THE TRINITY 7
The Definition
11/11/12
I want to begin this morning by telling you of an encounter I had with an individual a little while back. I do not believe this individual is what the Bible would define as a Christian. We were discussing John 6, specifically vss. 37-44 where Jesus speaks of the fact that no one can come to Him unless the Father draws them, and that those whom the Father has given to the Son, the Son will not lose any but raise them up on the last day.
The discussion turned to the sovereignty of God and the fact that the Bible teaches that God is omniscient, that He knows all things, that God by His very nature is unable to take in knowledge, because He already has all knowledge. We both seemed to agree that God was indeed omniscient. Somehow that conversation turned to the topic of evil. The individual stated that God because He is good and loving, evil is something that happens outside of God’s sovereignty, that it in essence does not have a purpose. He stated there is some evil that God can and does use, but there is other evil that God cannot. I stated that if God knows all things would He not then know of all the evil acts that ever would be committed and therefore while not promoting evil, He still has a purpose for it.
That individual stated that God does not know of all the evil acts that will be committed, but that he limits his own omniscience and does not in fact know all future events. He does not know all evil acts that will happen, he does not know who will or will not accept Him. I pointed out then He is not sovereign, nor is He omniscience. If God does not have all knowledge, regardless of whether it be self imposed or not, He is not omniscient.
The person stuck to His guns, and said, God cannot be a loving and caring God and know about all the evil in the world and do nothing about it. He cannot be loving and caring and create people He knows will reject Him and therefore suffer His wrath.
Here was the person’s problem. This person wanted a god he could figure out. A god he could handle, a god that fit into the box that he had build for him. As Martin Luther once states, “It is God who handles us, and not we who handle God!”
As McGrath notes we tend to treat God as if he is some sort of pet that we train and tame, something we can domesticate. But that is not the God of the Bible. If you honestly seek to know Him from the Scripture you will find that He will not stay in the crate. We must take God as He has revealed Himself, not as we want Him to be revealed. That is where so many folks end up with God. That is what happened with the previously mentioned person. God would not fit in his box, so he had to remove those parts of God, His absolute sovereignty and omniscience, that would not fit in the box. What the person ended up with was not the God of the Scriptures, but a god of his own creation.
That is what happens often when you talk about the trinity with folks. The triune nature of God just does not fit within their mental box of what God should be, or what they can understand God to be. So they cut of the parts that do not fit. Like the deity of Christ, or the eternal nature of Christ. The cut out the personality of the Holy Spirit, and make Him just a force, like electricity. Those things just will not fit into the box so that must be gotten rid of.
Thus far in our study into the trinity we have talked about how love is at the core of the trinity. We saw how God desires us to love Him as well as to love us. God has revealed for us how He wants to be loved, that is through His triune nature. We looked at how God is a jealous God, worship and praise belong to Him alone, and He will not share that we false gods.
We also looked at specific scriptural reasons at to why the study of the Trinity is so important. That is we have the command to know God, we are commanded to WORSHIP God in Spirit and in Truth, the gospel is proclaimed in the Trinity, and as God’s people we have been given the task to defend our faith.
We however have yet to dig into the definition of the Trinity. Today I want to take a close look at the definition we have been working with throughout these messages. That is the definition given by Dr. James White in his work the “Forgotten Trinity”.
“Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Today I want to dissect that definition, because I think it is important that we grasp what we are saying by it.
One of the difficulties in understanding the Trinity, or understanding God’s nature is that we have nothing compare Him to. There is nothing in His creation that we can say, “well God in His triune nature is like…”
As God states in Isa. 40:25; 25 “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One.”
There may be different aspects of God’s nature where illustration may help us, but in the end they all will fall short. I am sure some of you have heard different illustrations people of used to explain the Trinity, the apple, with its skin, meat, and core. Or water in what is called the triple point, where it exists as solid, liquid and gas. But all of these illustration will eventually break down, because God as creator is totally beyond His creation. Nothing compares to Him.
Another issue we have in understating the triune nature of God is language. To quote White at this point, “We struggle because language is a finite means of communication. Finite minds trying to express in words infinite truths.”
