Essential Truths: The Triune God - The Holy Spirit: Trinity in the World and in the Church
This past Thursday. 4 days ago. New Zealand. Christchurch. A peaceful city in a peaceful country. A 28 years old man walks up to another man and is greeted: “Welcome brother”.
The first man shoots the second man dead, walks into the mosque behind the second man and shoots to kill. He murders 50 people. Injures another 50 people.
Panic, terror, flee for your life.
Grief. Shock. Anger. The world reels. Another ugly example of the ugliest that humanity has to offer.
The first man abandoned love, abandoned God; he embraced the idiocy of white nationalism, racism.
By his actions he spit in the face of God, destroying God’s beloved creation.
In 15 or so minutes the gunman acted out an evil that the rest of the world has to grapple with.
All that is good in the world - love, hope, faith, fairness, equity - all those things disappeared for those 15 minutes for the gunman and the victims of his slaughter.
And some people unfortunately grapple with such evil with very poor and racist thinking. Australian senator Sen. Fraser Anning had the gall to blame Muslim immigration for racist attacks on two New Zealand mosques that claimed at least 50 lives.
We need to call out that sort of evil thinking.
I want to suggest that the New Zealand mass murderer acted out an ancient evil - a hate-fueled contempt for God and His God’s creation.
What are we to do with such events? They’ve happened here in Canada, in Quebec in recent years. And many feel that there is an underlying evil creeping into society in the form of tolerance for racism and bigotry.
We are not left alone with such thoughts. We are given the Word of God to help us understand and sort through these things. (Pause)
Today we are continuing in our series, Essential Truths: The Triune God.
Over the past number of months we’ve gone into some depth on what the Scriptures reveal about the One we worship, the nature of the Trinity, the Godhead.
We’re doing this so that we can grow to know more about Who God Is.
And our focus today is on the work of God, the Trinity, The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the world and in the church.
And I thought it might be interesting to start by imagining with me, if you would, for just a few moments, what the world would be like without God, without Jesus, without the Christian faith and without followers of the way of Jesus.
Let’s start by going back. Way back to before Jesus was born, what was life like before the will of God and the ways of God we’re made known to the gentiles?
The Hebrew people had the Torah and the OT, but they were a tiny minority of the people trust existed back then.
What was it like in broad terms for most people to live before Christ.
Health and Welfare of People
Well, a fourth of the population was sick at any given time; a quarter of the population were slaves and sold naked like animals in markets.
Life expectancy was very low, in many places only 20 years of age, due to war, savage religious rituals and disease.
Perfectly healthy infant girls, and then also babies born with abnormalities were routinely “exposed” to the elements and wild animals to their deaths, as normal practice.
“By today’s standards, it was hell on earth. Poverty, sickness, premature death, domestic violence, economic injustice, slavery, and political corruption were the given of life”.
Human Dignity: (Pause)
You may have heard the phrase: Imago Dei. It’s a deep Judeo-Christian
Understanding that humans are made in the image of God and because of that we deserve great dignity and respect.
Before Christianity, the ideas of human dignity and value were arguably non-existent.
Again, one in four people in the Roman Empire was a slave.
And the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle, otherwise generally considered a pretty smart fella, wrote: “The slave is a living tool and the tool a lifeless slave.”
Slaves were property and therefore owners could sexually exploit female, male and child slaves without punishment or consequences for their actions.
Also Roman Law commanded fathers to put to death their child if he/she is deformed, with a one law in particular reading: “A notably deformed child shall be killed immediately.”
For women, every point in her life during the Greco-Roman era was filled with danger. A girl baby was more likely to be abandoned or killed, young girls or teenagers were likely to face sexual abuse or forced prostitution.
In ancient cultures, a wife was the property of her husband.
Adult women were under the control of their husbands who had the right to abuse or abandon them at will, and or course widows faced poverty.
And so again, the concept of universal human rights and equality comes exclusively from the biblical idea that all people are created in the image of God. Imago Dei. The image of God.
[These are the findings of Jeremiah Johnson, a professional researcher, who also serves as professor of Early Christianity at Houston Baptist University published in his recent book: “Unimaginable”.]
What people thought of when they thought of God:
Here are some examples of the kinds of gods the Greeks and romans worshiped:
Before Christ was a world where Greco-Roman gods often were seen as the source of harm and suffering.
These deities were objects of fear and veneration not just for the Greeks, but for the people throughout the huge area over which Greek influence spread, and among the Romans who adopted the Greek gods with Romanized names.
That’s a quick snapshot of the ancient world before the Christian faith emerged from the Jewish tradition.
Let’s jump forward to more recent days. How might our world today and in recent centuries and decades have been different without the influence of God.
One recent example might be if there had been no Martin Luther King Jr., the key leader of the US Civil Rights movement who helped to bring about a concept of human equal rights that admittedly still seems to be fighting for air.
King was a Christian preacher, motivated by the gospel of Jesus Christ to bring about racial equality. No Jesus, no Martin Luther King Jr.
There are many others who have brought about very important changes in the world, inspired by Jesus: the suffragettes who brought about the vote for women.
