The Trinity Part 4

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Introduction

4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

This week we’re wrapping up our series on the Trinity. Over the last few weeks we’ve surveyed many of the texts that form and bear witness to this doctrine. And I’ve pointed out repeatedly that the Trinity is a doctrine that was born out of historical events, revealed in the Incarnation of the Son. One might say that the Trinity was revealed between the old and new testaments, through the birth of Jesus, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, events that were recorded for us not too many years later by the Apostles and their companions. Therefore, most of them wrote as experiential Trinitarians, men who walked with the incarnate Son, heard the voice of his Father from heaven, and experienced the power of the Holy Spirit. They wrote in light of those experiences.
Therefore, in our second week we explored what those same writers taught about the Son. And what we read was nothing short of incredible. Jesus is described as God himself in human flesh, that he claims to have authority to forgive sin, words that would be blasphemous if spoken by a mere man. Jesus is described as the creator of everything. He expects us to pray to him and the Apostles teach that we should worship him.
Then in the third week we explored what the NT writers wrote about the Holy Spirit. That he is much more than a mere power or impersonal force, but instead a divine person like the Son. That the Spirit refers to himself as a person who loves us and comforts us, and that he can be outraged, grieved and resisted. That the Holy Spirit, with the Son, shares the same divine name with the Father. That if you lie to the Holy Spirit that you lie to God himself.
Now, this week, I want explore how it is we understand these truths together, or as whole. How do we reconcile and affirm what the NT reveals to us about the Son and Spirit with what the OT previously taught and affirmed about God in general. For example, the OT teaches that there is only one God. In other words, how do we affirm the monotheism of the OT while also affirming the divine nature of the Son and Spirit revealed in the NT? Well, we’re going to spend the rest of our time tackling that very question.

Monotheism

And I want to begin by surveying, briefly, what the OT teaches us about God, specifically regarding the subject of monotheism, that there is only one true God. One of the hallmarks of the Jewish religion in the ancient world was that they claimed there was only one God. That this God was the creator of the heavens and the earth, that all other so-called gods were false. Monotheism set Israel apart from all the other nations. In fact, many have argued that the plagues against Egypt in the famous Exodus story were chosen to specifically to demonstrate that the Egyptian gods were false.
To this day Jews recite (morning and evening) what they call the Shema, a confession of faith that comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4-9. The word ‘shema’ literally means “hear” and it’s the first word of their confession starting in verse 4.

4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

Now, you’ll notice, at the heart of this confession is monotheism, “Yahweh our Lord, Yahweh is one.” Here they’re affirming both God’s uniqueness and his unity, or singularity. In fact, only a few verses earlier in Deuteronomy 5:6, we read,

6 “ ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

7 “ ‘You shall have no other gods before me.

8 “ ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 9 You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God,

I’ve actually heard Mormons argue that this text doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other gods besides Yahweh, but that the Israelites should only worship Yahweh.
However, if you’ve spend any time in the OT you’ll quickly see that such a claim is hard to maintain. For instance, just a chapter earlier Moses said to the Israelites, whom God had just recently delivered out of Egypt, that God was,

38 driving out before you nations greater and mightier than you, to bring you in, to give you their land for an inheritance, as it is this day, 39 know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.

And if that language isn’t strong enough the prophet Isaiah would later reiterate this truth over and over again. In Isaiah chapters 40-48, we read what some have called the “Trial of the False Gods” (James White, Forgotten Trinity, p. 33). In the OT Israel was constantly going through cycles of punishment, repentance and restoration because they were constantly forsaking Yahweh and going after other gods. And in these chapters of Isaiah we find the greatest expression of his uniqueness and of biblical monotheism. God sets up his cosmic courtroom and invites these false gods in for some, of what we might call, cross-examination. God relentlessly challenges these false gods and in the process reveals a lot about himself.
If you would, turn with me to Isaiah 43:10. We read,

10  “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD,

“and my servant whom I have chosen,

that you may know and believe me

and understand that I am he.

Before me no god was formed,

nor shall there be any after me.

Notice that last sentence, “Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.” Now, turn with me to Isaiah 44:6. We read,

6  Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel

and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts:

“I am the first and I am the last;

besides me there is no god.

7  Who is like me? Let him proclaim it.

Let him declare and set it before me,

since I appointed an ancient people.

Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen.

8  Fear not, nor be afraid;

have I not told you from of old and declared it?

And you are my witnesses!

Is there a God besides me?

