“Augustine said that anyone who denies the Trinity is in danger of losing his salvation, and anyone who tries to understand it is in danger of losing his mind.”

The Kingdom of God is like
There are none of the metaphors and similes about the Trinity that we see in the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom. There are just statements that are to be taken as both facts and mysteries. He never takes the disciples aside to explain, “I and the Father are one” or “If you have seen me you have seen the Father.” It is a Fact with a capital F. It is a Truth that cannot be illustrated or taken apart piece by piece and put back together again. It defies understanding only because it is completely beyond our ability to comprehend. But what we can comprehend and witness is the results of a failure to believe in the threefold person of God. So that is the direction I would like to take us this morning. Not to explain the inexplicable but to talk about the fundamental and historic beliefs of the Church regarding the Tri-Unity of God and then see if there are consequences for believing and not believing. In other words, “So what?”

Ray Stedman
“This is a nut shell summary of a great deal of truth in the scriptures. There is a passage in the prophecy of Isaiah where God speaks through the prophet about himself in relationship to us.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Theologians call that a revelation of the transcendence of God. He is beyond us, the “Holy Other”, as Karl Barth calls him. Now that is a bit tricky, because if God were entirely different from us it would be impossible for us to know anything about him, even if he told us. Of course we are also told that we are made in the image of God, so that there is a resemblance between God and us. In some sense, it is a low level resemblance, because as we have just read, his ways are higher and his thoughts are different from ours. This is why we must never be surprised if God does something we don’t understand. He tells us he will do that kind of thing. Therefore, the only way we would ever be able to comprehend who God is and what he is like is if he himself tells us.
This is why the revelation of God in Scripture is so important for us. We would not be able to understand what God is like and what we ourselves are like if we did not have this revelation. Many people have trouble with that. I think it is almost universal for us to imagine God as sort of an enormous man, very much like us. And we have great difficulty when we are confronted with any part of his being which acts or thinks differently than we do. We tend to think of God as a man projected into infinity. But the Scriptures tell us that this is not true.”

Oftentimes doctrines are responses to heresies and incorrect teaching. Times of great challenge are also times of great doctrinal clarity. The Church was able to survive over 300 years without a rash of heresies. There had been some – especially in the earliest years – but there was a long period of relative calm until the Church became the official religion of the State under Constantine. With that, there was a rise in heresies that challenged the basic understanding of the nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. People by the thousands followed false leaders and bad teaching as the Church grew and was no longer threatened by persecution. It was not only a struggle about theology but about power, influence and position. Ironically, new heresies arose to respond to old ones. In their attempt to correct the abuses of one they found themselves teaching doctrine that was just as harmful. There was no overall guidance from Church leadership until one heresy and one conflict threatened the Church. That was Arianism and it was serious enough to cause the Emperor Constantine to call the first council of the Church – the Council of Nicea in 325. He convened 1800 Church leaders to write a creed that would define the core beliefs of the Church. It was a 29 year old assistant to the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, who did most of the study and writing.

What is Arianism and how does it relate to our study of the Trinity?
Basically, Arius was teaching that the only true God was God the Father and that He had created the Son and the Holy Spirit who were not equal to Him but came from Him. There was a catchy phrase he used that spread throughout the Church: “There was a time when the Son never was.” It was a good example of an emphasis on a particular verse or truth that became
heretical. There is only one God. “Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one God.”

Without the divinity of Jesus there would be no Christian faith. Jesus could still be an extraordinary example of what we could become. He could be a great teacher. He could be a moral guide. But he could not be God. He could not be the perfect sacrifice and the only way to reconcile God and the world. Sadly, it also requires that Jesus be insane – a man claiming to be God.
The Council did not create the doctrine of the Trinity. As many have said, there is no mention of the word “Trinity” in the Bible. But the Council (primarily Athanasius) pulled together and wrote down what Scripture itself says about the Tri-Une nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. They did not make it up. As one teacher has said, “So there are these many places where the doctrine of the Trinity underlies and is interwoven throughout the texts of Scripture; the doctrine of the Trinity is in the Bible like the salt is in the sea. You can taste it everywhere, but you can’t very well separate it out, because it is so grounded in the very nature of God himself.”