In other words we are confined, both in language and in being, to time and that which is finite, yet we are trying to explain that which is eternal and infinite. In the end it boils down to trying to understand the immeasurable with brains that are quite limited.
Let us get back to definition and work our way through this, “Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
To make this perhaps easier to remember I want you to notice three foundations that we see in this definition. These three foundation are very important because if you deny one or more you end up in error, and I will say, you end up with a god who is not the God revealed in Scripture. We will look at each one of these foundation in turn.
Foundation one – There is Only One God
Foundation two – There are three divine persons
Foundation three – These persons are coequal and coeternal
Foundation one – There is only one God. We see this in our definition, With in the One being that is God…” To use a theological term when we say that God is One being, we are making the claim that we are monotheistic, or monotheists. This harkens back to the great declaration of Deut. 6:4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
We must however understand that we say that God is One being, yet three persons. We are making a distinction between being and person. I will explain that further in a moment.
We should recognize that there are indeed many groups and religions that are monotheistic. Islam is monotheistic. As are modalists and JWs. But they are Unitarians, that is they say God exists in one being and ONE person. Biblical orthodox Christianity is Tritheistic. That is we believe that within the one being that is God there exists three persons.
When we say one being what we are communicating is that a God as a diving being is undividable. He is not made up of different parts. Some folks get that confused when we talk of the three persons that make up the being of God.
In trying to describe the being of God we once more run into the problem of how to express the being of God. We can put it simplistically and say that the being of God is what makes God, God. Some of us use the term essence.
Because God is unique we can say that whatever the being of God is, that which is created does not have the same thing. As creatures we have certain attributes that make us creatures. We are finite, bound in time and space and of course because we are bound by time and the physical we think in those terms. We want to think of a being that is something that we can look at scientifically. Something that we can measure and weigh and physically analyze.
But we can’t do that with God. As Jesus states in John 4:24; “God is Spirit”. His being cannot be looked at scientifically, He is beyond the physical. That is what makes Him as we have said before, unfathomable.
Thus we read in Jer. 23:24; “…Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD.” Also think of the words of Solomon in 2 Chron 6:18 when speaking about the temple, “…Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!”
So then Foundation one – There is Only One God and that one being who is God is beyond our finite grasp to understand. He is a being that is outside of and thus not limited by space and time.
Looking now to Foundation two – There are three divine persons. As our definition states, “Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons…”
This we where a lot of folks get tripped up. When we use the term “persons” we want to go with what we know, we go with what experience tells us a person is. A person is limited physically, a person is a being. When people speak of the three persons of the trinity many have in their minds three men standing next each other. Again because that is what experience tells us a person is.
Once more we look back to the uniqueness of God which makes this difficult for us to understand. We do not have anything within creation that we can look to use as an example as to what one being made out of three persons looks like.
So then when it comes to us speaking about the persons of the Trinity, we must always keep in mind that God is one being. There are not three gods that make up the Trinity, that is often what Christian are accused of having by people who simply do not understand what we are saying. We must avoid thinking of the persons of the Trinity as being separate individuals.
As one person puts it, when we are talking about the Trinity we are talking about one what, and three who’s. The one “what” is God, the three who’s, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I believe that is a helpful way of looking at the Trinity, because it helps us to understand that difference between the one being of God, and the three person that exist as that one being.
Ok, Foundation one – There is Only One God, Foundation two – There are three divine persons. Now let us look at Foundation three – These persons are coequal and coeternal.
Again reading our definition “Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
What we are saying is that all the stuff that makes God, God, belongs equally to each person of the Godhead. The Father is all that God is, The Son is all that God is, and the Holy Spirit is all that God is. They all share in that essence equally. As White states, “Each divine person is in full possession of the entirety of the divine nature.”
They all equally share in this divine essence and also it is important to understand that they always have. That was never a time when this was not so. There was not some point in time where the Son becomes God, or the Holy Spirit becomes God. The Father as existed eternally as the Father, the Son eternally as the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the Holy Spirit.
Here again is where some folks have trouble because of their experience as a person limited in space and time. I think it would be helpful if we look at the difference between “being” and “person”. We are going to following Dr. White’s presentation here.
