Knowing The Holy Spirit April 10, 2005
The Spirit and the Trinity
Luke 3:21-22
God is three, and God is one.
The Trinity is not an easy concept to understand much less to explain. I’ve had supper time conversations with the kids that go like this:
“Jesus is God.”
“But God is God!”
“Yeah but Jesus is God.”
“How can Jesus and God be God?”
“We’ll God is three: he is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
“The Holy Spirit is God?”
“Yeah.”
“But I thought God was God!”
That is the Trinity for you
The Trinity, along with grace, is one of the major distinctives of the Christian faith. We do not believe in three Gods, we believe in one God who is three.
Luke 3:21-22
When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
Jesus’ Baptism may be one of the most Trinitarian pieces of scripture there is. It is a beautiful scenes: Jesus, the Son has come among us, and now, at the start of his ministry, he is baptized and all three persons of the Godhead show up at the very same time. The Son being obedient to the Father, The Father honouring the Son, and The Spirit empowering the whole scene.
From earliest days, Christians have had a triune faith. The earliest of creeds speaks of it: I believe in the Father
I believe in the Son
I believe in the Holy Spirit
Images of the Trinity
We believe in the Trinity, but we have a hard time explaining it.
We are told that Patrick introduced the idea of the Trinity to the pagan Irish through the Shamrock – its leaf is has three sections, and yet it is one leaf
Others have used an egg to describe the trinity – it is one cell, but it has the shell, the white and the yolk
Some people compare the Trinity to fire having a flame, giving off both heat and light.
These Illustrations might be helpful to get our minds around the idea of something being three and being one, but the analogies cannot be pushed too far before they break down.
The Egg and the Shamrock make God appear very static, and they do not express any idea of the personhood of the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit.
Bob Burridge writes about how these illustrations miss the mark
“God is not presented in the Bible as three different things combining to form a unified idea or mere appearance. God’s substance, power and glory are shared by all members of the Trinity as individual persons distinguished from one another only in ways God has revealed.”
He also says:
“Many attempts to illustrate the Trinity fall into the error of modalism. Modalism says that there is one God, but he reveals himself to us in different forms at different times – sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit) One common illustration presents the godhead as being like water which may exist as a liquid, or as a solid (ice), or as a gas (water vapor). The claim is that all three are water. But these states of water are not like the Trinity. God does not transform himself from one person to the other but is all the time, altogether, all three persons. The distinction of the persons in God is not one of changing states of being.”
- Bob Burridge, Geneva Institute for Reformed Studies GIRS.com
If these common images are not full enough, is there another that is much more full? (we know that any metaphor breaks down sooner or later)
It is not that we need to find a new image, but more that we need to rediscover an old image.
Brian Mclaren writes in a passage about what Eastern Orthodoxy taught him about Jesus:
“I learned that the early church leaders described the Trinity using the term perichoresis (peri-circle, choresis-dance): the Trinity was an eternal dance of Father, Son and Spirit sharing mutual love, honour, happiness, joy and respect.
Ask the God out of the Box people to share?
As I meditated on this Idea of the circle-dance of the trinity, This painting the Dave Chapman painted was always in my head. He painted it, not as a painting of the trinity, but as a painting of the children in our church. But it is an amazing image
Pinnock writes:
Gregory of Nanzianzus captured the mystery of triune life using the image of dance (perichoresis)… The metaphor suggests moving around, making room, relating to one another without losing identity. The divine unity lies in the relationality of Persons, and the relationality is the nature of the unity. At the heart of this ontology is the mutuality and reciprocity among the Persons. Trinity means that shared life is basic to the nature of God. God is perfect sociality, mutuality, reciprocity and peace. As a circle of loving relationships, God is dynamically alive. There is only one God, but this one God is not solitary but a loving communion that is distinguished by overflowing life.
God is three, and he always has been three – he did not become two at the first Christmas, and then become three at Pentecost. He has always existed as a community of three. The dance is eternal.
