The Trinity
Lesson 3
Recently I gave a series of three lessons to the young adults in our church. They had requested to know more about the Trinity, a fact I was mightily impressed by. This is the second of three posts that contain some notes I used. They are a bit rough and ready, but I hope you find them useful.
The first two posts can be found here:
Revelation
The Trinity is how God has revealed Himself.
How can we know God? Can we know God?
By human effort? No way. Just think about the universe and utterly vast it is. Then think about knowing the One who created it all purely by our own efforts. This is impossible.
The man-made route will result in a god made in our image.
To say that God is unknowable is also presumptuous. What if that God chooses to reveal Himself? Who are we to then say He cannot do that!
God made us in His image, that means we are capable of knowing God, but sin has blinded us to the truth. At its core, sin puts us at the centre.
He revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the exact representation of His being. See what this says as well. What do we get in Jesus? The focus is not on power, though of course Jesus does demonstrate power. The focus is on relationship. We will come to that again later.
The Holy Spirit opens our minds, takes the veil off our minds. He enables us to see who Jesus is, He enables us to cry “Abba, Father”.
Love and Relationships
We might think that things would be simpler if God was just God, and we didn’t have any of this trinitarian stuff. This is what Islam gives you. There are two answers to this, both important. One is that God has chosen to reveal Himself as the trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So any argument against this immediately collapses. The other is do with love.
“God is love” is one of the best known verses in 1 John. But if God is just one person, where does love come from? For love is about the relationship between persons.
But if God exists eternally as three persons, then love is fundamental (love is ontological! A fundamental part of His being). There is relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and there always has been. And notice what we said above. The revelation of God in Christ was primarily relational, He revealed what God is like, and His relationship with us. We will also see that this is crucial in salvation.
We also learn from the trinitarian relationship, the fundamental nature of God, about human relationships. In a good marriage two become one, but the two parties do not lose their own identity. In a corrupt marriage one party may lose their identity, being crushed or dominated by the other. But in a good marriage the two both become closer and closer to each other, but they also both grow and flourish as individuals. Both parties seek the well being of the other. This unity and diversity is what we see in the Trinity.
This pattern applies to all human relationships. Jesus prayed that we would become one (John 17) as He and the Father are one. We should not seek to dominate or crush others, but to enhance them.
Sometimes people say that God created us because He needed someone to love. This is nonsense. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit have eternally existed in a love relationship. We were not created because God needed someone to love, rather we were created out of that love relationship, and we were saved by that love relationship.
Salvation
The trinity and the divinity of Christ are absolutely central to our salvation, to its effectiveness and to understanding it.
A question sometimes asked is how can the death of one man pay for the sins of everyone? The reason is that it wasn’t just any man, but the Son of God who died on the cross. Think of it like this. Imagine you are in serious debt, debt you cannot hope to pay off yourself. Then suppose I offered you a lump of coal. Your natural and rational reaction would be to think what good was that going to do, and the answer, of course, would be not a lot! Suppose instead I offered you the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Like the lump of coal it is carbon, but it is worth about a billion pounds (its actual value is unknown). That would certainly solve your debt problems, and completely transform your financial life. It is like that with Jesus. He is fully human, but He is also the Son of God, He lived a sinless life, a life of perfect obedience to the Father. It was not just a man who died on the cross, it was the Son of God.
We also need to appreciate that the Father, Son and Spirit were in it together.The Father sent the Son, the Son freely offered His life on the cross, the Spirit makes the truth of this known to us. It was also an act of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Sometimes the cross is presented as a loving Jesus persuading an angry Father to forgive us. The worst example of this is those who call it “cosmic child abuse”. This is a complete misunderstanding of the cross. It was an act of love towards us, but it was also an act of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They were united in the quest to save mankind.
The Church
Read John 17:20-26.
Societies tend to go in one of two directions. Our western societies are excessively individualistic, other societies are crushingly corporate (eg China which is seeking to crush Christians and Muslims). We were made in the image of God, and in the Trinity we see both the individuality of the three persons, and the unity of God. We also see that they created us. The relationship is not self-centred, rather it is creative and gives out. As churches we are to be creative and outgiving.
The relationship was prepared to suffer in order to achieve its purpose, we too need to be prepared to suffer.
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