It was William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a Christian English politician and leader of the movement to stop the slave trade, and John Wesley (1703-1791), English cleric and founder of Methodism, who both lived during the so-called Age of Enlightenment that pushed for the end of slavery.
Most areas of life have been massively impacted by the fact that God sent Jesus into the world. (Pause)
We’ve talked about the concept of the value of human life. But so many other areas have also been impacted for the good that I don’t have time to go into:
Marriage and family, education, science, art, music, literature, even government by the people for the people.
All these areas have been drastically improved due to Christian influence.
(Pause)
We’ve been talking about the impact of people of faith in the living God on our society, our world.
We’ve been talking about those things which have resulted from the reality of God’s existence and on the changes that have come as a result of people seeking to bring glory and honour to God.
People who have prayed as Jesus taught: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, and then have cooperated with God to see this slowly come about.
The Effort to Eliminate God
There is another thing we need to consider. As much as God has brought about His justice in the world through those who have believed in Him and have been followers of Jesus,
there are those who have spent their lives trying to obliterate the notion of God. Who have sought to or effectively have the impact of reducing or eliminating faith in God.
There were at least 4 thinkers in the 19th century that moved the world away from a Judeo-Christian worldview:
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Feuerbach wrote a book that had a great deal of influence called the essence of Christianity in which he claimed that faith and love are inherently opposing forces: that one cannot be simultaneously a person of faith, and a loving person.
Darwin: The father of modern evolution, thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy. He laid the groundwork for the notion of a self-propelling development of creation via natural selection which needed no Creator.
Though Darwin himself believed in God in a general sort of way, others who did not took his views and ran with them.
Marx, the father of communism said some interesting things:
“Religion is the opium of the masses”
“The first requisite of the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”
"Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality."
In a poem, he once wrote: "I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above."
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a committed atheist and hated Christianity, came up with the dangerous idea of the Superman, who is a monster from our world that wishes to dominate humanity.
About humanity he wrote: “You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.
Once you were apes, and even now, man is more ape than any ape.”
He also wrote, “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.”
Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman that inspired Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin.
Adolf Hitler became its incarnation – Nietzsche’s Superman – a madman determined to destroy most of humanity to benefit a ‘superior’ race,” writes Johnston. “Hitler was the end-product of the West’s determination to move away from its Christian heritage.
Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews. Another 70-85 million people, 3% of the world’s population at the time, died in the war he started.
In rejecting Christianity, the radical atheism of the twentieth century did not take humanity forward into some kind of utopia; it took humanity back into pre-Christian barbarism and hell on earth.
God-based ethics and values were tossed aside and replaced by new ‘scientific’ ethics that had no problem with supposedly superior humans enslaving and murdering supposedly inferior humans.
The main difference between the world before Jesus and post-Christian totalitarian governments that bought into the lies of those trying to eliminate God is that the more recent version has far greater zeal and far more dangerous tools.
Darwin’s ideas were also used to justify slavery, with some suggesting that lesser-evolved human races were closer to apes than more evolved humans from Europe.
“Not only did this understanding of humanity accommodate racist ideology, it provided a theoretical foundation and justification for slavery itself.
The Work of the Trinity in the World and in the Church
So we’ve considered a contemporary evil, perpetrated by a man who absolutely rejected God and killed 49 innocent people.
We’ve looked back at history to get a glimpse of what life was like before God was manifest in the flesh in Jesus and before God’s kingdom began to be manifested in the world.
We’ve looked at a few modern examples of God moving through His people, people who loved Jesus and brought about positive change to society, which we could call God’s kingdom coming to earth as in heaven.
We’ve looked at some thinkers in the past few centuries who called for a rejection of God and we’ve seen how that absolute rejection of God led to the 20th century’s wars and genocides and general carnage.
Now let’s look at our Scripture passages for today and what they say to us about how God has moved, and is moving in the world and in your life.
7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. 8 And when he comes, he will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; 10 concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more; 11 concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.
The work of the Spirit is to turn our hearts on. To make us truly alive. The Holy Spirit turns hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.
How does God do that. How does he get our attention. How does he turn her hearts on? What is it that turns us from the choice to live without God to the sincere desire to follow Jesus?
The word that John uses of the work of the Spirit is the word elegcho (eleg-ho), translated “convince” by the Revised Standard Version and “prove” in the New International Version.
The trouble is that no one word can translate it adequately. It is used for the cross-examination of a witness, or a man on trial, or an opponent in an argument.
It has always this idea of cross-examining a man until he sees and admits his errors, or acknowledges the force of some argument which he had not yet seen.
It’s used by the Greeks for the action of conscience on a man's mind and heart.
That kind of cross-examination can do one of two things--it can convict a man of the crime he has committed or the wrong that he has done; or it can convince a man of the weakness of his own case and the strength of the case which he has opposed.
In this passage we need both meanings, both convict and convince.
So the Spirit of God acts on the spirit of humans I’m at least 2 ways: by bringing conviction of sin;
and by convincing the human heart that God is both right to judge because he is God, and that we are right to surrender our lives to Him.
