The Holy Who? Spirit and Trinity
May 3/4, 2003
Intro:
Being a Christian is about knowing God. It is about being in relationship with God. Faith is not mentally agreeing with a prescribed set of abstract principles, faith is about living in obedience to a God you know and love and worship and interact with. That is what Christianity is about.
Who am I in a relationship with?
This morning we are going to begin a series of sermons leading up to summer – six weeks talking about who God is. We talk quite a bit about God the Son – and so we should. And we talk about God the Father quite a bit also – and so we should. But there is a third member of the Trinity which we don’t talk as much about, God the Holy Spirit. That is what I want to spend the next 6 weeks talking about together. Who is the Holy Spirit? What does the Holy Spirit do? What is the Holy Spirit’s role in creation, in salvation, in the world, in the church, in our lives?
For the record, my primary source (after Scripture) is a book by Clark Pinnock called Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit. While there are a number of things in the book which I don’t agree with, there is also some good teaching that I want to pass along. Right away, in the introduction, Pinnock reminds us that we need to combine analysis and contemplation – that the true essence of knowing God the Holy Spirit is not a matter for study alone but rather experience. All good theology is about head and heart – mind and spirit. And so in this series I want to seek both. Pinnock writes, “As well as studying the Scriptures on the Spirit, we must be prayerful and open, longing to fall in love with the One who frees and surprises, delights and searches, energizes and purifies us.”
You see, if Christianity really is about knowing God, then we need to know the Holy Spirit, who is God. And not just know about Him, like stats on a famous hockey player, but know Him like a friend. Know Him like an intimate member of the family who is with you always, in recognizable ways. To that end, let us pray.
The Trinity:
The place to start in understanding God the Holy Spirit is with the nature of God, specifically with the concept of the Trinity.
Now the minute I say that word, some of you throw up your hands and think, “I’ve never been able to figure that out, so I’m just going to mentally check out of this sermon and play games on my palm pilot or catch a few zzzs. Please don’t!! Let’s wade through this together, and come to a deeper understanding of who God is.
1. God the Father. We begin with God the Father. This one is easy – it is the picture we have of God from the beginning of the Bible and consistent all through the OT. In the NT, we recognize God the Father specifically in relationship to Jesus.
2. God the Son. And then along comes Jesus, claiming to be God and backing up His claim with miraculous signs culminating with His bodily resurrection from the dead. He taught and demonstrated a distinct personhood from God the Father. As Christians, we understand Jesus to be fully God and affirm His divinity. And suddenly our concept of God gets a little messier – we believe that God is one, we affirm that we are monotheists like Jews and Muslims, but now we recognize God the Father and God the Son.
3. now, stay with me. It gets a little messier still, before we begin to make sense of it. Jesus taught that He was leaving, but that He would send Someone else – the Holy Spirit. This is in Jn 14 and 16, just before His death and resurrection. The gospels and the writings of the apostles in the rest of the NT affirm that the Holy Spirit is also God. One example is 2 Cor 3:18, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
So we now have three Persons – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. But we believe in one God. That is the teaching we have from Scripture. It is most clearly expressed by Jesus Himself just before His ascension into heaven, when He commands us to baptize “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 28:19). It is also very clear in Ephesians 1:3-14, where in one long unbroken sentence Paul praises the Father, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit.
So we have three Persons, and the Bible teaches each are God. How do we understand this – what is the relationship between these three Persons – how does this come together? Early Christians wrestled with these questions quite a bit, and numerous understandings were proposed – most of them wrong. Some suggested that originally there was only God the Father, who later made Jesus and the Holy Spirit (diagram). That can’t be right, since John 1:1-2 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”, and Hebrews 9:14 calls the Holy Spirit “eternal”. So then someone suggested that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just different modes of God – God in the OT is the Father, in the NT is the Son, now is the HS. Kind of like one person acting three different parts in the same drama, or like water that might be solid when it’s cold, liquid when it’s warm, vapor when it’s hot (diagram). But that doesn’t work either, because all three are present at the same time at Jesus’ baptism – and water can’t be in three states at the same time. One other suggestion was that we actually have three gods – and they form some kind of committee or something (diagram).
I know this is a little heady, and somewhat complex. But it is important to figure out as best we can because we are talking about the very nature of God – what God is like, who God is. And since we are cultivating a relationship of love and obedience with God, and trying to introduce others to Him, it is worth the mental effort to try to understand as best we are able.
So let me show you one more diagram – this an ancient Christian depiction of the Trinity.
You see that each of the Persons is affirmed as God, and that their distinctiveness as Persons is also affirmed. They are equal to one another, they are all eternal, each Person is God. This is the Christian understanding of the Trinity.
A Relational Godhead:
That is mysterious. We are limited in our ability to understand how there can be three Persons in One. But that shouldn’t really surprise us – we are talking about the nature of God from our perspective as His creation – we are in many ways like an infant looking up at her parents and trying to fathom how she has a unique dna signature that was created when one of her parents provided half her chromosomes and the other provided the other half in a unique union of egg and sperm that together contained the entire blueprint for every cell, every organ, every system in her amazing small body. There is no way that infant could even begin to understand the beauty and complexity and mystery – she simply does not have the capacity to fully understand.
