The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity

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The tri -unity of God is the subject this evening and it is with some fear and trepidation that one approaches this subject because of the actual nature of the discussion.
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We are talking about what God has revealed concerning himself and I make no apologies to the fact that our subject this evening will be
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Christian theism. I will not attempt to address any other type of theistic belief other than the
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Christian viewpoint because of the very nature of what we're addressing. We are addressing information that God has revealed about himself and that is a buzzword amongst
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Christians. We're used to hearing ideas like God revealing himself but that is actually foundational to everything else that we will do this evening.
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A lot of things we will talk about tonight are attributes of God, are facts about God that we could not know outside of God's graciously revealing them to us.
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That man's knowledge and man's wisdom could not in and of itself come to conclusions that are given to us by scripture itself.
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And so that leads me to a foundational statement and that is when we look at the nature of God, we are looking at the nature of God on the basis of God's revelation and that is the
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Bible. The comments that we have will be based upon and will demand adherence to the tenets of scripture and we will frequently refer to the
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Bible and to its teaching in looking at what God has revealed about himself because it is the only way that we can know that what we believe is true and that we are indeed following God's revelation and his revelation of himself.
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So as we look at the nature of God, we first start with some of the most basic information and that is the attributes of God.
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What are the attributes of God? Well, on our outline this evening we have divided the attributes of God up into three classifications.
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First, the natural attributes of God. Secondly, the attributes of God pertaining to his infinity.
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And third, the attributes of God pertaining to creation. Now, it is important to note that it is impossible to divide
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God up along black and white lines into specific compartments where you will not have any overlapping.
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You will discover that many of the attributes that we list here overlap with one another in what they are attempting to express and say.
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But that's just simply the nature of what we're dealing with. You can't put God under a microscope and divide him up and put him in that type of a scientific rigorous examination.
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So when we look at even the broad classifications, for example, the attributes pertaining to his infinity, the attributes pertaining to creation, some of those will overlap.
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We will see some things that look somewhat similar. But for convenience and for examination's sake, we'll look at this.
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So under the natural attributes of God, we have three attributes. That is spirituality, personality, and life.
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First of all, God is spirit. In his very nature, he is spirit.
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That is that God is not, in and of himself, a material being.
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God is not limited to the material realm. This is over and against such ideas as pantheism, for example, that would connect
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God intimately with the physical realm. The God of the Bible is spirit, and he is not limited to the physical realm because, as we will see, he is the creator of the physical realm, and he existed before the physical realm existed itself.
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In John 4, 24, Jesus told us that God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.
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Part of his very nature, his way of existence is that of spirit.
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Secondly, God is personal. This is very, very important because as we face the onslaught of various new philosophies today that would attempt to tell us that we are a part of God, and God is a part of us, and have movie stars standing on beaches saying,
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I am God, I am God, I am God, we need to, against that, proclaim the biblical truth that God is personal.
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And because God is personal, we are created in his image, man too is personal.
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What does it mean to say that God is personal? In Exodus 3, 14, when God revealed himself to Moses, he said,
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I am that I am. God realizes he exists. He has the attributes of personality.
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He is aware of his own self -existence. He is aware of the existence of other things.
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He has feelings and emotions. These things are those things that are attached to a personal being.
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God is not an it. God is not the supreme force. God is not some cohesive factor to creation.
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God is personal. This is very important because many of the modern philosophical teachings about God will actually redefine
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God as an impersonal force. The Christian cannot allow this.
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This is not accurate from the Christian perspective whatsoever. Thirdly, God is life.
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That is, he is alive. He is the source of all life. All other living things are derivative from and depend upon God.
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All other life that exists owes its existence to God and depends for support upon God.
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God is alive. In Jeremiah 10, verses 6 -11, you have the comparison that Jeremiah draws between the dead gods of the idols and the true
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God who is described as the living God, the eternal God.
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God is the source of life. He is living. He is alive. These refer to God in his nature.