They did not pull it out of Scripture. They pulled Scripture together to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity that is woven throughout. That is the origin of the Nicean Creed and the Athanasian Creed that we read. Without the doctrine of the Trinity there would be no fully Christian life.

Athanasian Creed
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father Uncreate, the Son Uncreate, and the Holy Ghost Uncreate. The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible. The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost Eternal and yet they are not Three Eternals but One Eternal. As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible. So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not Three Almighties but One Almighty.

So….how should we do this? How do we capture hundreds of years of teaching in a few minutes?

Let’s divide the study into six basic steps to describe Fact of the Trinity:

1.  There is one God. (Deuteronomy 6:4)

Deuteronomy 6:4 is one of the most important verses to the Jews, who believe in one God. It is known as the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!”
Here is the Hebrew: Shema Yisrael: Yahweh Elochenu Yahweh Echad. The Hebrew language has two words that are translated “one”—Yachid and Echad. Yachid means an absolute one. Echad refers to a united one. Echad is the word used of God in the Old Testament—God is a united one.

Look at Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” Look at Genesis 11:7:“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

It is also what Christ Himself called the greatest commandment in Mark 12:29. There is not one God and two lesser Gods. There are not three Gods – that is the heresy of Tritheism and it was a very appealing way to resolve the issue of one God and three persons. But, there is only one God and He is a united God. He is both “us” and “one” at the same time.

2.  The Father is God. (2 Peter 1:17) “For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.” This is the easiest for us to understand because we have heard it so often. “Our Father who art in Heaven” is the basis for the prayer Christ taught the disciples. “For God so loved the world that he sent His Son.” Paul often speaks of being sent by the Father and says in Ephesians 4:6: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”

3.  The Son is God. (John 8:58) “I tell you the truth…before Abraham was born, I am.” When doubting Thomas met Jesus he said, “My Lord and my God!” Even the earliest disciples recognized that Jesus was not merely a man. “They must have struggled with that. I’ve often wondered how they ever arrived at that conclusion. They where Jews, trained to think of God only as a single unity – one God. In fact they were taught that anyone who denied the unity of God was not worthy of living longer and was put to death. Yet, trained as they were to think that way, as they lived and walked and worked with Jesus, and saw and heard him, there came a gradually increasing conviction in their hearts that this was more than man.” He was far more than a superman or angel or messenger from God. He was God Himself.

Paul says in Colossians 2:9: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” and in Colossians 1:15 he says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created..”

Jesus himself says “If you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9) and “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

4.  The Holy Spirit is God. (Acts 5:3-4) “How is it that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land…What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.”

Unfortunately, we have made the Holy Spirit into an invisible force instead of recognizing him as a true person of the Trinity. He is a powerful It but not a personality as is the Father and the Son too often. “Sometimes the Personhood of the Father and Son is appreciated, but the Personhood of the Holy Spirit is neglected. Sometimes the Spirit is treated more like a “force” than a Person. But the Holy Spirit is not an it, but a He (see John 14:26; 16:7-15; Acts 8:16). The fact that the Holy Spirit is a Person, not an impersonal force (like gravity), is also shown by the fact that He speaks (Hebrews 3:7), reasons (Acts 15:28), thinks and understands (1 Corinthians 2:10-11), wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), feels (Ephesians 4:30), and gives personal fellowship (2 Corinthians 13:14). These are all qualities of personhood.”

