How many of you have read the Shack? I recently read it and the newest book that author came out with, and both books have interesting imaginings about the Trinity. In both books the Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit are people with various characteristics, male and female. In the Shack, the Father manifests Himself initially to the person as a black woman, which of course was very controversial. I wouldn’t take it too seriously though, because I’m sure in our imaginations, God could manifest himself in any way that would best get His message across to us. We have no idea what the Father looks like other than in human form he is Jesus. The book honors the Trinity as one God however.
Anyway the mystery of the Trinity, God being three persons in one, has been difficult for Christians to explain since the beginning. Last week we talked about some religions and offshoots of Christianity who have denied the Trinitarian nature of God because it is hard to reconcile that God is one, and three. I think it’s also one of the ways Christianity has weakened itself by making the most personal and active person of God, the Holy Spirit, something other than what He is. We have an easier time thinking of God as some external, impersonal being that we can worship from afar, not a Spirit actually living in us. Our main problem is in trying to separate the three rather than seeing them as one.
I’m going to do my best today to have you leave with a better understanding of the Trinity, and I’m sure it will still be inadequate, as I’m sure I will not come up with a new revelation that will turn the lights on for everybody. And the point of this again is to be able to come up with an accurate, believable explanation that we can feel confident sharing with those who are not Christians yet.
Let me start today with looking in Scripture to find the basics of what it says about the Trinity. The very first inkling is actually right at the beginning in Genesis 1. “In the beginning God…” That is the Father, the creator of the universe.
Next verse, “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”. There’s the Holy Spirit. And God said “let there be light” in the next verse. I believe that is Jesus, the light of the world, the very first visible manifestation of God. We’re also familiar with the parallel account at the beginning of the Gospel of John.
“In the beginning was the Word who was God and was with God”. What was the very first thing God said in the Bible? “Let there be light”. Jesus is the original word that was with God in the beginning when all things were created, and according to John in chapter 1 verses 4-10 it says, “In him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”. Then John the Baptist was sent as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all may believe through him. He was not the light but came to witness about the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”
So the Trinity is mentioned in the first 3 verses of the Bible. It is hinted at again later in the first chapter of Genesis where we hear God say “let us make man in our image, in our likeness”. He refers to himself in the plural a couple other times in Genesis most notably at the tower of Babel where he says, “Let us go down and confuse their languages”.
Now let’s look at this for a minute. God identifies himself at the very beginning of the Bible as a plurality but also one. He says that man is made in his image and likeness, and II. Jesus himself is the physical manifestation of God when in the flesh he identifies himself with the Father saying in John 14, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me, if you had known me you would have known the Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him, I and the Father are one … Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”.
So what can we say about this Trinity so far. We can say that no one has seen the Father per se. He is the invisible, omnipotent, all-knowing source of all things. In some ways he is like a giant unlimited, perfect, consciousness able to create with a word or intention. We hear elsewhere that He is Spirit and he is love.
Now we also know that the physical fully human Jesus is also fully God, and is the perfect image of the Father. How is that then possible? It is possible through the indwelling Holy Spirit. How can Jesus, and how can man be the image and likeness of God? Through the indwelling God - the Holy Spirit.
Back to John 1. Jesus is called the son of God and here John says, “But to all who did receive Him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor the will of the flesh nor the will of man, but of God”.
So believers in his name become adopted children and III. manifestations of God just as Jesus is the begotten son of God. Why? Because they have no longer just been born of blood and flesh and human will, but are reborn in the spirit of God. What do we get the moment we believe? Eternal life right? What did Adam and Eve have when they were made? The breath of God which literally translated is the Spirit of God. They had eternal life when they were created in the image of God. What did they lose when they sinned? Eternal life, the Spirit of God.
Because Jesus was born of the Spirit, what did he have when he was born - eternal life. He was never without the Spirit of God, never without the Father. So he couldn’t die even though he was killed in the flesh. Now the Bible says we were created in the image of God, and Jesus was the perfect image of God. But unsaved sinners are not the image of God, nor were Adam and Eve and every human since then after sin entered the world.