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By nature, he is personal. By nature, he is spirit. By nature, he is living. The next series of attributes we will look at are those that pertain to his infinity.
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As we look at them, you'll understand what it is when we say pertain to his infinity. For example, the first of these is absoluteness.
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Or as you may notice, another term that would be applicable would be uniqueness. What does this mean?
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For a long time, I didn't really have a full understanding of what this exact word meant when referring to God.
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I understood that God was the absolute of good and the absolute of love and things like this.
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But in reality, when we refer to God himself as being absolute, what we are referring to is that God is the foundation of, the grounds of, all else that exists, and all else that exists to have its proper meaning and to be understood properly must be related to this personal, infinite
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God. Since he is the creator of all that is, since he is the absolute standard of all that is, if one wishes to know truth, if one wishes to know meaning, if one wishes to know right, then we must be related to God and we must relate each individual thing in creation to God.
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No individual thing in and of itself, by itself, separated from its created status has meaning outside of its relationship to God and God's purpose in making it.
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That is a very vital truth that our, especially our culture, needs to hear about today.
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And unfortunately, our culture has abandoned that type of a concept and that type of a worldview.
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Secondly, God is sovereign. God is supreme. God does not depend upon the created order, is not frustrated by the created order.
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God is not contingent upon the created order. There are a number of passages.
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Look at Isaiah chapter 43, verses 12 through 13. Isaiah 43, 12 through 13.
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Here God says, I have revealed and saved and proclaimed I and not some foreign
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God among you. You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, that I am God. Yes, and from ancient days,
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I am he. No one can deliver out of my hand. When I act, who can reverse it?
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God here points out that one of the differences between the true God and the false
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God that he is engaged in argument about here in the book of Isaiah, between about chapters 40 and 50, is that one of the things is that the false gods have no ability to act, whereas the true
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God is sovereign. When he acts, no one can reverse it. The false
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God can be frustrated by man's attempts and man's will, mainly because they don't really exist and they are the figment of men's imaginations in the first place.
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But God says that he is sovereign. None can deliver out of his hand. Look at Isaiah chapter 46.
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In Isaiah 46, 9, God says, remember the former things, those of long ago.
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I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come.
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I say my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please.
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Now this eternal God points out that it is his will that will be accomplished, that he will do all that he pleases.
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In fact, the psalmist had said that long time ago in Psalm 135, 6, and a number of other places in the psalms, of course.
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But in Psalm 135, 6, the psalmist wrote, the Lord does whatever pleases him in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths.
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These are just a few of the many, many passages that could be called upon to demonstrate for us the fact that scripturally, the
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God of the Bible is sovereign and supreme in his universe that he has created.
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The third attribute pertained to his infinity is that of self -existence.
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This is important as well. God does not depend upon anyone or anything at all.
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God is self -existent. He can say I am and stop right there.
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When we say I am, we say I am because I have the proper atmosphere, because I have the proper oxygen, because I have the proper light and food and water, etc.,
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etc., etc. We are contingent beings. At any point in time, we could simply cease to exist in the state that we currently are.
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But God is not like that. God is self -existent. We owe our existence to God, but God owes his existence to no one and no thing.
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God does not need anything. I know you've frequently heard it said, well,
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God was lonely and so he created man. Well, I don't believe
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God was lonely because that would be an imperfection in God. And when you look at the fact that, as we will see later in this evening, that God is triune,
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God wasn't lonely. I suppose if you're a Unitarian, you might say God was lonely, but God wasn't lonely.
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He doesn't need anything from man. God is self -existent.
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The fourth attribute pertaining to his infinity is immutability, which is a long word for saying unchangeableness.
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God does not change. He cannot change because if you think about it logically for a moment, you'll realize that a being that undergoes change is growing and changing and experiencing.
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And in fact, you have to ask the question, the change that occurs, is it for the better or for the worse?
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A perfect being cannot change because if he changes for the better, then he wasn't perfect in the first place.
