Word of Salvation – Vol.32 No.29 – August 1987
One God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 8
Reading: Isaiah 6:1-15; John 14:6-17
Singing: Ps.H.321:1,2; Ps.H.321:3,4; Ps.H.319:2,3,4; Bow.S.10; Ps.H.318:2,4
My parents had a children’s Bible which had a story in its preface about the church father Augustine.
The point of the story was lost on me when I was a child but later on in life that story has often come back to me and I can now see the point it was making.
I don’t even know if the story is true but anyway it tells of Augustine going for a walk along the beach.
He had been busy all day with a book he was writing about God but found the going tough when he tried to explain why God is the way He is.
As he walked along he was completely taken up by his thoughts, wondering how to put the being of God into human words.
He came across a little girl who had dug a hole in the sand and who was busily running back and forth to the water, filling up her bucket and emptying its contents into the hole.
Intrigued by the girl’s hard work, which was a fruitless activity because the water disappeared through the sand almost as fast as she poured it into the hole, he asked her, “Little girl, what are you doing?” “I’m trying to put the sea into this hole,” she said brightly, then dashing away again to get some more water.
As he walked on Augustine humbly thanked God in prayer for using that little girl to teach him an important lesson.
Here he was, trying to put the eternal, almighty, infinite God into the framework of the limited, temporal, finite human mind.
It was as impossible as the girl’s efforts to empty the sea into a hole in the sand.
I don’t know if Augustine finished his book but the point is obvious.
In thinking and speaking about God we have to do with Him whose thoughts, as the Bible says, no one knows except the Spirit of God (1Cor.2:11).
His judgments are unsearchable and His paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? (Rom.11:33,34).
And yet this invisible, immortal God has made Himself known to man. The psalmist speaks of the heavens declaring the glory of God (19:1). And in Revelation 1:8 we read of God describing Himself as the Alpha and the Omega, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty. With these thoughts then we approach the doctrine of the Trinity and our theme is:
One God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In the first place we see how the church came to have this teaching and,
secondly, the witness of Scripture to this teaching.
- Firstly then, how did the Christian church come to have the doctrine of the Trinity?
Well, this doctrine is not an invention of the early Christian church, as Jehovah Witnesses keep telling us.
Even if the church in those early times did not discover from Scripture that God is triune, the church in other places and other times would have done so.
It is inevitable, for that’s the way God is: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In fact, each Christian as he searches for God in the Bible and gets to know Him, will sooner or later discover that God is triune.
Mind you, as we seek to understand God in His dealings with us, and as we experience His presence in our lives, we find that in some ways the perfect, infinite being of God remains hidden from us for we are unable to fully comprehend Him.
Our minds are just not up to it.
Yet we also find that God has revealed Himself very clearly in Jesus Christ, His Son.
And we do not kneel before the altar of the unknown god like the religious men of Athens whom Paul met, but we worship God in spirit and in truth.
“God is light”, explains Scripture and we join in with the words that follow, “and in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1John 1:5).
The psalmist may seem to contradict that when he said that God made the darkness His covering around him (18:11), but we know that this does not prevent us from seeing God’s guiding hand in our lives.
Moreover, we may pray to him and tell Him our needs.
We find peace and rest in His presence.
God has revealed a great deal of His wonderful self and we can know and understand something of Him with a child-like approach, much like a small son who feels secure and happy knowing his father is the greatest of them all.
Yet, at the same time we know so little of the depth, height and width of Him, the all-wise and all-knowing God.
We know God by many names, but still the fullness of His being cannot be grasped by us.
If, according to 1Kings 8:27, the heavens and the highest of heaven cannot contain God, then consequently we have to remain very humble as we draw near to Him.
“Woe to Me!” cried Isaiah, “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the king, the Lord Almighty (Is.6:5). Indeed, as the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, God is in heaven and we are on earth, therefore we should be careful not to misrepresent Him (Eccl.5:2).
When the early Christian church formulated the doctrine of the Trinity, then it’s good for us to remember that believers of that bygone age did not do so in a kind of sterile atmosphere of some weekend retreat where they could calmly play around with words in a relaxed manner.
No, their attempt to formulate who God is, was done in the heat and turmoil of the great spiritual battles which the early church had to fight because of persecution, false teachers and heresies. The doctrine of the Trinity was forged into shape in situations that were trying and difficult.
It was no invention. Those believers searched the Scriptures to see how they could answer the false teachers who claimed that Christ was not God, that the Spirit was just a power, and that the O.T. and N.T. spoke of two different Gods, one who was love and the other a devil.
And these believers came to the conclusion, as so many did after them, that the Scriptures made two facts clear.
– One fact said that there is only one true God.
– The second fact said that this one God had revealed Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that each one is as fully God as the other.
