Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

A blessed Holy Trinity to you.

While both Jesus and the Holy Spirit each have their Feast Days, God the Father does not.

So the Church speaks of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit on Trinity Sunday.

And, as we have just confessed, one cannot be saved without believing in the Holy Trinity.

“The man upstairs”.

“The Big Guy” “The Higher Power”.

“Intelligent design”.

The Masonic “G”.

“The Great Scout Master of all Scouts”.

“The Head Chief”

All monikers for God.

They’re spoken either to bring God down to our level, like “he’s my buddy”, or because there is fear about offending others using a name too specific, or is influenced by Deism, or other non-Christian religions, or an attempt to boil the “concept of God” down to the “least common denominator.”

Enough of these.

We worship none of them.

We give offense and break the Second Commandment when we use them of God.

God has a Name.

Today we remember what it is.

His Name is YHWH.

It is a proper Name.

“I am Who I am” or “I am that I am”.

And this God reveals Himself as Three Persons: Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Three persons, one God.

That is what we confess.

The Trinity always was.

This essence of God is not missing from the Old Testament.

The Father spoke at creation.

John tells us that Jesus was present at Creation, indeed God’s very Word.

And the Holy Spirit was hovering over the face of the deep.

“Let us” God says, “Let us make man in our own image.

So on Trinity we confess God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We acknowledge that He made us, that He redeemed us and that He sanctifies us, calling us to faith in Himself.

God MADE the Heavens and the Earth

Today, we are going to learn about the Trinity through viewing the Creation Account in .

The first four words of the Scriptures declare that there is a God: In the beginning, God.

The Bible reminds us,

There have always been a lot of fools.

They walk among us today as well.

There are those who try to juxtapose faith and science.

They fall into the logical error of the “either/or” fallacy.

You cannot believe both, it’s either one or the other.

Such is a false argument.

All of the great scientists of the past knew this: Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, and Einstein.

It was Albert Einstein who said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

It’s not either/or.

It is both/and.

The root of the word science, “sciencia” is the same root as one of the attributes of God: God is omniscient- which means “God KNOWS all”.

The word science is the Latin word for “knowledge”.

Today, you would hardly know that.

We have science marches that debunk religion as took place last month; and we have religion that holds that science is the root of all evil.

Both views are entirely wrong.

There is rogue science, like Macro Evolution, rogue because no one is allowed to question or challenge it without grave consequences academically, politically, or scientifically — true science is built upon always questioning its own theories continuously, and there is rogue faith that does not see the beauty in science.

Again, what Einstein said holds true: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

To this, the Scripture points us to its first four words: In the Beginning, God.

And God created the heavens and the earth.

No accident.

As Greg Koukl says, “No Big Bang without a Big Banger”.

No random beginning.

No accidental collision of atoms (where did they come from??), no aliens from outer space, no amoeba on backs of crystals.

One cannot be a scientist without seeing the intricacies of nature, the complexity of each system in each living being, the interrelationship of living beings with their environment.

To believe that these things happened accidently requires more faith than is required than what it takes to believe the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The Father said the word.

The Son is the Word.

The Holy Spirit brings the life out of the formless deep.

“AND GOD SAID”

In Six Days God creates everything.

In each case the Bible records “AND God said” The word “and” shows a chained together, foreward moving, ordered creation set in motion by God’s Word:

Let there be light

Let there be a firmament

Let there be Land and Plants

Let there be sun, moon and stars

Let there be Fish and Birds

Let there be Animals.

The Scripture does not go into the how of what happens: When God said something, how did it happen exactly?

That’s what science sets out to discover.

God Made Man Differently and Gave Him DOMINION over the Earth

God breaks this chain when He speaks of man.

Instead of “And” God says “Let”!

There you have the Second reference to the Trinity right in the First Chapter of the Bible, as the world is created.

Let US.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

goes from a macro-view to a micro-view.

It describes how man was made:

This creation was different from all others.

Man was not a part of the “and” train.

He was formed by God out of the dust of the Ground, and was brought alive by God breathing in him the ruach of life.

God then created woman, meaning from the “womb of man” out of Adam’s rib:

:

Man has some similarities to the animals, but according to God, is not from the animals.

The image of God is reflected in the union of male and female.

And that image was God’s holiness.

God then gives DOMINION— that is rule, authority, and stewardship over all of the life and all of the earth.

To rule over it in God’s stead.

Of course, this all comes to a crashing end when Eve falls for the devil’s temptation and Adam follows suit.

They fall into sin and die to holiness.

They die to God.

Except God’s love is more powerful than their sin.

He promises a Savior.

The third reference in Genesis to the Trinity.

For the one who would be from Eve and Adam’s seed would have his heel nipped by the serpent, but in turn would crush the serpent’s head.

There is Jesus, right in Genesis Chapter 3.