The Mystery of the Trinity

Galatians 3:26–4:7 ESV

for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Scripture: Galatians 3:26-4:7

Belgic Confession Lesson: Articles 8-9

Sermon Title: The Mystery of the Trinity

           For the last number of weeks when we have used the Belgic Confession, we have been focused on the Bible. What it is, what it does, what should and should not be considered Scripture, how it operates in our lives and for our faith. As we heard when we recited Article 8 earlier, the Confession now turns our attention to God; specifically, what it means for God to be Trinity. So tonight we are looking at the big picture, which is likely familiar territory for a number of us, but it is beneficial to be reminded. The next grouping in the Belgic Confession, as we will see in future messages, examines the distinct persons of the Godhead and what we understand about them. Tonight we are going to start off by reading from parts of Galatians 3 and 4, but I also encourage you to keep Article 9 close by as I will be referring to that quite often as well.

           Brothers and sisters in Christ, Neal Plantinga Jr., a pastor, author, and former president of Calvin Seminary, some years back wrote a lengthy study that covers most of our creeds and confessions. He begins the chapter that deals with the Trinity like this: “Imagine: your dentist is tinkering with a particularly sensitive tooth. He has cotton, hooks and mirrors, a small vacuum cleaner, and both his hands in your mouth.” We really can almost feel like we are in that dentist chair, and most of us probably do not particularly like that thought.  “Your eyes wander to his name tag: Abraham Weinstein, D.D.S. He probes a place where the pain is most exquisite. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘Do you really think Jesus was divine?’”

           In our lives and world today, most people couldn’t imagine something like that happening. Whether it would be in the middle of a dental exam or at another of our most vulnerable moments, that someone who yields the ability to inflict greater amounts of pain or deal very gently with us would ask us questions about theology, let alone the divinity of Jesus. I know a few of you and others in our area that enjoy talking theology and the Bible. If you run into a pastor on the street or pick up the phone and call one of us, you can pick our brains about what we think and understand and claim to know about different topics. But most people usually don’t have such probing questions to ask at such sensitive times. 

           It’s not just that heavy theological and doctrinal topics are not often talked about, but today it feels like things that dentist was asking about are fairly settled. Of course Jesus is divine, why would anyone think any different? Or we can broaden the matter, and say, everyone knows the Trinity is real, end of story. But that has not always been the case—there was a time, Plantinga refers to, when, “The arguments were punctuated with fists and clubs.” 

Those times were long before the Belgic Confession was even written in the 1500s. It goes back to the 4th century and earlier. If you look at the last paragraph of Article 9, you see a list of religions and names. The doctrine of the Trinity is affirmed and maintained against the Jews, Mohammedans (who we today would call Muslims), and then the heretics—Marcion, Mani, Praxeas, Sabellius, Samosatenus, Arius, and the like. These other religions, false Christians, and their followers are deemed to not follow the same God. There is a right way and there are wrong ways to understand the make-up of the Trinity. The fact that this had in the past been such a sensitive topic, even viewed as worth injuring or taking someone’s life may be why DeBres saw it as important to put so much detail into these two articles.

We will come back to this list later on in our message. It is fitting to know what has been discussed about our God in the past. What has the tradition of the church, assumedly with the help of the Holy Spirit, affirmed and passed on to us, and what has been agreed to as false.  But before we do that, we want to know what basis for the Trinity do we find in Scripture, what does the Bible tell us. Or we can phrase it how Article 9 does, the proof for the Trinity of Persons in One God. 

First of all, it references Genesis. In chapter 1 verses 26 and 27—God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…And God created man in his own image, male and female he created them.” Shortly after in Genesis 3, after the Fall, God declares in verse 22, “Behold, the man is become as one of us.” We encounter that from the very beginning of history, all the way back to creation, that God speaks of himself in both singular and plural language, as one as well as multiple. The Confession adds that in this we see unity. 

This is unique and it begins the mystery that the Trinity. How can something be one and also several? Hopefully we will shed some light on that question going forward, but what we can see here is that it seems that there is such a difference in the Godhead that communication among the different persons is possible. “Let us make man in our image…our likeness…He has become as one of us.” Those words do not carry only a tone of declaring, but of sharing with one another, too. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit engage socially with one another.

The Confession says that what is obscure in the Old Testament —because we are not told who makes up the Trinity, gets some clarity in the New Testament. It begins with what we associate with baptism. Matthew 3 brings us to the Jordan River—Jesus was to be baptized by John, and heaven opens, we hear a voice—that is the Father, and the Spirit is said to descend in the shape of a dove. We also think of the Great Commission, the call of all disciples involves baptism “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” 

What we see first of all in Jesus’ own baptism is that the three persons of the Trinity are present and accounted for. God was there in total—Jesus was not sent into the world to do his own thing and gets left behind. No, all three persons are included and part of the mission that Jesus the Christ came to accomplish. Similarly, what we find shortly after that in the Confession, a reference to the gospel of Luke, when an angel came and spoke to Mary. “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High,” again, assuming God the Father, “the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God.” We believe that these three persons exist, and exist with a unity together.

