2: The Triune God
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Titus 3:4-7
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Welcome to Family Worship at Eastern Hills Baptist Church this morning. If you’re in the room today, thank you for being here to join together with the rest of the body in person to worship our Lord. If you’re joining us online, thank you for joining us from wherever you are right now to worship, and we’re glad that this technology is helpful for you to be connected to the church family, even though you couldn’t be here today. Thanks to the praise band for leading us in musical praise and worship this morning, and I’d like to say thanks to our Welcome team for their faithful service out in the foyer every week.
Announcements
Announcements
Pastor’s Bible Study tonight at 5:30 in MH
Men’s Breakfast next Saturday (1/15) at 8:00 am in FLC
If Joe didn’t mention Business meeting time change, do so… no longer on 1/16, now on 1/23 at 5:30.
I also received an email this morning letting me know that this Tuesday is the New Mexico March for Life. Visit newmexicomarchforlife.com for information on the events of the day, which include a sidewalk prayer vigil in the morning, a Pro-Life Rally from 1-3, the March for Life itself at 3:30, and a Candlelight Prayer Vigil at 7 that evening.
LMCO ($39,469)
Opening
Opening
We started a new kind of sermon series last Sunday morning. Eastern Hills Baptist Church has a Statement of Faith that addresses 20 core doctrines of Christian belief, and we believe that all of us in the church family should have understanding of and agreement with those core doctrines in order for us to be sure that we are all on the same page theologically. So throughout this year, we are going to go through our Statement of Faith in four parts, one part each season. We’re calling the series “We Believe,” and part 1 is “God and His Word.” This series will be somewhat topical in nature, as we will look at a different article of our Statement of Faith each week.
This morning, the passage we’re going to read for our opening is more illustrative than focal. Let’s stand and honor God’s holy Word as we read it together:
4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, 5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6 He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.
PRAYER, including the Kings in the death of Joe; Larry, Ted, and others (COVID)
Last week, we opened with a consideration of the Scriptures themselves. The Scriptures are God’s special revelation of Himself to humanity, and as such, they are to be the source, or what informs, our theology—our way of thinking about God.
If we are not obtaining our knowledge of God from the Scriptures, then whatever knowledge of Him that we think we have will be suspect. That’s not to say that any other ways of thinking about God (such as seeing His hand in creation) are necessarily wrong, but that if we do theology and from that develop doctrine apart from the Scriptures, then we have no reason to trust in the conclusions that we draw, because the Bible is the only certain source we have about God and it tells us (as I mentioned last week) the truth about who God is and about who we are.
We bear the image of God, but because of sin, we bear that image in a broken, flawed way. Therefore, our contemplation about God must be firmly planted in the truth of Scripture in order to be trustworthy, because He is the Creator, we are the creature, and all we can ever know for certain about God is what He has chosen to disclose to us in holy Scripture. And then, even in our contemplation of Scripture, we must always keep in mind that our “contemplators” are flawed because of sin as well, and so if we land somewhere that Scripture doesn’t support, the problem is not with Scripture—it’s with us. If we find ourselves in that kind of position, it’s not the Bible that needs to change. We do.
With that being said, the doctrine that we are studying today is the doctrine of the Trinity, which is affirmed in the second article of our Statement of Faith:
EHBC’s Statement of Faith, Article 2: God
There is one and only one living and true God. … The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence, or being.
“But, Bill,” you might say, “if our theology must always be informed by the Scriptures, then is the doctrine of the Trinity unscriptural? For the word “trinity” does not appear in Scripture, and the Bible never directly declares that God is triune.” If you’re thinking this way, bonus points for you for knowing your Bible and asking the right question, given my introduction. And while this is the right question, the answer to the question is “no.” The Trinity is not an unscriptural concept, because while the Bible doesn’t use that word to describe God, it doesn’t need to. The doctrine of the Trinity is taken from the testimony of the Scriptures.
