The Trinity 8 - Revelation Series

THE TRINITY 8

REVELATION

11/25/12

Today we are continuing our study in the blessed and holy doctrine of the Trinity, that is the triune nature of God. That teaching that tells us that “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 will be the last messages on the Trinity until after Christmas. The next four weeks I will be preaching on the four weeks of advent. When we get back to the Trinity, we will begin to look at specific verses in the Bible that teach the Trinity, the deity of Christ and the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit.

As we have looked at the Trinity over the last few weeks, we have looked at how love is at the core of our understanding of the Trinity. We examined how important the study of the Trinity is, for it is how we know God. A couple of weeks ago we unfolded our definition of the Trinity, as we have looked at all that I have this fear.

My fear is that you will not be moved by a better understanding of this great and awesome doctrine, and thus arrive to the conclusion that striving to understanding the Trinity is not all that big of a deal. I fear that you will not be motivated through this study to love God more, to desire God more through the realization of just how amazing and astonishing the nature of God is.

Let me say this. If that is the case with you, please do not make the assumption that a greater understanding of the Trinity will not do that for us, that a more ample understanding of the Trinity will not in fact cause us to love God more, to desire Him more, to humble ourselves before Him, because it will do that by its very nature.

The problem, please understand, is with me, and my failure to truly communicate to you, with clarity, the wonders of the Trinity. Because if I accomplish just that, then I know it will move you towards God, for it certainly has done that for me. So put the blame on me, not on the doctrine itself.

This morning I want us to focus on how it is we can come to know that doctrine of the Trinity is true. What I am saying with that, is not I am going to prove to you that it is true, but how it is we CAN prove the Trinity to be true. The simple answer is this, we can know that the doctrine of the Trinity of is true, because God has revealed it to be true. Let’s unpack that statement.

The first truth that needs to be stated is that the word Trinity itself is not in the Bible. In fact this is one of the most given argument against the Trinity. People will say, and perhaps someone has said to you, that because the word Trinity is not a biblical term, then the doctrine itself is not true.

This argument is not only very weak, but it is an argument that can be used against the person who is making it. Say you are talking to a person who denies the deity of Christ, or a person who states that Jesus is not the eternal Son of God.

If that say, well the word Trinity is not even in Bible so how can it be true? Well, I can look a them and say, well you believe that God exists as One being and One person only, that makes you a Unitarian. Where is Unitarian in the Bible? It is not. So therefore what you believe about God cannot be true because the word we use to define it is not in the Bible.

We use the word monotheism to describe the fact that God is one, and our Unitarian friends would also agree with monotheism. But do we say that it cannot be true because the word we use to define is not in Scripture?

The thing is we cannot simple dismiss a teaching based on the fact that word we use to define that teaching is not in the Bible. The word atheism is not in the Bible, but we know that the Bible talks of those who say there is no God.

The word incarnation is not in the Bible, but any honest person can see the Bible teaches that God is said to become flesh. For John 1:1 tells us the Word was God, John 1:14 tells us that the Word became flesh.

The truth of the matter is, is that there are many such words that are used to define Bible truths even though those words are not in Scripture. To quote Warfield, “…the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such unbiblical language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.”