Galatians 4 verses 4 through 6, part of the passage we read, gives us a similar look at the presence of each of these persons. “God sent his Son,” and Paul describes him in our human form, while also identifying that he is able to redeem us. It continues, “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out ‘Abba, Father.’” Not only do we find existence of three persons in the one God but we find that the three each have particular functions which are different from the others. While equal and eternal and worthy of the same worship—the Father has his calling, the Son has his own, and the Holy Spirit his own as well. 

When we have grown up with this and presumed to not worship three gods but one, it all can seem fairly clear. Yet there is a pivotal and humbling statement about halfway through Article 9. “In all these places [in Scripture] we are fully taught that there are three persons in one only divine essence. And although this doctrine far surpasses all human understanding, nevertheless we now believe it by means of the Word of God, but expect hereafter to enjoy the perfect knowledge and benefit thereof in heaven.” What that boils down to is that we get enough from the Bible to believe it, but only when we meet God in eternity will we wholly understand it. 

There is mystery surrounding the Trinity. As people, especially in the early church, tried to wrap their minds around it, the tradition of the church declared some of them to be wrong, to be heretical. Looking at that list that we heard earlier, and there were people like Mani who believed that humans cannot respond to salvation that is supposedly in Jesus Christ. The benefit of what he did cannot transfer over to us. So Jesus really should not be seen as a divine Savior.

Others like Sabellius held to a view of modalism. There is one God, but he has different modes. Either God appears as the Father, or as the Son, or as the Holy Spirit. There might be unique times when you see all three present, but for the most part they are different descriptions for different times. If someone says the Trinity is like water—which can be steam, liquid, or ice, that is not accepted because it is a form of modalism, water can only be in one state at a time.

A man named Arius was one of the most famous heretics, and he is known for claiming that Jesus was not fully divine. He believed that Jesus was a creature—and so he could not redeem fallen humanity. People like Samosatenus, also known as Paul of Samosata, built upon this by saying that Jesus was a man but he was adopted by God in such a way that he was infused into God. Even if we overlook that it brings into question the eternal divinity of Jesus, it gets rid of the understanding that the Trinity is made up of three distinct persons.

All of these are heresies that have come up in the past against the Trinity. They mistake and contradict what our tradition as a holy catholic church believes—that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinguished but not divided or intermixed, there are properties that each only have, but they are all co-eternal, co-essential, and they are all God. 

It is important that we as believers are mindful of our beliefs about God, and God as Triune. It is important because it does differentiate between whether we should look at someone as a true believer or if they are someone who is professing a false or different faith completely. Our beliefs about God and the persons of God are essentials in our faith. The reason why these men and their followers were labeled as heretics and treated so harshly is because this is something we in the church must take seriously.

To begin to give more or less credit and praise to one or more of the persons of the Trinity is a distortion of who God is. We also must see that someone who does not profess the Trinity is worshiping someone different than us. They are going against not only the word of God that we believe to reveal him, but they are going against God himself. The Triune God is one of those things that separates orthodox Christians from people who do not know the truth—we see that our God is not their God. If that is true, then there can be no salvation in their god.    

           There is importance to understanding where our knowledge of the Trinity comes from as well, and this is where we will wrap-up tonight. Not only do we know the Trinity because we find evidence in Scripture and what followed in the tradition of the church, but Article 9 also says that we know the Trinity is real from the way we feel in ourselves. Our faith is not only intellectual—we are not just making sure we have the most well-rationalized beliefs, but our faith is lived and practiced, and that with God. When we read in Galatians 3 and 4 that we are sons of God, and we could make that more general and inclusive to women and girls as daughters of God—believers cannot help but feel something. That we are not just human beings, that we are not just members on a list in a book, but that we are called son and daughter, heir and heiress of the promises in Christ—to know that causes us to feel truth.

           Understanding that we are not on our own and God is off in his kingdom, but that he is here, and believing that he has made his temple in each of his children by way of the Holy Spirit—we know the Trinity to be true and real and effective in this world. For our closing song tonight we are going to be singing, “Because He Lives.” In that song we put forth the question, “You ask me how I know he lives?” and we give the answer, “He lives within my heart.” It is absolutely true that we know Jesus lives because of Scripture, and yet the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us that Jesus is living, that God is still in control, and he gives us his comfort even in our own lives. Amen.