Obviously, I can’t possibly preach everything there is to say about the Trinity. Not only that, but I don’t and can’t understand everything about the nature of our triune God. But this morning, we are going to try to unpack the mystery of the Trinity a little bit so that we can have a good foundational understanding of the reality, the importance, and some of the beauty of this core doctrine of orthodox Christian faith.
1: The REALITY of the Trinity
1: The REALITY of the Trinity
Where did we get this explanation of God as “Trinity” or “tri-unity” “three and yet one?” It is not a new concept in the slightest. The Latin theologian Tertullian, who lived in the late second and early third centuries, is credited for coining the term trinitas as a word to encompass the biblical witness of the co-divinity of the distinct Father, Son, and Spirit, yet the complete oneness of the Godhead, saying that God is una substantia, or “of one substance.” The concept of the Trinity, which is really our understanding of the very nature of God, was the central doctrine discussed at the first two big church councils in the fourth century: Nicaea in 325, and Constantinople in 381.
Our opening passage from Titus this morning is an example of the threefold formula that appears in many passages in the New Testament:
Titus 3:4–7 (CSB)
4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, 5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6 He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.
In this block of four verses, we see the Trinity on display. Both God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son are referred to as our Savior, but Paul refers to the completion of God’s work as being through the activity of the Holy Spirit. All three Persons of the Godhead, in unity with a single purpose, a single love, a single mercy, a single grace, are evident and active as one God in our salvation.
I did a single point on the doctrine of the Trinity last year during our Heresies series when I preached specifically on God the Holy Spirit, and I’m going to reiterate some of that point here this morning.
First, we must affirm the fact that there is ONE, and ONLY ONE, God. It would be easy to slip into the heresy called “tritheism” without this starting affirmation. Tritheism says that there are actually three “gods”—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—all working together, but that they are completely separate individual beings. This is false. God has declared that He alone is God, and there is no other god but Him:
9 Remember what happened long ago, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and no one is like me.
Solomon declared this truth for the nations when He dedicated the Temple of the Lord when it was completed:
60 May all the peoples of the earth know that the Lord is God. There is no other!
Christianity is monotheistic. We believe that there is only one God, the Lord. Polytheistic faiths such as Hinduism believe that there are many gods. Pantheism believes that god is in everything and everything is god. Atheism says that there is no god at all. These are all false. There is one and only one God, the Lord over all creation, the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible:
24 This is what the Lord, your Redeemer who formed you from the womb, says: I am the Lord, who made everything; who stretched out the heavens by myself; who alone spread out the earth;
Our Statement of Faith was largely taken from the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, and where our Article 2 has the ellipsis (the three dots), the Baptist Faith & Message says this:
The Baptist Faith & Message 2000, Article 2: God
Same opening and ending sentence as ours.
[God] is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal Being, the Creator, Redeemer, Preserver, and Ruler of the Universe. God is infinite in holiness and all other perfections. God is all powerful and all knowing; and His perfect knowledge extends to all things past, present, and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures. To Him we owe the highest love, reverence, and obedience.
Amen! This is who our God is. To quote Deuteronomy: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” And He is awesome. And I don’t mean that he’s really cool, the way we usually use “awesome” today. I mean that He is the most awe-inspiring Being who has ever, will ever, could ever exist. He is worthy of our total and complete worship, our absolute obedience, our highest praise, and our greatest adoration. All glory to Him and Him alone!
So we’ve looked at His “oneness”, but what about His “threeness?” As I said earlier, there are many places in Scripture where the threefold imagery of God comes into view, even in the Old Testament. But in the Old Testament, the picture is out of focus and conceptual, waiting for the coming of Jesus to bring it into sharp relief. Consider the visitation of Abraham in Genesis 18:
1 The Lord appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the heat of the day. 2 He looked up, and he saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to meet them, bowed to the ground, 3 and said, “My lord, if I have found favor with you, please do not go on past your servant.
Who appeared to Abraham? The Lord, singular, Whom Abraham referred to as “my lord,” singular. And how did the Lord choose to reveal Himself to Abraham that day? As three, and as we look further, we see that the three speak as one:
9 “Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him. “There, in the tent,” he answered. 10 The Lord said, “I will certainly come back to you in about a year’s time, and your wife Sarah will have a son!” Now Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent behind him.