We are right to it knowledge that we are not God. We are right to knowledge that God is God and deserves all that God deserves. our confession, our worship, our thankfulness at his goodness for all of our days.
So the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin. When you think about it, when the Jews crucified Jesus, they did not believe that they were sinning; they believed, quite genuinely, that they were serving God.
Just like Saul believed quite genuinely that when he persecuted the church after Christ had ascended to heaven, that he was serving God.
Apparently it’s quite possible to be passionately and genuinely wrong.
But for the Jewish Leaders, when the account of that crucifixion was later preached, they were pricked in their heart (Ac.2:37).
They suddenly had the terrible conviction that the crucifixion was the greatest crime in history and that their sin had caused it. Imagine the confusion. Imagine the conviction. Imagine the shame.
But you know, some people have no concept of sin. I know before I came to Jesus I had a very fluid and flexible idea about morality. If I got caught, it was wrong.
If I didn’t get caught, it was right. If I didn’t get caught, I slept like a baby. If I got caught, only then did I pause to examine myself.
But even then, it might’ve been 25% self-examination, and 75% scheming to do it smarter so I wouldn’t get caught the next time.
What is it that gives a man or a woman a sense of sin?
What is it that makes us see how low we have gone in face of the Cross?
What is it about this symbol (point to cross) that can cause a person who is either full of pride or full of self contempt, two sides of the same coin, to humble themselves?
In an Indian village a missionary was telling the story of Christ by means of slides projected on the white-washed wall of a village house.
When the picture of the Cross was shown, an Indian stepped forward, as if he could not help it: "Come down!" he cried. "I should be hanging there not you."
Why should the sight of a man crucified as a criminal in Palestine two thousand years ago tear the hearts of people open throughout the centuries and still today?
What could possibly cause that? It is the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit of God convinces and convicts the human heart that the Only Son of God willingly, and full of love, went by his own choice to the cross, in full coordination with and to the glory of God the Father.
So the work of the Spirit convinces and convicts us of sin. It becomes clear what this means when we see that it is Jesus Christ's righteousness of which people will be convinced.
Jesus was crucified as a criminal. He was tried; he was found guilty; he was regarded by the Jews as an evil heretic, and by the Romans as a dangerous character; he was given the punishment that the worst criminals had to suffer, branded as a felon and an enemy of God.
We only need to look to the centurion who stood at the foot of the cross, guarding Jesus.
39 And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” Mark 15:39
A soldier, a hardened warrior, becomes the first to see.
Or we can look at Saul on the Damascus road. A pharisee determined to wipe out the Christian church in its infancy, who when met by the risen Jesus and asked ““Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
What changed that? What made men see in this crucified figure the Son of God?
God the Father, through the Holy Spirit brings about a transform way of thinking, of understanding. This new way of thinking brings people to appreciate the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
The righteous One in Whom was no sin became the One Who chose to bear our sin on the horrible cross. Dying as a common criminal. But for my sin. For your sin.
On the Cross evil stands condemned and defeated.
What makes a person feel certain that judgment lies ahead?
It is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is he who gives us the inner and really, unshakable, conviction that we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God.
When we are convicted of our own sin, when we are convinced of Christ's righteousness, when we are convinced of judgment to come, what gives us the certainty that in the Cross of Christ is our salvation and that with Christ we are forgiven, and saved from judgment?
This, too, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is he who convinces us and makes us sure that in this crucified figure we can find our Saviour and our Lord. The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and convinces us of our Saviour.
This is how God begins his work in our lives, and brings us into a saving relationship with him through Jesus Christ.
Then, and this is amazing but true, he brings about change in the world that can benefit all people through us, the ones whose hearts He has changed.
Show Nouwen quote: “God’s Kingdom is a place of abundance where every generous act overflows its original bounds and becomes part of the unbounded grace of God at work in the world”
How is your heart? How is your heart today? Is it soft toward God?
Is it hopeful because you know that God is at work?
Maybe your heart is in need of renewal. Have you approached the door from the inside as Jesus has been standing on the outside knocking? He wants to come in and dine with you. He wants to make your life new.
Have you come to Jesus Christ in faith, trusting that His sacrifice on the cross happened because He is love, and He loves you enough to lay down His life for your salvation, for your healing, for your peace?
If you don’t know Jesus, I want to give an opportunity for you to accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, as the king of your life, as the One you will follow all the days of your life.
I’m going to pray a prayer, and if you want to, you can repeat after me.
Lord Jesus, I believe that You gave your life for my sins. I repent of my sins – I choose to turn from them and toward You.
I thank you for the gift of salvation that comes only through Jesus. I now receive Jesus Christ into my life as my Lord and Saviour. Amen
If you prayed that prayer and you meant it, that means that you have taken the first step in a life-long journey with Jesus that will actually never end.
I encourage you to speak with one of the pastors or Elders here to let us know that you have begun or renewed your journey with Jesus.
We want to support you as you make positive steps forward in your life.
May God bless you and keep you, may He make His face shine upon you and give you His peace.
Amen.
[Note: The message borrows freely from William Barclay, a noted Scottish exegete. As well, Jeremiah Johnson's book "Unimaginable" was also used freely in the writing of this sermon].