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If he changes to the worst, he's no longer perfect. So God does not change.
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And of course, this is not just simply a logical argument, but it is also a scriptural argument. In the 102nd
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Psalm, verse 27, the psalmist in describing, interestingly enough, in verses 25 and 26, the creator and the distinction between the unchangeableness of the creator and the changeableness of creation.
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And you might want to just note that this very passage spoken of Yahweh God in Psalm 102 is quoted of Jesus Christ in Hebrews chapter one, says in verse 27, but you remain the same and your years will never end.
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You remain the same, though the universe changes. In fact, though the universe will eventually be discarded as an old garment, you do not change.
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There is hardly anything more comforting to the people of God than to realize that God does not change.
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That God tomorrow will not cancel his covenants and cancel his salvation.
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God is not changing. He's not progressing. He's not growing. He's not gaining new knowledge.
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You say, well, everyone knows that. No, that's not true. Not only do some very major cult groups have a problem with that, but even within quote -unquote orthodox circles today, you will find a teaching known as process theology, finite godism, that basically teaches that God has no coercive power.
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That is, he has no actual power over the universe. He only has persuasive power. He attempts to persuade the universe as it comes into existence each second to be the best it can be.
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And it's up to the universe to choose whether to be so or not, down to the point where every single atom and molecule in your body has a choice whether it wants to do what
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God says or not. And this is within some of the absolute mainline denominations that if I mentioned the names, every one of you would know what they were.
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So this concept of God's immutability, his inability to change, is infinitely connected to everything else we say about God, about his eternity, about his timelessness, things such as this.
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It's very important. The fifth attribute pertained with infinity is that of unity.
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Unity. There is one substance, one to use the terminology used by some of the
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Greek fathers in the early church, one ougia, one being of God that cannot be divided up.
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God is indivisible. Whether it's in three parts or a thousand parts, you can't divide
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God up into sections. God's being is indivisible.
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You can't take God's being, if you could picture what it was, and chop it up into pieces.
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That ceases to be God. Now, this is really the root of what we'll look at again a little bit later, biblical monotheism, the belief that there is only one
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God. If you may recall, the Jewish people, when they would rise in the morning, would recite the
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Shema. And the Shema starts off, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad.
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Here, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. This was central to the revelation of God's word that God is one.
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That there is not two gods, there are not three gods, God is one. You say, well, you're going to be talking about the trinities.
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Aren't you contradicting yourself? Not in any way. I'm contradicting tritheism, not the trinity.
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Never confuse tritheism with the trinity. They are not the same thing in any way, shape, or form, and we'll see that as we go along.
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The sixth attribute pertaining to his infinity is that of perfection. Now, you may notice that one of the passages you might think of,
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Matthew 5, 48, talks about our Heavenly Father being perfect, and in reality, that's predominantly relevant to his moral perfections, his moral completeness.
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But when we talk about God's perfection, we are talking about the lack of anything missing in God.
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God does not come short of perfection in any of his attributes.
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When we talk about God's love later on, or God's holiness, something like that, these are perfect and complete.
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God is complete, and you can see how that is connected somewhat to his self -existence and things like this.
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The seventh attribute pertaining to his infinity is that of immensity. In 2
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Chronicles 6, 18, we read that God fills the heavens and the earth.
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Now, you might say, what's the difference between that and omnipresence? We're talking about here
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God's being as considered outside of its relationship to the universe, that God's being is unlimited, that God's being is infinite, that it cannot be spatially limited to a particular place, to the exclusion of other places.
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That does not mean that God does not use language of dwelling with his people, dwelling in someone's heart, and things like that.
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We're talking about his being in the absolute sense is immense and unlimited.
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Now, the eighth attribute, and the final attribute, in looking at God's attributes pertaining to his infinity, is one that is not easy.