We only regain the image of God when we are again filled with the Holy Spirit. And as co heirs with Christ, we are in essence made a member of that Trinitarian family with Jesus. Jesus says in John 17, “Father keep them in your name that you have given me, that they may be one even as we are one”.
The rest of John 17 confirms this oneness with God in verse 21 saying “that they may be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me.”
Do you see what that says? By you making these people one with us, the world (those who don’t know you) will see me in them, hear about me, and know that you sent me to the world as God. In other words, these people will be basically replicas and witnesses of me proving my existence even after I leave the world. How? Through the Holy Spirit.
Are you with me so far?
So we can say that Jesus is the physical manifestation of God. But God can only manifest physically through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the active agent of God in the world. In other words, the only way God can be experienced in material reality is through the Holy Spirit empowering the physical. That includes the cloud, the burning bush, and the prophets in the Old Testament, and it includes good angels, and it includes Jesus and born again believers.
So again think about it in terms of light. In Genesis 1 we see the order of God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Light or Jesus, basically the physical manifestation of God. So with the analogy of light we might say that God is like electricity. Can you see electricity itself? No. So in order for light to appear, the power of electricity (the Spirit), must be manifest through light, or lightning, or your clock, or your computer, or your table saw, anything that electricity empowers in the physical world. This is why New Agers like to refer to God as energy.
God is like the invisible, unlimited, unrestrained, unchanneled, source of electricity. Electricity itself is the power of God to make Himself manifest in the material realm. Can light shine in a light bulb without electricity. No. Can electricity itself be seen without a physical outlet? No. Can there be electricity without a source? No. None can be shown to exist without the other. The source of electricity cannot be known unless the electricity that it can produce is seen, and it can only be seen through light.
Now in the world, light was the first physical manifestation of electricity. But now electricity can be seen thorough many different things right? Now any analogy is going to be imperfect but the point I’m trying to make is this, can you say that the source of electricity is electricity? I think so. Can you say that electricity is electricity? Of course. Can you say that light is electricity? Yeah you could, certainly you could say it comes from electricity and cannot exist without it. So all of them are electricity, and each can only be known with the other, but all of them have different roles or manifestations. You can never see the source, and you can never really see the electricity unless it is harnessed and made visible.
So the Father is the source, the Holy Spirit is electricity, and Jesus is the light or the product of the electricity. And since Jesus left, we are called the light of the world, and the Holy Spirit, can be seen in us through all the manifestations of the Spirit in us, such as real love.
Electricity can be seen just as much in a power saw, as it can be seen in a light bulb for instance. So in the body of Christ as a Spirit powered being, you may be a power saw, or a light, or a microwave, or video camera, whatever. But in all those things, God can be seen in you through the electricity, the Spirit that you manifest.
Does that help? There are many way to explain it. To me that is the best analogy for how my mind works. But you could say, God is like a family. There is a Father, Mother and children that are all separate, but still one family. A tree has roots, a trunk, and leaves but it is all a tree.
So why is any of this important? The Bible never uses the word Trinity, and it is a doctrine that has really divided the church, and caused many inside and outside of the church to be very confused. Can’t we just say there is a God, there is a Jesus? Is this like the Book of Revelation where we maybe need to just not analyze it and just agree about the big point, there is a God? Well, I would say yes to that, and certainly you can get by quite well as a Christian without a full understanding of the Trinity. But my question is why then does the Bible even mention these three aspects of God all being God. It seems to me that there must be a reason God wants us to understand this at least to some degree.
And here is my opinion of why? What was characteristic of pretty much all the activity of God in the Bible? What was a common denominator any time God acted through people in the Bible?