13 But the Lord asked Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Can I really have a baby when I’m old?’ 14 Is anything impossible for the Lord? At the appointed time I will come back to you, and in about a year she will have a son.”
They asked the first question, but then “The Lord said...” And then verse 13: “But the LORD asked Abraham,” and twice He said, “I will come back to you.” Again, this isn’t an appearance of the Trinity per se, but it’s a dusky reflection of the truth that we would come to understand fully through the incarnation of Christ. The New Testament is just FULL of trinitarian references. For example, we see the distinctiveness of the three Persons of the Trinity clearly at Jesus’ baptism:
16 When Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water. The heavens suddenly opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased.”
The Son is baptized. The Spirit descends. The Father speaks. The Christian faith is monotheistic: there is one God. And the Christian faith is trinitarian: there is only one God, who exists eternally in three distinct, co-equal divine Persons.
But what about other monotheistic faiths? What do they say about the Trinity? They have it wrong. The God of the Bible is not like Allah, worshiped by the Muslims. In fact, the Quran specifically says that Allah is above having a son, and that if you asked Him, Jesus would say that He never claimed that He was God. This is just untrue. The Mormons claim to be monotheistic, but they believe that our god was once as we are, and that through good works we can someday be as he is, gods ourselves… hardly monotheistic. The Jehovah’s Witnesses deny the divinity of both Christ and the Holy Spirit, and teach that the doctrine of the Trinity is heresy.
No, we worship one God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
It’s helpful for us to read and listen to the church fathers when we get to thinking and talking about such subjects. Perhaps the clearest (but not the simplest) confession of the doctrine of the Trinity is found in the Athanasian Creed, which was written in the 5th century, and named after a 4th century theologian named Athanasius who defended trinitarian thinking against the heresy of Arianism.
We worship one God in trinity and the Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the divine being.
For the Father is one person, the Son is another, and the Spirit is still another.
But the deity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coeternal in majesty.
What the Father is, the Son is, and so is the Holy Spirit.
Uncreated is the Father; uncreated is the Son; uncreated is the Spirit.
The Father is infinite; the Son is infinite; the Holy Spirit is infinite.
Eternal is the Father; eternal is the Son; eternal is the Spirit:
And yet there are not three eternal beings, but one who is eternal; as there are not three uncreated and unlimited beings, but one who is uncreated and unlimited.
Almighty is the Father; almighty is the Son; almighty is the Spirit: And yet there are not three almighty beings, but one who is almighty.
Thus the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God: And yet there are not three gods, but one God.
Thus the Father is Lord; the Son is Lord; the Holy Spirit is Lord: And yet there are not three lords, but one Lord.
Just as Christian truth compels us to confess each distinct person as both God and Lord, so catholic [universally true] religion forbids us to say that there are three gods or lords.
— The Athanasian Creed, 5th C.
So this is the reality of the Trinity. Our God, the God of the Bible, is one and He is three. But the next question is: “So what? Why is this important? Does it really matter if I affirm the Trinity? Isn’t this just kind of a really high-minded theological idea that doesn’t really matter in the real world?” These questions bring us to our second point:
2: The IMPORTANCE of the Trinity
2: The IMPORTANCE of the Trinity
The fact that God is Trinity is of utmost importance...Of FIRST importance, even. In fact, if we get Trinity wrong, we get basically everything else about God wrong. This is why it’s a doctrine that we can’t shy away from, even though its mystery doesn’t fit perfectly in our squishy brains. Trinitarian doctrine is absolutely critical to both our understanding and worship of God.
You see, it goes like this: If we don’t affirm the triunity of God, we don’t affirm the biblical revelation God. If we don’t affirm the biblical God, whom are we worshiping, exactly? Because if we don’t affirm the Trinity, we end up in heresy. That heresy might be that we decide that the Son or the Spirit or both don’t exist, but God is just playing different roles at different times (modalism). That heresy might be that we say that either one or more of the three are not fully God at all, such as that each is just one-third God (partialism), or that the Son is a created being (Arianism), or that the Spirit is not a Person (Macedonianism). We might land on the heresy that we’ve already mentioned, tritheism: that there are three separate gods in essence, nature, and being, and we become polytheists.