There is no Rock; I know not any.”

The relentless point being made here is that there are no other gods beside Yahweh. Therefore, to worship anything else is idolatry. Any god that we create in our minds, apart from Yahweh, is false.
And this monotheism isn’t unique to the OT. It’s assumed and taught in the NT as well. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 8:4,

4 Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” 5 For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

So by the time we get to the NT this reality hasn’t changed. There is still only one God. The NT writers aren’t all of a sudden polytheists, they don’t believe in more than one God, instead they continue to affirm biblical monotheism.

The Trinity

So the question becomes how can they affirm monotheism while also affirming that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God? Isn’t that three gods? That’s a difficult question isn’t it? Well, I want to make sure we remember three particular truths that Scripture reveals to us, as we move forward, 1) there is only one God, 2) there are three distinct, and divine persons, and 3) those persons are coequal and coeternal. These three realities are plainly revealed and taught in the Bible (we’ve covered that a lot of them already), and as Christians we’re tasked with affirming all three of them.
However, we have to be careful not to diminish any of those three truths in our efforts to make sense of them together. In other words, in my attempts to affirm monotheism, for instance, I must be careful not to diminish or destroy the personhood and divine nature of any of the three persons. And this goes both ways, I must be careful not to diminish or destroy biblical monotheism in my attempt to affirm the persons of the Father, Son and Spirit. And since there are three pillars, there are multiple ways we can fall into error by diminishing or destroying one or more of these pillars.
For instance, if we deny monotheism we end up with polytheism (or multiple gods), if we deny the three persons we end up with Jesus praying to himself and not the Father (i.e. modalism), if we deny the equality between the persons we end up with members of the Godhead being more or less divine than one another, the Bible doesn’t teach this, it doesn’t teach that the Father is 1/3 of God, that the Son 1/3 of God and that the Spirit 1/3 of God. Instead the Scriptures indicate to us that the three persons share fully in the divine being of God.
So at the end of the day we want to do our best to be biblical, we want to rightly affirm everything that God has revealed to us in his word. This isn’t any easy task, in fact, it will consume the entirety of your Christian life, in other words, you will spend the rest of your life as a Christian seeking to understand and obey God’s word. This is a part of the process of having, as the Apostle Paul puts it, our minds renewed, being transformed by the renewal of our minds, so that we’re able then to discern what is good and acceptable, or what is true and what is false. And as I said at the outset, our goal is to believe right things about God so that we might worship him truly, and obey him properly. This ought to be the heart of our pursuits.

Person vs. being

Now, as we seek to affirm these three pillars that I’ve mentioned, 1) monotheism, 2) the three divine persons, and 3) the equality between those persons, the first place we tend to get tripped up, is attempting to see how three distinct persons can be called one God. And the reason this is a challenge, I think, is largely because we’re so creaturely. We immediately attempt to find an analogy in the created universe for God, we want to find another thing to compare him to, however, this is where we go wrong. We must first remember that God is holy, that he’s otherly, or different from us. There isn’t anything analogous to the nature of his being here on earth. In the same way, we find it challenging to comprehend the idea that he is eternal, or without beginning or end, that he’s not created, because everything around us is created, but God is not created, and that’s hard to wrap our minds around.
The second place we typically get tripped up, and this is where most Unitarians get hung up too, is that we usually assume that the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘person’ are synonymous, or the same thing. Whereas, in the doctrine of the trinity making a distinction between the idea of ‘being’ and ‘person’ is essential. Let me give you an example, a book has being, in other words, it exists, but a book is not a person. Whereas humans are both beings and persons, they posses both qualities. So when the Scriptures say that God is one yet with three persons, what it’s saying is that God is one being with three persons subsisting within that single being. Now, on the face of it that seems utterly foreign to us, because there is no earthly creature that contains more than one person within its being. This is why we typically assume that the concepts of being and person are one in the same, because we’ve never encountered a creature more complex than that, but God is.
God is tri-personal, where three persons share the same being of God. This is why the NT writers can speak of the Father as God, the Son as God, and the Spirit as God without teaching that there are three gods. This is why Paul sees no contradiction applying the the words of God (or Yahweh) back in Isaiah 6 to the Holy Spirit in Acts 28. This is also why Jesus can call the Father his God in John 20:17 when he says,

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”

This text doesn’t indicate that Jesus is less than God, for we’ve already seen elsewhere that Jesus is God, rather this only confirms what we already knew, that the person of the Father is God, and it would be strange for Jesus call him anything else.
So, in the doctrine of the Trinity, distinctions are absolutely critical. Knowing the difference between ‘being’ and ‘person’ helps us to see how the three persons revealed in Scripture can be distinct yet one. It’s how we make sense of so many texts in the Bible concerning God and the three persons of the Godhead.