At least 15 books in the Old Testament, and pretty much all the books of the New Testament speak of people being filled with the Spirit of God. God’s activity is always characterized by the power of the Spirit of God right since creation. Jesus himself was conceived by and fully empowered by the Holy Spirit.
We know the significance of Jesus while he was on the earth, but when you look at the overall history of the world, Jesus has really only been physically manifest for a minute blip in time. His ministry has primarily been in Heaven. It is the Spirit of God, which is again all three of them, that is the highlited aspect of God’s activity in the physical universe throughout the entire Bible. And if God didn’t want us to make those differentiations, I believe he would have just called himself God through the whole Bible.
So isn’t it interesting that though the Holy Spirit (which cannot be separate from the Father and Jesus) is the key figure in all the Bible, that’s not heresy because the HS is Jesus and the Father, yet most of the church today, has made Him the least important part of the Trinity, or at least has made him an impersonal aspect of God. We have elevated Jesus to the highest level and tend to pluck him from the Trinity. But notice Jesus never did that. Does the Spirit tend to glorify Jesus, of course, is Jesus important, of course, but it is God the Holy Spirit who is the active agent in the physical universe including in the incarnate Jesus. We need to be sure we are worshipping and glorifying all of God, not just a separate Jesus, not just the Holy Spirit, and not just even the Father.
If we look at Christianity we see that different denominations and cults tend to emphasize one aspect of the Trinity over others, and I don’t think this would be God’s will. But the personal relationship with God, including Jesus, is through the Holy Spirit. If we focus only on the Father, we tend toward the creator, the judge, the all powerful authority that we must obey or be smited, and it makes it hard to fathom a personal relationship.
If we focus only on Jesus we tend to focus on redemption, love, grace, sacrifice and salvation. We tend to focus on the relief that he brings, and can lead us to try to simply imitate Him, and we can get quite self-centered.
When we focus only on the Holy Spirit, we tend to emphasize only mission, supernatural power and gifts and so on. All these extremes can be detrimental and divisive. So we need a balanced view of God as all of those, he is the creator and judge to be worshipped and feared, he is the sacrificial lamb that redeems, and he is the Spirit that gives us power. But these should not be separated. We should see all of this in all of them.
But the fact remains that it is the Holy Spirit who allows us to see the truth, empowers us to carry out the mission of God, and is the source of life in us as believers. I guess you could look at it this way, when we come to worship on Sunday, our focus tends to be on mostly the Father and the Son. They all deserve our worship and it is the Spirit who allows us to worship them in Spirit and truth. But outside of our specific worship and devotional times, we see in Romans 12 that every day we are to worship spiritually through our sacrificed lives, which we live through the power of the Holy Spirit who allows our minds to be transformed rather than conformed to the world.
It is this Spirit that gives us the gifts we are to use to be true Christians as Romans 12 continues. It is also through this Spirit that we are able to discern the perfect will of God as Jesus did when he was human. We read a couple weeks ago in 1 Corinthians 2 that it is only the Spirit of God who can search the mind of God and thus know His will. He finishes that passage with, “but we have the mind of Christ”, how? Through the Spirit of God. And eternal life only comes through the Spirit as that is how Jesus lives in us.
This is so important, because while the Father and Son are responsible for all of this, it is only through the Spirit that we as human beings can be transformed or sanctified, and then empowered to carry out the mission we were saved for. The Christian who is not living by the Spirit of God is as useless in this world as Jesus would have been had he chosen not to do anything but be a quiet carpenter all his life. And we know that IV. God is love and can only be known through the Holy Spirit.
IV. A. Look at 1 John 1:1-3, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us – that which we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”
He goes on to talk about Jesus as the light and that we must also walk in the light. How do we walk in the light - through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is how we have fellowship with the Father and Son. John reiterates Romans 12 when he says that we must not love the world or the things in the world, because if we do, the love of the Father is not in us. But you have been anointed by the Holy one, and you have all knowledge (clearly a reference to the Holy Spirit). I write to you, not because you don’t know the truth, but because you know it. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If you do, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.