5.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct individuals. (John 14:26) “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” The Son and the Holy Spirit are not merely different roles or ways the Father expresses himself. This was the teaching of what is called Modalism. There is only one God (The Father) but he expresses Himself in different ways. According to the modalistic concept of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not equally and eternally co-existent, but are merely three successive manifestations of God, or three temporary modes of His activity. Modalism, which is actually a form of unitarianism, denies that God in His own inner being is triune. Rather, it claims that the Father, Son, and Spirit are either temporary or successive roles adopted by God in carrying out the divine plan of redemption and that they in no way correspond to anything in the ultimate nature of the Godhead. Modalism does not recognize the independent personality of Christ, but regards the incarnation as a mode of the existence or manifestation of the Father. For the modalists, the Father, Son, and Spirit only refer to the way in which God reveals Himself, but bear no relation to His inner being.
This is where comparisons fail us. The Trinity is three complete Persons who are each fully God. “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons. The Bible speaks of the Father as God (Phil. 1:2), Jesus as God (Titus 2:13), and the Holy Spirit as God (Acts 5:3-4). Are these just three different ways of looking at God, or simply ways of referring to three different roles that God plays?

The answer must be no, because the Bible also indicates that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons. For example, since the Father sent the Son into the world (John 3:16), He cannot be the same person as the Son. Likewise, after the Son returned to the Father (John 16:10), the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit into the world (John 14:26; Acts 2:33). Therefore, the Holy Spirit must be distinct from the Father and the Son.

In the baptism of Jesus, we see the Father speaking from heaven and the Spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove as Jesus comes out of the water (Mark 1:10-11). In John 1:1 it is affirmed that Jesus is God and, at the same time, that He was “with God”-thereby indicating that Jesus is a distinct Person from God the Father. And in John 16:13-15 we see that although there is a close unity between them all, the Holy Spirit is also distinct from the Father and the Son.

The fact that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons means, in other words, that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. Jesus is God, but He is not the Father or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, but He is not the Son or the Father. They are different Persons, not three different ways of looking at God.”
Again, this is where analogies fail us. We’ve heard the analogy of how one person can be a father, a son and a husband. There are different roles for the same person. That is not the doctrine of the Trinity. That is a modern expression of Modalism. It is one person having three roles. The Trinity is three Persons who each have all the attributes of God.

That leads us to the final step.

6.  Therefore, there are three Persons in the one Godhead. There are not three parts that added up equal the Trinity. Each one of the Persons contains the whole. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. There are no parts – only three real Persons who are all 100% God. There are many Scriptures that confirm that.

Perhaps the clearest statement of the Trinity is found in Matthew at the close of the Great Commission. Jesus said (28:19): “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Notice, one name but three persons; this clearly is a statement of the three-person God.

Paul closes his second letter to the Corinthians with a reference to the Trinity in a well-known and often quoted benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (II Corinthians 13:14). He places all three persons on the same level. Then again in Ephesians 2:18 we have another statement of this: “for through him (that is, Jesus) we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” He sees the persons of the Godhead as working together.

This is not easy, is it? It is completely outside our human experience to say three Persons without there being three separate individuals who somehow come together but remain three individuals. That is why it is a mystery and not a problem to be solved. It is a Fact that is beyond our comprehension. We cannot even say “the kingdom of God is like”. There is no “like” that is adequate, is there? It is not blind faith. It is what I call a necessary mystery. Without it everything else unravels – even though we cannot understand it.

So…we can say in summary:

1. God is three persons.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.

As I said at the beginning, rather than making a comprehensive proof of God’s three Persons in One, I would like you to think about the consequences of not believing in the Trinity.

What difference does it make if you believe Jesus is good but not God?
What difference does it make if the Holy Spirit is merely a source of power for living a better life?
What difference does it make if God was not in Christ reconciling the world to Himself through Christ’s perfect sacrifice?
What difference does it make if Jesus claimed to be God but was not?
What difference does it make if there are actually three Gods and not one in three Persons?
What difference does it make if God is alone and Himself enjoys no fellowship or love?

I’m not going to answer those for you but consider it a take home test for this week. Consider it and see what you think.

I’ll leave you with this:

C.S. LEWIS
“God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like: like players in one band, or organs in one body. If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact.”