Everything that exists has being. A tree has being, my dog has being, we has people are human beings.
But, not everything that has being is personal. A tree for instance is not personal. My dog is not personal in the biblical sense of the word. She does not think of herself as part of “dog kind” working for the betterment of “dog kind” or something of that nature.
When we look to the Bible we can see three kinds of beings that are personal. God, mankind, and angels. As a man I have being, I exist and that existence is personal. Yet as a created being, I am limited and finite. I am restricted to time and space. I am limited to being in one space in one moment of time.
My being is also shared with only one person, that is me. As a created man I am limited in my being to one person and one person alone.
But when we speak of God we speaking of being that is not limited by space and time, He is infinite and eternal. He is not created, but the creator. So therefore because God is unlimited, He can be in a way that is beyond our experience, beyond our comprehension, have a being that is personal that can be shared fully by three divine persons.
So we have a divine being that is one, with the divine persons being three. We know that the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Spirit, but each person is fully and completely God.
So as White states, “Unless we recognize the difference between the terms being and persons, we will never have accurate or workable understanding of the Trinity.”
In speaking about the coequal and coeternal nature of the persons of the Godhead, one of the issues that some folks have with this is that they make the wrong assumption that different functions among the persons of the Godhead means that they are not of the same nature.
Let me give a couple of argument that they might use. The Father is creator of all things, but the Bible states that He creates through Jesus Christ. Therefore Jesus Christ is not fully God. Or they may say something like, The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father to testify of the Son Jesus Christ. Since the Spirit is sent by the Father, then He cannot be fully God.
This however is nothing more then an assumption on their part. Just because the persons of the Godhead have different roles or tasks, that does not indicate a different nature or an inferior nature. It is simple not logical to say because one person does something different that they cannot share the same nature.
There is what is called the “Eternal Covenant of Redemption” which states that from eternity past the Father, Son and Holy Spirit chose different roles in bringing about the redemption of God’s people. These roles are clearly seen in Scripture. The Father’s role in that He is the fount and source of the work of redemption. The Son’s role is one of redeemer and to become flesh as one subject to the Father. The Spirit’s role is that of sanctifier and indweller, He is the one who seals us. Each person of the Godhead takes on a necessary role in bringing God's people to Himself.
It is just a false assumption to think that in order for Jesus to be God, or the Holy Spirit to God, that they have to do the exact same thing in the exact same way as the Father.
Just because our Lord Jesus Christ, The Son of God, takes a different role in the eternal covenant of Redemption than that of the Father or the Holy Spirit, does not mean that He is of a different nature, or less God.
It certainly distinguishes Him from the Father and the Holy Spirit, but it does not follow that it somehow makes Him less than the Father or the Holy Spirit.
So do not fall in the argument that a difference in roles equates to a lesser nature.
We have gone through our definition of the Trinity, “Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” And we have seen within that definition are three foundations;
Foundation one – There is Only One God
Foundation two – There are three divine persons
Foundation three – These persons are coequal and coeternal
I know that we have covered some things that are hard to understand but I pray that you now have a better understanding of what we mean when we speak of the Trinity. Next week we will begin to look at the Scriptures as we will biblically defend that definition.
You may be thinking I still do not understand the Trinity, at least that is what I hope you would be thinking. Because we end where we started this morning, God is beyond our grasp to comprehend. Christianity has always taught that the Trinity is a mystery beyond the comprehension of man. That is not to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is irrational, it is simply a statement of the fact that as created finite beings we cannot fully comprehend the enormity of the nature of our Creator.
Dabney puts it well when he said, “all our difficulties on this doctrine arise from the vain conceit that we comprehend something of the subsistence of God’s substance, when, in fact, we only apprehend something. Could men be made to see that they comprehend nothing, all the supposed impossibilities would vanish; there would remain a profound and majestic mystery.”
In closing my prayer is not that you comprehend God, but that you apprehend Him. That you have a relationship with Him. A relationship that involves the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May your faith be in the eternal Son of God. Believing through the Holy Spirit, that the Son was send from the Father, to die for your sins, only to raise again, and return to His place in glory at the right hand of the Father. May God grant you the grace to believe in the gospel.
LET US PRAY