There is a danger in teaching the doctrine of the Trinity from Scripture and it is our tendency to try too hard to go too far. We want to show how much we understand and how precise we can be in our speaking about God’s triune existence. But we will never be able to fully understand. This aspect of Father, Son and Holy Spirit each being fully God, and yet not having three Gods but one God, will always remain a mystery.
Now we just have to learn to live with this mystery, for we can’t do without it.
It’s probably easier for us to say what it isn’t because we know when people go wrong when they define God in a way that is scripturally incorrect.
Trying to define God is the wrong thing to do anyway.
We confess God in faith.
From the Scriptures we have come to know and to trust God in a certain way which we believe is true to His Word.
And now we have to watch it that our confession of faith about God’s triune being does not become a trying to define Him. No one, not even the church, can define God for He is not a mathematical formula or a theory.
For this reason we should not be too quick to use illustrations in trying to “prove” the Trinity to the unbeliever.
Do you think the unbeliever will be persuaded to believe in God because the three-in-one concept is there in the triangle, or the shamrock plant which has three leaves in one leaf?
Just because the family is one unit but consisting of father, mother and child, will not cause the sceptic to accept God with a vibrant living faith.
The doctrine of the Trinity has not come from the pen of the philosopher nor from the laboratory of the scientist but from the hearts and minds of God’s people who searched the Scriptures in order to distinguish truth from error.
This doctrine is not even the property of the theologian but of those who have come to know Jesus Christ as the divine Redeemer, the God-Man Saviour, and in whose lives the Holy Spirit has made the triune God a reality so precious that Christians have been prepared to lay down their lives for it rather than deny it.
- In our second point let us look at the witness of Scripture to the doctrine of the Trinity.
When we come to the Bible in order to know God then we read in Deut.6:4, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord!”
God found it necessary to reaffirm to the Israelites His unique existence right at the time they were about to enter the Promised Land and face peoples who had many gods.
In the face of that multi-god situation, God’s people were reminded that there is only one, true God. Many years later the prophet Isaiah was inspired to say of God, “I am the Lord and there is no other, besides me there is no God.” (45:5).
In this one true God, said the apostle James in his letter, there is no variation or shadow due to change (1:17).
And in the Hebrew letter we read that God is the same, yesterday, today and forever (13:8).
Now the orthodox Jew and the Muslim of today are also in full agreement with the O.T. witness of God being ONE and being the only one.
But they regard it a terrible mistake on the part of Christianity to claim that the Son and the Spirit are also God, for that is to them a denial of the testimony of the O.T. about God being ONE. For obvious reasons, therefore, the Jew and the Muslim have deep misgivings about the N.T.
Yet, even in the O.T. already there is a reference to God’s Spirit hovering over the face of the waters at the creation (Gen.1:2).
Of course we cannot point to that alone as conclusive evidence that God is triune but the evidence builds up as one goes on in the O.T.
When God created man He said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen.1:26).
Here God refers to Himself in the plural but in the next verse it’s singular, “So God created man in his own image.”
Then in the time of Abraham and on later occasions, the Scriptures speak of the Angel of the Lord.
It’s not an ordinary angel but the Angel of the Lord and quite often simply referred to as “the Lord.”
Again, we try not to jump to conclusions from one or two texts alone, yet in the light of the complete biblical witness, there is good reason to believe that the Angel of the Lord spoken of in the O.T. was the Son of God before He became Jesus born in Bethlehem.
He was the Christ before He came in the flesh.
And then there are the many prophecies in the O.T. that refer to the coming Messiah as the Son of God, and in one such messianic prophecy the Son is described as the Mighty God and everlasting Father (Is.9:6).
Also in Isaiah’s prophecy there is mention of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit of God enabled the prophets to bring the message of God and later Christ Himself went on to say that the same Spirit of God had also been given to Him (Luke 4).
Then we find that the N.T. naturally flows on from the O.T.
It fully upholds the O.T. teaching on God’s Truine existence and expands it further.
There are clear indications that God the Father sends God the Son into the world to be the Saviour.
And God the Holy Spirit is given to God the Son to enable Him to do the work of saving.
At Jesus’ baptism there is evidence of God triune.
Jesus the Son of God is baptised, the Spirit of God descends upon Him, and the voice of God the Father is heard from heaven (Mat.3:16).
And there is the command to the church to baptise new Christians into the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Mat.28:19).
And many a N.T. letter addressed to individuals and churches begins by given a greeting in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or ends with a benediction giving in the Name of the triune God.
We can look to one such benediction to highlight the fact that each person of the Trinity is fully God.
Take for example, the benediction at the end of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all..!” (2Cor.13:14).
The love of God must obviously refer to God the Father, for Christ and the Spirit are mentioned separately.
The Christian comes to know about God the Father when he thinks about the origins of all things.