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Getting a hold on is not easy, but it's vital. In fact,
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I have seen people's entire concepts of God change when we look at God's eternity,
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God's timelessness. Now, in Exodus 314 that we looked at before, when
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God said and identified himself as the I Am, we get some indication there as well as, for example, in the passage from Isaiah 43 that we looked at where he talks about proclaiming the beginning from the end.
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When we look at Psalm 90 verse 2, it says, Before the mountains are brought forth, or without form, the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art
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God. When we look at passages in the New Testament like 1 Timothy 1 .17
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and Jude 25, where it talks about the eternal God, the everlasting God, we understand that the scriptures teach that God is eternal, but what does that mean?
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What does it mean that God is eternal? Does it mean that God has simply always existed in the same understanding that we have of time, that his timeline is just infinitely longer than our own?
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Or is there something more to the existence of God in his relationship with time?
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Now, I realize there are a lot of Christian scholars and a lot of Christian discussion concerning the nature of time and things like that.
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It's not the biggest discussion in most churches, that's for sure, but amongst Christian philosophers there is a discussion of the nature of time.
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But I think if we are going to be consistent with what has come before, what we have looked at in regard to God's immutability,
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God's immensity, and these other aspects of his being, that we will have to see that when the
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Bible says that God is eternal, it's not just simply saying that God has existed for a long time.
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It is talking about a completely different kind of existence. Time itself,
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I believe, is a created thing. That is, it is measured by changes within the created order.
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We measure time by the movement of the stars and the circling of the sun and things like this.
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But was there that kind of time before, not a word that we're stuck using, but before creation?
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What I'm putting before you is the concept that God is eternal, that is, he exists outside the realm of time.
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He is not limited to time as you and I are. That he is not experiencing a progression of events as a part of his nature.
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I have what must be the world's simplest visual aid to attempt to describe what
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I'm talking about when I talk about God being eternal. On a white sheet of paper here,
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I basically have a line. That's all it is. It has two ends on it. It doesn't go all the way across the paper, but I have a line.
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It is predominantly a straight line without having used a ruler. It's close enough anyways. This is meant to represent time.
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Time having a beginning, time having an ending. Now you can place us anywhere along the line if you want to, depending upon your particular eschatological beliefs, but time is only going one direction.
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No matter what you do, in approximately 40 seconds it's going to be 748.
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Now you can hold your breath. You can run out of the house. You can destroy my watch.
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You can do anything you want to, but we're all going to get to 748 at the same time. It's inevitable.
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It's going to happen. That's the nature of time. We only go one direction. It's going that direction.
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We can't go back, despite all the science fiction novels to the contrary.
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So what does that mean? If this is time, then attempt to view this entire sheet of paper as God's being.
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If God exists all around and all through that timeline, then what we are saying is all points in time are instantaneous to God.
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Now that is a difficult concept to grasp because it is so different than our own experience, but all points in time are instantaneous to God.
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When we talk about the idea of God seeing the future, have you ever wondered how it is he does that?
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Have you ever struggled with the question of how God sees the future? Does he have a crystal ball he uses that he just has the exclusive rights to?
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Why doesn't anybody else do it? Obviously not. God knows the future not because he simply looks in the future, but because the future is a present reality to him, as is the present, as is the past.
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If that is true, then from God's perspective, God is still as much with Moses at the burning bush as he is with us here this evening.
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Difficult thing to understand? Yes. But I think vital, especially when you begin looking at how
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God deals with man, how God talks about such things as salvation and aspects of salvation, especially in the revelation of the
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New Testament. I think these understandings come even more clearly to us then.
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And if by now you haven't come to the realization, let me say it too explicitly, we are talking about a being who is unique, who is totally other than we are, and who far transcends our small thoughts about him.
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We would not know these things about God if God did not reveal them to us. That's why
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I emphasized that when we started off. Now, the third section under the attributes of God are those pertaining to creation.
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That is, assuming creation exists now and we are here, what are some of the attributes of God that we see in relationship to that creation?
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These are the famous omnis, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.