Economic Trinity

Moreover, the entire redemptive story of the NT demonstrates the validity of what we call the Trinity, for instance, we see the members of the Godhead working in concert with one another to carry out our redemption. Theologians call this the Economic Trinity. When you consider the storyline of the NT you quickly discover that each person within the Godhead possess different roles in accomplishing our salvation. I’ve mentioned it several times before, that the Trinity was revealed to us, out of necessity, due to the Incarnation, when the Son of God became a man. Up until that point there was little that necessitated the further revealing of God’s nature, but because it was the unique role of the Son to become a man and give up his life as a ransom, God’s nature was made manifest to a much greater extent. And so it was with the Spirit, Jesus promised to send the Spirit after he departed, and told his disciples that the Spirit would convict, help, comfort, and lead them into all truth. The plan of redemption was revealed in all its glory, the Father sending the Son, the Son making atonement for sin, and the Spirit keeping the elect until the day of salvation. The three persons in the Godhead working in perfect harmony without contention or disunity in their work of salvation.
We see this repeatedly in Jesus’ ministry, for example, in John 4:34, while talking to his disciples, Jesus says,

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.

and John 5:19, when Jesus says to the Jews,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.

Jesus tells them that whatever he does, whoever he heals, and whatever he says is in accordance with the will of his Father in heaven. And that if the Jews deny him then they deny the Father also, because the Son is not at odds with the Father.
Then again in John 10:25-30, a text we looked at a couple of weeks ago, illustrates this even more,

“I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”

The Father and the Son are unified in their mission to save a people for themselves out of the world.
And so is the Spirit, in John 16:12-15, Jesus says to his disciples,

12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

There is perfect harmony in the Godhead.
And the disciples would later, in their letters, affirm this as well. Albert mentioned last week 1 Peter 1:2, when Peter’s is giving introductions he says,

To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood:

Again, the three persons of the Trinity are unified if their mission, they are a perfect trinity.

Subordinationism

Now, I want to mention something else at this point, many Unitarians have argued that because we see a difference in function between the members of the Trinity, that it must imply inferiority or superiority between the members. For instance, they assume that in order for the Son or the Spirit to be fully God they must perform the same function. This is the error I alluded to earlier that’s called subordinationism, where Unitarians argue that since the Son submits to the Father’s will that this must indicate that the Son cannot truly be God. However, their assumption is wrong, we must always remember that difference in function does not indicate inferiority in nature. Or to say it another way, difference in roles does not equal difference in value. We even acknowledge this principle in our daily lives. We understand that our worth is not determined by the work we do, that a person’s worth is not determined by whether they mop floors or own a fortune 500 company, despite whether we’re tempted to or not. An nor is it so in the Godhead, the submission to the Father’s will is voluntary, and as we read earlier, Jesus called it his food to do the Father’s will. The writer of Hebrews even says that “for the joy that was set before him, [he] endured the cross.”

The Trinity in the OT

Now, as we close, I want to address one other often asked question. Do we see the Trinity in the OT? The answer is yes and no. We don’t see the Trinity explicitly revealed in the OT, however, in light of what’s been revealed to us in the NT we can see hints of it in the OT.
Theologian B.B. Warfield once said, “The Old Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what is in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.”
The Apostle Peter also eluded to this reality in 1 Peter 1:10-12,

10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

In the OT the prophets searched and inquired carefully, but they could not see in detail how God would accomplish their salvation through the coming Messiah, but in light of NT revelation there are OT texts leap off the page with deeper meaning and greater fulfillment that the prophets could never has fully seen at the time.
One of the most prominent is probably Isaiah 9:6-7, where divinity is attributed to the coming savior,

6  For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

7  Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Conclusion

The more you search and study the Scriptures the greater the reward. To see God reveal and carry out his plan of redemption from Genesis 3 to Revelation is a privilege and a delight, but let’s also realized that “the Trinity is a doctrine not revealed merely in words but … in the very action of the Triune God in redemption itself! We know who God is by what he has done in bringing us to himself.” (James White, The Forgotten Trinity, p. 166) Therefore, may we see to it that we do not neglect such a great salvation.

Prayer

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