See there again that inclusion of us into the Trinity - how? Through the third member of the Trinity that lives in us as we become the temple of the Holy Spirit. And if you read on in 1 John it talks about being children of God, testing the Spirits to make sure they’re of God, overcoming the world and sin, and giving testimony about Jesus. All acts of the Spirit.
John finishes that letter saying that “we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life”. Again all three of the Trinity are mentioned as one in that passage. Without Jesus coming, there would be no understanding through the Spirit and no eternal life. But Jesus left the world for a reason.
IV. B. Finally we have this passage from John 16:7-8 “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper (Holy Spirit) will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you”. Then in verses 13-15 “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all 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, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you”.
Do you see there how Jesus is making them all equal and calls the HS He, even though it sounds like in places that both Jesus and the Spirit are subordinate to the Father. That is true only in the manner that they are manifested. Jesus is God so he can only do and speak what God tells him in his manifested state. The same is true of the Spirit, he is God so he can only say and think and show what God gives him. In other words neither the Spirit or Jesus can be anything other than God. But because God the Father cannot manifest himself because he is pure unlimited essence, he manifests in the Spirit and in Jesus to make himself known.
I always used to wonder why God created everything, and why he allowed things to get off course. But now I know that it was very simply so that he could make himself known to someone other than himself. If he had never created material reality he would never have had to been separated into three aspects, but with creation came the need and ability and choice to identify himself in three persons so that he could be known by and become one with His creation.
Wow, I hope I have been able to even come close to giving you the amazing nature of the triune God today. As God was showing me this truth, I was absolutely flabbergasted and only hope that I have done it justice. In case your head is spinning or you tuned out somewhere along the way, let me briefly and simply summarize what I think God wants us to leave with today.
There is one God who created physical reality with a thought or a word. He is pure invisible essence with no boundaries, a limitless being who is not a person in the sense of what we imagine a person, but he is a being, with a personality. He is manifest in both the Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, one seen and material, the other not seen and Spirit. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are simply different manifestations of the one God so that he could be perceived in the created reality.
Much like you can’t see Sean as simply a name, but you can see him in this body and in this personality. If any of those are lacking you can’t really know Sean. Sean is the unseen essence and totality of this person, he is Sean, and the body is the physical manifestation, and the personality is what gives character to the body and makes it Sean. All are necessary and dependent on each other in physical reality in order to know each one. All of them we call Sean.
If I had just a name but no body, you couldn’t know me here in this world. If I was a body without a spirit, you couldn’t know me either, I would just be a pile of matter with no personality or animation, like Adam before God breathed life into him. And if I was just Spirit, you couldn’t perceive me to know who I am without a body.
Why does God want us to know all this? Because he desperately wants a relationship with us and the part of Him that is absolutely crucial for knowing him is the Holy Spirit. God created us and the world to know him, he had to send Jesus so that we could be redeemed and have a relationship with him again, and the Spirit now allows us to have a relationship with him as he lives in us. This is what Jesus demonstrated with his life.
Do you see why this is crucial for salvation? Eternal life exists in the Spirit or breath of God, and if a person remains a body without the Spirit, the Bible says he can never know God and never have eternal life with him. Besides dying to forgive our sins, that’s what Jesus came to show us, that eternal life only exists in the Spirit of God, not in these bodies or in our personalities or minds.
Jesus said it best in John 3. “Truly, truly I say to you , unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh (and flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom), that which is born of the spirit is Spirit”.
And listen to this, “the wind (Spirit) blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit”.
God is invisible and you cannot know the source without the wind, and the wind is manifest in the physical impact it has in the material world. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit, including Jesus himself, you can only know the one who is the source by our spirit filled impact in the world. So let’s show God to the World.
IV. C. And let me close with what I believe explains this and may be the greatest Scripture in the entire Bible, which shows us how to show the love of God to the world, (1Jn 4:7-17)…