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That is, God is omnipresent. There is not a part of his created universe that he does not have access to.
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He is present within all of that. That is not the same as to say that God is intimately connected to his universe.
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The difference is, the pantheist would tell you that God is within the very sheets of paper within your
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Bible, or within your handout, or within your date address book, or within the couch you're sitting on, or wherever else you might be, that God is within it and he can't escape it.
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It is a part of him, he is a part of it. The Christian says, no,
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God existed before that thing ever did. He created it, not because he had to, but because he wanted to.
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And he exists within it because it is his gracious choice to do so, not because he absolutely has to.
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So he is present in all of his creation, but not in an existence way, not in a way where he is dependent upon that creation.
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His omniscience means that God has all knowledge. And that does not mean, that does not mean, do not get it wrong in thinking that what
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Christians are saying is God has all knowledge even of the absurd. You've undoubtedly heard the atheist ask the absurd questions that are just that, they are absurd, they're totally illogical, there is no resolution to the question.
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They say, well see if God doesn't know that, then God must not be God. The same thing in the relationship to omnipotence.
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When we talk about God having all power, a lot of times Christians say, well that means
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God can do anything. No he can't. The Bible says there are things God can't do. God can't cease being
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God. God can't lie. The writer of Hebrews said that.
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There are things God cannot do. God cannot do the absurd. God cannot make a square peg fit in a round hole.
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Now he may change the entire laws of the universe and physics and make square pegs fit in round holes. Don't ask me how in the world he'd do that.
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The point is, where things are right now, that's a logical self -contradiction. That is an absurdity.
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And it is ridiculous to say that God has the ability to do the absurd. You know, making rocks heavier than God can lift and wild and crazy things such as this.
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And of course there are many passages that demonstrate these. Romnic Presence, we have Psalm 139, 7 -10 in Jeremiah 23, 23 -24.
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Romnicians, Hebrews 4 .13, Matthew 10, 29 -30, Romans 11 .33. Omnipotence, Genesis 17 .1,
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Revelation 1 .8 where God is described as the almighty God and Romans 4 .17. So this is a very brief run through some of the attributes of God that are revealed to us by scripture.
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Now there are also the moral attributes of God. We've only listed four. That is holiness, righteousness, love and truth.
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And we see these more in God's actions toward mankind. That is the realm in which you encounter morality.
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We see God's holiness in Isaiah chapter 6. You have the temple vision of God upon the throne.
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You have the seraphim and cherubim around the throne saying holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
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We know that there is no darkness in God at all. There is no sin in God. He is totally and perfectly holy.
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We also know that his actions with man conform to that attribute of himself that is holiness.
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God does not deal with man in a capricious way. God deals with man in a holy way. We see righteousness.
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Righteousness, when we think of it in the New Testament sense, is normally applied to Christians and it's how we are made right with God, how we were given the proper standing with God.
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But when we talk about the righteousness of God, we are talking about the perfection, the accuracy of God's actions with man.
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The fact that again, because he is holy, because he is righteous, he deals with us in certain ways.
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God is love. The Bible directly says that. Don't get that wrong. It does not say that love is God. It says that God is love.
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That part of God's attributes is to be love. But notice that that is balanced by his holiness.
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Don't get the sloppy agape view of God that makes this one attribute the grossly enlarged attribute that dwarfs all the others.
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Because if you look at the cross of Christ for example, and see nothing there but the love of God, and you do not at that very same time see the holiness of God, you're not seeing even all the love of God that is demonstrated in that event.
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Finally, we see truth. God is truth. There is no error. There is no lie.
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There is no self -contradiction in God's being. God deals with us truly. In fact, since he is true, then we can claim that truth actually exists.
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Which, in most modern philosophical systems, is a shocking statement.
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That truth exists. You may not be aware of that, especially if you've grown up within a
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Christian home and a Christian system. But in most philosophical systems today, truth is a completely relative thing that has really no meaning.