But I’m not content to recognize the beauty of the mystery and give up there. We can accept the doctrine of the Three-in-oneness of God by faith, but we can also understand at least one thing more, which is critically important to us understanding the nature of God and how we relate to Him. And that is this:
The very essence of God is relationship. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist together in Personhood as one God in relationship with one another. They are each God yet distinct from one another, yet existing in complete unity. Complete relationality. Complete liveliness. Complete love. Early theologians describe the divine nature in terms of dance imagery. They obviously weren’t Baptist theologians…
Have you every seen a couple who have been married for years and years who love to dance together, out on the dance floor? What do you see? You see two, but they move as one. They are fluid, together yet distinct. They move apart and back together flowing freely and still seeming as one. If you look in their eyes you see joy in one another and in their interaction. You see unity. You see love. And you see life.
And though that in no way is a complete picture of the Trinity, it teaches us something critical about the nature of God. God is, in His very essence, relational and united and alive. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit exist in a communal, loving, dance. One that is full of motion and joy and interaction and above all, life. And it is good. And that life and character of God spills over and becomes creation.
I said a moment ago that this was critically important for us to understand about the nature of God, and here is why: God invites you to join the dance. God wants to absorb you and I into that unfathomable love expressed in the essence of the Trinity as Three dance as one. God opens Himself up to add one more partner into the dance – His creation in general and specifically you, as His redeemed and adopted child. That is what the NT means when it repeats over and over that we are “in” Christ, and when it speaks of being “united with Christ” in His resurrection – it is talking about joining in the eternal dance with God. The picture is of that married couple who love to dance picking up their 4yr old grandchild and dancing together.
Too Many Left Feet:
Your response to that might be, “but I don’t know how to dance. Especially with God.” Enter the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, indwelling us. The Spirit teaches us to join the dance of God. He takes our feet and our hands, He says, “Let me lead and I’ll show you how to join in the festive dance.” Of course we don’t know how, we are sinful. We are children. But God gifts Himself to us in the Holy Spirit and teaches us how.
I wanted to begin our study of the Holy Spirit with this discussion of the Trinity for this reason: I don’t think we completely embrace the Holy Spirit as fully God. In our language He is always third. In our practice, we talk mostly about God the Father and God the Son. In our prayers, we generally pray to the Father in the Name of the Son – and we are supposed to pray through the Holy Spirit when in reality we more often pray through our minds. In our lives, we try often to live in our own strength rather than in the power of the Holy Spirit. I wanted to begin with the truth that the Holy Spirit is God – just as the Father is God and the Son is God. Jesus taught us that the Holy Spirit is to be our “Counselor to be with you forever-- the Spirit of truth… But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you … (and) will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” (Jn 14:16,17,26). Let us put these two truths together: The Holy Spirit is God; and the Holy Spirit is to be “with” and “in” us, to teach us and counsel and comfort, in a knowable and experiential way. Therefore, God is in us. More accurately, and returning to my previous image – God is in us, so that we can be in God. So that we can join in the dance of love in the family of God.
Conclusion:
Let me close with a parable:
Five brothers were walking along a road when they saw a sign: “party tonight!” It announced. “Free food, drink, music, dance.” And best of all, at the bottom it said, “hosted in person by The King.”
The first brother read the poster and said, “I’m not interested.” I’m going to stay home and eat leftovers and go to bed early. This is as close to the King as I ever want to be.”
The other four were excited to go, and spent the rest of the day choosing their best clothes and getting cleaned up and talking about what it was going to be like. The appointed time came and they set out together.
As they neared the hall they could already hear the music pouring out of the windows, and they could see the smiles on people’s faces as they walked in. It was a glorious sight, and they could feel the excitement. The second brother stopped and sat down on the curb. “This is close enough,” he said. “I can sort of hear the music and I can see the people going in. This is pretty good, I don’t want to go any further because I’m not sure what I’ll find. And maybe I’ll get a glimpse of the King going in.”
The three remaining walked into the hall together, and the sight was amazing. The smells were incredible, the food unbelievable, the music was supreme. They sat and feasted and enjoyed the party, and could see the King at the head table feasting and laughing and radiating joy. As they finished the meal, the tables were cleared away to make room for the dance floor. The third brother got up and said, “I’ve had enough. My belly is full, I enjoyed the meal, I’m leaving before I have to really join in the party. I got to see the King, this is close enough for me.”
As the last two sat there, they saw a beautiful woman walking across the dance floor straight towards them. As she got closer they recognized her as the daughter of the King, who had been seated beside Him at the head table throughout the meal. She approached the two and reached out her hands to them both and said, “Come and dance! My Father saw you and wants you to come and join He and I and the others in dancing for joy!!”
One brother looked down at his feet. “No, thanks. This is close enough. Besides, I don’t know how to dance.” “Just let go, I’ll teach you!” said the Daughter of the King. “No,” he replied, I might get embarrassed. This is close enough.” And he got up and left.
The last brother also bowed his head. “I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough to dance with the King, and besides, I don’t know how to dance either. I’m afraid He will send me away, or I’ll get it wrong and look silly.” He paused, and looked up into the eyes of the daughter of the King. She repeated the invitation, “Just let go, I’ll teach you!” She reached her hand a little closer, and though his was shaking, he reached up and took her hand. Her faced came alive with a smile, he saw joy in her face, he felt life and boldness and love and exuberance come flooding into him and with joy he followed her across the dance floor to the King, who embraced him like a long lost son and then took both of them by the hand. And then they all danced.