There are certain questions that lead him to the Father, like: On whom do all creatures depend?
Who brought us into being?
Did we make ourselves or was it God?
Well, the Christian discovers from the Bible that in the O.T. God the Father has the special qualities of creating.
As natural fathers can generate new life, so also is the fact of life coming into being associated with God the Father.
He spoke and everything came into being.
But the concepts of caring and providing are also linked to fatherhood.
And thus we find it is God the Father who time and again delivers His people from oppression and who watches over them with His care and provides for them.
But not only does the Bible show God the Father being related to physical things, it is also indicated in the Bible that He is the Father of our salvation.
It’s the Father who has chosen His people for salvation from before the beginning of the world.
The beginnings of new spiritual life in the death and darkness of a sinner’s heart and mind originate with the Father.
All this leads the Christian who is busy with the Word of God to discover that Fatherhood is very much belonging to God.
God is Father, it’s as simple as that.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that the early church expressed its faith in the Apostles Creed by saying that it believed God to be the Father of our creation, our existence, both physically and spiritually.
Then also in the benediction are the words, “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The N.T. church is built on Christ.
People witnessed the miracles He did and we know about them from Scripture.
We also know of His miraculous birth, His death, resurrection and ascension.
We know that through Him there is deliverance from sin and guilt. He has come from God to have sinners restored to God.
He has spoken about Himself and the Father being one, that He did the work of His Father, yes, that He has been with the Father in all eternity.
Because of all this the Christian is made to confess that the Son too is truly God!
And again it comes as no surprise that the early church confessed in the Apostles’ Creed that they believed in God the Son and our redemption.
The last words in the benediction are, “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.’
How can the Christian have fellowship with a mere impersonal spirit, a mere force or influence?
With an “it”? The Christian can relate to the Father and to the Son for each has his own unique characteristics.
But so also the Holy Spirit.
The Christian learns from the Bible that the Spirit lives in him and then he discovers that this is God.
Jesus had spoken of the Holy Spirit as the One who would continue to do Jesus’ work on earth after He had ascended to heaven. And so the Christian discovers that God is not far away from them, but He is living in them and working through them. The Spirit does the same marvellous things Jesus had done. The Spirit gives courage to witness for God, supplies inner strength to carry on in difficult situations.
The Spirit of God makes the Bible come alive. He renews and sanctifies the believer.
In this way the believer of the early Church discovered that having the Spirit was having the same wonderful God all over again.
It’s no wonder then that in the Apostles’ Creed we hear the confession of the Holy Spirit being God and our sanctification.
God is one, yet within that one God there is diversity. That’s how God has been and will always be.
He is not, as some say, first Father, then at a later point in history He became Son, and then later again the Holy Spirit. This way of seeing God is rather like an actor who merely takes on different roles.
No, always and ever, it is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, yet one God.
The three Persons in the Trinity are distinct and yet not separate.
They each have a different function and yet are fully interrelated into one glorious divine being.
The use of the word “Person” in the Trinity can be confusing.
It is not the most ideal word but we do not really have anything better.
In the Trinity ‘person’ means to say that God has personality and that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are as it were extensions of this one personality.
God in His various manifestations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a personal being, He has personal characteristics, and is quite independent and exists quite by Himself and within Himself. To think of God, therefore, as being the same as the impersonal god of eastern religions, but only known by a different name, would be the deepest of insults to the triune God.
In conclusion, let us remind ourselves again that confessing God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is essential to salvation.
In other words, denying God’s triune being is putting oneself out of reach of salvation.
The more popular sects of our day such as Christian Science, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormonism, Christadelphianism, all make the same basic error by denying that Christ, or the Holy Spirit, are fully God.
They therefore bring a false gospel.
I like to close with a quote from a book called “The Living God” by R. T. France (p.114/5):
“The man who will get the nearest to understanding the trinity as the N.T. understands it, is not the philospher or the historian, but the man who knows for himself the God who made him, who has redeemed him, and whose power is undeniably producing in his life the fruit of holiness. He is the man who can read the N.T. and say: ‘This is where I belong; this is the life I know.’ And he is the man to whom the doctrine of the Trinity, (while it may stretch his mind to the limit and beyond), is a warm, living, vital echo of his authentic Christian experience. And as he comes to see it in this light, he will realise that the early Christians did not invent this doctrine from sheer cussedness, to make faith as difficult and unreasonable as they could, but that it forced itself on them, as part and parcel of a revolutionary new way of seeing things, the only way they could account for what God had done, and was doing still, for them. And as he sees the doctrine in this light, he will thank God for it, and rejoice in the loving, redeeming, sanctifying work of the triune God.”
Now that is the language of faith.
And that’s the language we must speak when we as Christian believers confess: I believe in ONE God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.