Now, the next three Sundays after today will be spent one each on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. So I’m not going to go too in depth here on each Person of the Godhead. However, it is important for us to take a moment to consider the ramifications of the Trinity as it relates to the Gospel of Christ, so there will be a little overlap here between today and the next three weeks. Consider this a bit of a primer for those.
Timothy George, in His essay entitled The Nature of God: Being, Attributes, and Acts, spoke of the importance of the Trinity this way:
“The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary theological framework for understanding the biblical account of Jesus as the true story of God—and if what the Bible says about Jesus is anything other than that, we have no gospel.”
— Timothy George, “The Nature of God: Being, Attributes, and Acts,” A Theology for the Church
So for a moment, conceptualize the idea of the Trinity as a gemstone (no, I’m not making an analogy for the Trinity). As we turn the stone, we catch a new facet, and see the light in a new way. It’s only in turning the gemstone that we will be able to see the whole and comprehend the beauty. So let’s turn the Trinity for a moment.
First, we acknowledge that the Father is God. But the Father is holy, perfect, and completely “other” than us. We understand from Scripture that no one can look upon Him and live, that because of His absolute purity, we would be undone in His presence.
1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphim were standing above him; they each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies; his glory fills the whole earth. 4 The foundations of the doorways shook at the sound of their voices, and the temple was filled with smoke. 5 Then I said: Woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips, and because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies.
Isaiah was given this vision of God and found himself in great distress, believing Himself to be ruined because of His sin and God’s absolute holiness. Paul refers to this “otherness” of God as being that He dwells in “unapproachable light”:
1 Timothy 6:15b–16 (CSB)
15 He is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords, 16 who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see, to him be honor and eternal power. Amen.
He is not man. He is not like man (Num. 23:19). He stands against evil (Hab. 1:13) as a consuming fire (Isa. 33:14, Heb 12:29). And since this is who the Father is, we could never stand in His presence because of our sinfulness. A vast chasm exists between us and the Father! So how could we then be reconciled to Him?
We can be reconciled to the Father because He sent God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. God the Son is fully God—eternally existent, being present and active in Creation, and being one in nature and essence with the Father.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.
5 Now, Father, glorify me in your presence with that glory I had with you before the world existed.
However, the Son of God took on flesh, became a man, and since He has taken on our humanity, He is the go-between for us and God, the mediator of the way of salvation. Because He is God, He could live a perfectly sinless life. And since He is man, He can stand in our place, receiving the wrath of God in our place, paying the sin debt that we cannot pay. Without His divinity, He couldn’t be perfect, nor would He love us enough to die for us and pay the price we owe. Without His humanity, He wouldn’t be paying the price that mankind owes.
14 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus,
15 Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance, because a death has taken place for redemption from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
And finally, the Holy Spirit is God, also eternally existent and also an active part of Creation:
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
The Spirit is exactly like Jesus in divinity and power, and is even referred to as the Spirit of the Son:
6 And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”
(another great Trinity passage, right?) When we are saved, the Spirit indwells us, coming to live in our hearts, and by His presence we are sealed for the day of redemption as adopted children of God, the very presence of God Himself living within us.
22 He has also put his seal on us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a down payment.
He also regenerates and renews us, as we saw in Titus 3 earlier.
Do you see how important the truth of the Trinity is to our salvation? Each Person of the Godhead is fully active and fully part of our salvation, and without each Person of the Trinity being a part of the work, the work would be incomplete. Each is fully God and God is one God with one purpose and one work of salvation. The Gospel is a triune Gospel: The eternal Father loves us so He sends the eternal Son who dies for us and rises and ascends and sends the eternal Spirit who works in us from the inside out to make us more like Christ to the glory of God and so we can live eternally with Him.
