this world, but for
eternity.
The Apostles and the Nicene Creeds that are
central to the Christian faith, that ended much of the Church’s fighting over
doctrine by setting down the central things that the Bible teaches, are both
based on the structure of the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed, a third creed, is
very long and rarely used in public worship, but it has some of the best
language focused on the Trinity.
How many Gods do we believe in? One. That
God is three persons. Each person is fully God. That is the doctrine of the Trinity.
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered yet?
How to illustrate that? A shamrock, a triangle;
ice-water in a glass, one man who is a Father/Husband/Son or one Woman, who is
a Mother, wife, and daughter, are all things I’ve used to point to the Trinity.
And here are three that I haven’t: an egg (shell, white, and yolk), the Sun
(star, heat, light), and the three layers of an apple. Every one of them is
inadequate, some border on heresy, and some cross the border.
For example, saying that the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three persons of the Trinity, but are different
parts of God, each equaling one third: that’s Partialism
Saying that the Trinity is three separate
individuals: that’s Tritheism
Saying that we believe in one God who
reveals his self in three different ways, like Father in the OT, Son in the Gospels,
and Spirit in the Epistles: that’s Modalism
Saying that God the Father always existed,
but that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created by God and therefore are less
than fully God: that’s Arianism
Remember those lines about Jesus in the
Nicene Creed that say, “eternally begotten of the Father” and “begotten, not
made”? Or the one about the Holy Spirit that says, “proceeds from the Father
and the Son” (note: “and the Son” was added later)? Those were all written
against Arius, the namesake of Arianism.
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered yet?
I saw a meme the other day that showed a
triangle connecting the corners named Liquid, Pitcher, and Ice connected to a
circle in the middle. It said that connecting the liquid, the pitcher and the
ice doesn’t describe the Trinity. It describes The Kool-Aid Man. (Oh, yeaaaah!)
Water in a glass can be useful in another
way. Is the glass half-empty or half full? Of course, most of us are going to
say half-full, because the psychology of our culture says that’s the way we are
supposed to see it, that people who see it as half-full are more goal-oriented,
optimistic, positive and successful than people who see it as half-empty. Who
wants to be Eyore?
But is there another way that the water in
the glass can be described that is not so either/or?
I would say that the glass is 100% full.
It’s half water and half air, but it’s 100% full. That’s a bit like what the
Trinity is. It’s present. It’s active. But it’s not obvious. It takes a special
way of seeing that is the work of the Trinity itself in the Holy Spirit.
Why is this important? Well, I think that we
would agree that it’s important both to understand what we believe and to know that
the things we believe are true. Practically speaking, what we believe about the
Trinity in the abstract has a major effect on how we relate to God.
For example, sometimes, you’ll hear people
say “I love Jesus. He’s so accepting and forgiving, so non-judgmental. But I
have hard time with the God of the Old Testament. He seems so judgmental, so
intolerant, and so punishing.”
The thing about the Trinity is that they are
exactly the same. God the Son is God the Father is God the Holy Spirit is God
the Son, and ‘round and ‘round. We believe in one God who is three persons, and
each is fully God. How can God be one and three at the same time?
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered yet?
Are we now any closer to understanding the
Trinity? I would say, “No.” So have we just wasted the past 10 minutes or so? Well,
I hope not.
I would say that anything that we claim that
we have figured out about God is probably not true. All we can know is what is
revealed to us by God. We can’t understand God any more than a loaf of bread
can understand the baker, or an engine can understand the mechanical engineer.
If anyone says they fully understand God, that
god is probably not the God of the Bible. That is a god they have invented for themselves,
not the Creator of all the exists, the redeemer of my soul, and the one whose
presence within me and within us makes me and us holy!
How many of us love a mystery? One of the things
we like about mysteries is solving them, or not being able to solve them and
then being shown the answer at the end of the movie or of the story and then
working out the clues that were there all along.
The Trinity is a mystery, but not in the
sense that we can solve it, or that anyone can show us the answer, or that the
clues are hidden but are there for all who can recognize them. The Trinity is a
mystery in the sense that it cannot be understood.
Do you believe in God? You give your
testimony every time you read or recite one of the creeds in a worship service.
The word “creed” comes from the Latin word “credo”, which means “I believe”. Those
creeds are Trinitarian, they are the core of the Christian faith from which we
grow. They are what the Church believes. Not what your denomination believes,
but what the entire Christian church believes is central to what it means to be
a Christian.
Trying to understand the Trinity is like
trying to understand what it means that God created everything out of nothing.
And when I say “nothing”, I don’t mean empty space. I mean nothing. No space.
No time. Nothing. Try to picture nothing. If you’re like me, you are probably
picturing empty space. Try picturing no space. What was it like before God
created something and then everything?
It’s a mystery to us.
It’s like the answer to the mystery of human
existence that all of Job’s friends tried to explain to him. In the end what Job
learns is that God is God and he’s not.
The Trinity is described throughout the
Bible, but it is never spelled out. How could it be? It’s a mystery.
Martin Luther (that guy again), in his explanation
of the, as I said earlier, Trinity-structured Apostles Creed in his Small
Catechism, describing the section on the work of the Holy Spirit wrote:
“I believe that I cannot by my own
understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But
the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his
gifts, and sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”
Everything we can know about the Trinity
comes from the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Everything we do
happens in response to the gift of faith, a living relationship with the one
true living God. Open your heart and allow the presence of God to clean you out,
to lead you to repentance and forgiveness, to make of you a new creation.
Perhaps the best way to encounter the
Trinity is to live in the name, that is the living reality, of God as Jesus
instructed his followers to live in what is known as the Great Commission at
the end of the gospel of Matthew, the 28th chapter, starting at the 18th
verse:
*Matthew
28:18-20
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