When you think of it, it makes sense – John tells us that “God is love” – He is eternally love, God did not become love when he created us to love, the love of God has always existed in God as the three love each other perfectly.
Genesis 1:26-27 tells us
Then God said, "Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
So God created humanity in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
The first thing you might notice is that God says, "Let us make humanity in our image.” The next thing that I notice lately is that the line right after God creating in his image is the line that he created us male and female – he creates us in community, with the ability to expand the community. I believe that a large part of being created in the image of God is being created in community as God himself is in community.
God always exists as a Trinity, and he always acts as a Trinity – the Son did not leave the trinity to come to earth, the Spirit does not leave the Trinity to live within us.
You can see this ongoing relationship often in the Gospel like in Luke 10:21
“At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.”
While the Trinity can be compared to a circle dance, it could also be compared to a jazz trio where there are times when the bass has prominence, but the drums and the guitar keep playing, and then the drums come to the fore, and later the guitar. I don’t think that Gregory of Nanzianzus ever heard a jazz trio, but I think he might be happy with this illustration as well
There is actually much more to be said about the Trinity, but our time is short.
The Spirit in the Trinity
What is the Spirit’s role in the dance?
Augustine named the Spirit “the bond of love” in God. So without losing the Idea of the Spirit’s person, we can see the Spirit as having the role of keeping the bond of the divine relationship and as the principle of divine unity.
He is also the unity between us and God. He is the Spirit of adoption
(Rom 8:16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
Gal 4:6-7) He is the one who extends his hand and invites us into the Dance that is the Trinity. He unites us with the Father through the Son.
If we go back to Dave’s painting. We are like the child on the outside of the dance – created to be in the dance, and longing to be in the dance, but unable to enter. The Spirit extends his hand to us and through the sacrifice of the Son and the love and forgiveness of the Father, we enter the dance.
If we go back to Brian Mclaren’s quote, he continues to say:
“I learned that the early church leaders described the Trinity using the term perichoresis (peri-circle, choresis-dance): the Trinity was an eternal dance of Father, Son and Spirit sharing mutual love, honour, happiness, joy and respect. Against this backdrop, God’s act of creation means that God is inviting more and more beings into the eternal dance of joy. Sin means that people are stepping out of the dance, corrupting its beauty and rhythm, crashing and tackling and stomping on feet instead of moving with grace, rhythm and reverence. Then, in Jesus, God enters creation to restore the rhythm and beauty again.
Pinnock says about the Spirit:
“I like the term ecstasy for the Spirit. It means “standing outside oneself,” which suggests that Spirit is the ecstasy that makes the triune life an open circle and a source of pure benevolence, fosters its ecstatic character and opens it up to history.”
What does this mean for us?
Join the Dance!
The Spirit takes us by the hand and leads us into the dance, and he introduces us to the Trinity: This is the Father, he’s been waiting for you to join the dance since the beginning of time! This is he son, he paid you ticket into the dance with his life, and his life will teach you how to dance. And for the rest of eternity, the spirit keeps us in the dance reminding us that we are children of God and he loves to dance with us.
Join the Dance – don’t be wall flower – be united with the Father, Son and Spirit, Embrace the Father, Let the Son teach you to Dance, let the ecstasy of the Spirit fill you with Joy in the dance!
Community
If the God we worship lives in community, is a community. We must come to realize that relationships are a huge part of our faith.
We cannot be a solitary Christian, there is no such thing.
John Wesley’:
“Holy solitaries” is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than “holy adulterers.” The gospel of Christ knows no religion but social, no holiness but social holiness. Faith working by love is the length and breadth and depth and height of Christian perfection.
We are not just called to dance with the Trinity, we are called to dance with his people, and to dance with his creation. We need to work out the discord, figure out how not to step on each other’s feet and practice grace and forgiveness when others step on ours.
To live and worship in community is to join in the very character of God. To live in right relationship with those around us and our environment is to be Godly!
The Spirit calls us into community with God – come join the dance!
The Spirit calls us into community with each other