So we need to read our Bibles with trinitarian glasses on, watching for the revelation of the Trinity throughout. The Bible is the revelation of the Father through the Son by the power of the Spirit. When we pray, the Spirit takes our prayers to the Son, who constantly intercedes for us before the Father. When we baptize, it is in the SINGULAR name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And as we look at Scripture through the lens of the Trinity, we will start to catch a glimpse of the beauty of the Trinity, our last point.
3: The BEAUTY of the Trinity.
3: The BEAUTY of the Trinity.
We could turn this gemstone of the Trinity until our brains were completely emptied of everything we know and can understand about the nature of God, and we still would not have come close to fully appreciating the incredible beauty of the doctrine of the Trinity. I want to consider just one aspect of God’s nature that the Trinity illuminates that has great importance in our lives and our understanding of God. This aspect both flows out of the eternal nature of God as Trinity, and has meaning for us in how we respond and relate to Him.
And it’s this: God’s triune nature shows us that He is RELATIONAL. Try to imagine for just a moment that God is NOT triune. What was He doing before He created anything? What was His essential identity? In that time, was He eternally “Creator?” No, not yet. Being “creator” would have required something to have been created, and then that would mean that He would have to derive His identity from us, instead of the other way around.
Was He eternally “Ruler?” No, not yet. There was nothing but God Himself to be sovereign over. Again, He would derive His essential identity from us, instead of us deriving our nature from Him.
He is not eternally Creator, because there was a time when He had not created. He is not eternally Ruler, because there was a time when He did not rule over anyone or anything. In fact, why would this non-triune “god” make anything at all, especially something that he knows is going to get broken?
This is what completely captivates me about the Trinity. If God were merely a completely solitary individual, there would be no reason for Him to do what He did when He created, other than just to make people to show off for and lord over. Michael Reeves wrote about it conceptually this way in His book, Delighting in the Trinity:
“Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist.”
— Michael Reeves, Delighting In the Trinity
No. The beauty of the Trinity is shown in the fact that one of God’s essential characteristics is that He is love, and He is love eternally. But what does love require? It requires relationship, and eternal love requires an eternal relationship.
16 And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.
If God is love, then for all eternity, God must have been in relationship, because how do you love without a beloved? And we have already seen that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were all actively engaged in creation. We see that the Father loved the Son before the creation of the world:
23 I am in them and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one, that the world may know you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me. 24 “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they will see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the world’s foundation.
So God is eternally relational, because He is love, and He has always been in loving relationship within Himself in the Trinity. This is part of what makes this doctrine so beautiful. It says that God didn’t create because He was bored or showing off or just wanted to pad His resume. It says that God made us because He is a relational God whose basic characteristic is love—and such is His love that He created mankind so that He might lavish the love between the Father and the Son onto others. He proves that love by giving His beloved Son, pouring His love out on us through giving us His Spirit of adoption, calling us His children, when we really were rebels, working in our hearts to make us into what we have already been declared to be.
1 See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called God’s children—and we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know him. 2 Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. 3 And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.
This is just a part of why the Trinity is so beautiful. The doctrine of the Trinity displays a love that overflows, a love that is given freely and with liberality, a love that we can experience, duplicate, and emulate, because He has given us His Spirit, who now works within us to make us all that God means for us to be.
Closing
Closing
I know it’s been a full morning. I know this has been a lot to take in. But my prayer is that God has used this message this morning to invite you to take delight in who He is, to stand back in awe of His nature as Trinity, and to be humbled by reflecting on the fact that we have the blessing of being included in such an incredible relationship as we see in the Trinity.
And to you who are lost this morning, having never experienced that relationship with God, He offers His love to you freely. Jesus died for you, to set you free so you could be made right with the Father, so you could be adopted into the family of God, so you could be forgiven and have eternal life. Fall into His arms of love, giving up your sinful ways and submitting to Him today. You can surrender to God right now where you are. Let us know.
Join the church: church as a continuation of that family/children picture.
Prayer, at the steps.
Giving.
Invitation
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
AOM tonight at 5:00 pm
Bible reading: 2 Sam 11 today
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
2 Corinthians 13:13 (CSB)
13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.