The Trinity

Ben Wulpi
March 10, 2008

How do we define God? Can we define God? We can know bits and pieces about

Him from His creation, which reflects His glory. Romans 1:20 says, “For since the

creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—

have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are

without excuse” (NIV). We can look at nature and at ourselves and see the beauty and

complexity of it all, and figure there must be some kind of brilliant Creator behind it.

This is what’s called natural theology. But this natural theology can only get us so far in

our understanding of God. We can only really know God from how He has revealed

Himself to us through Scripture and His workings in history.

What does the Bible tells us about who God is? He is good, He is love, He is holy,

He is Jesus—wait, He is Jesus? Really? How can God be up in Heaven and Jesus at the

same time? Don’t we only believe in one God? This is the tricky thing about the Christian

belief in God. We believe that God is a Trinity—meaning that He is three persons

somehow wrapped into one God. We believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This belief—or doctrine, as it’s called—of the Trinity is not directly found in the Bible,

but it is based off of teachings from the Bible. For example, in that passage of the Bible

that we call the Great Commission, Jesus says to His disciples, “Therefore, go and make

disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of

the Holy Spirit…”(Matthew 28:19 NIV). The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit here are equal.

Together they are all God. And all three—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—work together

throughout the Bible to bring about our salvation.

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 So why is this important? Today this is pretty easy for us to accept, because we’ve

grown up with stuff like this, right? But back in the days of the early Church, there was a

lot of controversy about this stuff, and they had to bring a lot of important people

together in a council to decide once and for all what the Christian belief about the Trinity

is, because there were other guys who were bringing incorrect ideas about God to the

table. So this council, called the Council of Nicaea, hammered out who God is, who the

three persons of God are, and how they are still One.

God the Father is the person of God who is revealed to us most clearly

throughout the Bible. He is there at the beginning in Genesis, doing His creation thing.

He works throughout all of the Old Testament. He is the one that is always called “Lord”

in all capital letters throughout the Old Testament. He is the One God that the Jews

worship. There is no other God but Him.

But then in the New Testament comes this guy Jesus, who claims to be one with

God the Father. To the Jews in Jesus’ day, this was a really outrageous claim! The Jews

were monotheistic, meaning they believed in only one God. So for Jesus to say that He

was God too really ticked off some Jews because it messed with their whole monotheism

belief. But Jesus is the same as God. What is it that John 3:16 tells us? “For God so loved

the world that He sent his only begotten Son….” Right? Well, the word begotten has a lot

of significance there. It means that Jesus wasn’t created by God like we were. He was

begotten, which means made of the same substance, or essence of God. There were some

people back in the days of this council in Nicaea who tried to say that Jesus wasn’t really

God because he wasn’t made of the same substance/essence of God. But Scripture really

tells us that Jesus is made of the same stuff as God, and the Nicaean guys tried to prove

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this to them. Also, in the beginning of the book of John, it tells us that Jesus was present

at the very beginning of creation, right there with God the Father. Jesus is God. There’s

really no getting around it.

The last part of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. The person of the Holy Spirit is also

God. The Spirit shows up a few times in the Old Testament, and is present with Jesus

throughout a lot of His life. But the Spirit is fully revealed to humanity at the event called

Pentecost. This is after Jesus had ascended into heaven, and a bunch of believers were

gathered together. Suddenly the Spirit came “like the blowing of a violent wind” from

heaven and came upon the believers like “tongues of fire” (Acts 2:2, 3 NIV). The Spirit

came to replace Jesus in the world after Jesus’ ascension. The Spirit is the power of God

at work in us and in the world. He has come to guide us and lead us into understanding.

We cannot understand God apart from the work of the Holy Spirit within us (Placher 84).

So now we have the three persons of the Trinity figured out, but how can we say

that they make up just one God? Last I checked 1+1+1 does not equal 1. We can use

some analogies to try to figure it out, but all of them will fall short and fail us. There is

the analogy that the Trinity is like water, in that it can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a gas,

but it is all still water. This doesn’t really work, because it can’t be all three of those states

at the same time, like God is as the three persons of the Trinity. One analogy that kind of

works is one by an old guy in history called Gregory of Nazianzus. He said that we can

view the Trinity not like three rays coming from the same sun, but rather like three suns

combining to produce the same ray.

Truth be told, exactly how the three persons of the Trinity make up one God is

beyond our comprehension as human beings, no matter what kind of analogy we try to

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use. “There has never been a single formula adopted by the majority of Christians

designed to express the doctrine of the Trinity” (Placher 128). Christians have been trying

to figure this out for centuries, without much real success. One guy who lived a long time

ago named Ockham suggested that must simply accept, from Scripture and the teachings

of the Church, that God is both three and one and not try to understand the “divine

mystery” (Placher 146). That’s kind of a refreshing option after looking at all the

complexity of this Trinitarian theology. We can work as hard as we can for our whole

lives trying to understand how the Trinity is like it is, but we won’t really know until we

are in heaven and we can know all things.

So we must accept that we worship one God in three Persons. The Father is 100%

God, Jesus is 100% God, and the Holy Spirit is 100% God—all of them existing together

for all eternity in perfect relationship with each other. It is a perfect community of love

and mutual glorification. We worship all three equally, and to glorify any one of them is

to glorify all of them. This is who God really is. Let’s pray that He continues to help us

grow in our understanding of Him, and even in our understanding of how much we don’t

know about Him.

*SDG