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But we as Christians can say that truth exists because God is true. So with these attributes of God as a background, we can then move forward and begin to ask the question, how is it that God has demonstrated that he exists trinally as the
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Trinity? Well, there are a number of considerations that first we must look into.
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On the handout that I have given to you, you will find two creeds stated, one from the
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Council of Nicaea in 325, the other the Athanasian Creed. We do not know when the
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Athanasian Creed was written, but the only thing we know about the Athanasian Creed is that Athanasius did not write it as to its actual origin.
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But these basically express what the Christian Church has taught concerning this doctrine.
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But obviously, Nicaea, being 325 AD, is 300 years after Christ.
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And so, frequently it is objected, well, this could not be the
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Apostles' doctrine, this could not be what Jesus taught, could it? Well, when we look at the doctrine of the
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Trinity, I would like to suggest to you, I would like to place before you the fact that I believe in the doctrine of the
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Trinity because of the biblical teaching on three specific points.
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And that in fact, if the Bible presents these three specific points, there is no other possible understanding of the
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Bible's presentation than that that the Christian Church has held onto for lo these two millennia, and that is the doctrine of the
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Trinity. What are those things? The three biblical truths that together form the foundation of the
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Trinity are as follows. One, there is only one God. That is, monotheism.
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That is the first thing. The Bible must present that there is only one true God. And we will briefly look at the fact that it does indeed do that.
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It says there is only one true God. Secondly, that there are three persons spoken of,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is in direct contradiction of modalism, civilianism, or the
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Jesus -only teachings that deny the separate personhood of the Father, Son, and Spirit. I can't tell you how many times
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I've had Christians and non -Christians, especially non -Christians involved in various and sundry cultic groups that deny the
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Trinity, present to me their understanding of the
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Trinity and found out that it wasn't really the doctrine of the Trinity at all. I can't tell you how many times
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I've had someone say to me, well, I just can't understand how Jesus could pray to himself. He didn't. That's how the doctrine of the
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Trinity said. The Son prayed to the Father. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the
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Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. That is known as modalism or civilianism.
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It is not the modern sense represented to us by the oneness group, the United Pentecostal Church being a prime example of this, the
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Jesus -only teaching that claims that indeed Jesus was the
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Father. So that when Jesus was praying, what they say is that Jesus was actually two persons.
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He was the Father and the Son. The Son was only human, the Father was the deity, and the Son, the human nature, was praying to his other nature.
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He was actually speaking to himself. That's what they're saying. Then you've got real civilianists who actually tell you the
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Father is the Son, the Son is the Spirit. That's not what we're saying. The scriptures clearly present to us three persons,
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Father, Son, and Spirit. And we'll look at some of the evidence for that. Thirdly, the third foundational element is that there is full equality of the persons.
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This is in direct contradiction to Arianism and all systems that would deny the full deity and equality of the
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Son and the Spirit. So in other words, what this is saying is that the scriptures present the
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Son and the Spirit in terms, terminology, and description that can only be used of God himself.
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Now we will briefly look at this as well, though we have other information that goes more into depth in demonstrating, for example, the deity of Jesus Christ.
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We'll briefly look at these things. Each of these truths is part of God's revelation of himself, and no system can claim to be based on the
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Bible unless these truths, which we have just looked at, are taken into account.
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The denial of any one of these truths leads directly to false doctrine and to heresy.
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The denial of monotheism leads to polytheism, such as in Mormonism. The denial of the three persons leads into modalism, such as the
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United Pentecostal movement. And the denial of the equality of the persons leads into subordinationism, such as the
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Watchtower Bible and Tract Society and the Way International. You can actually chart out how this all comes together.
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So briefly, we need to take our Bibles and ask the question, does the
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Bible present to us these three things? For if the
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Bible does, then we must accept what it says or reject
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God's revelation of himself, because these are the foundational statements of the doctrine of the
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Trinity. So let's look at the fact that there is but one God. But one
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God. Now I have a number of passages listed, and we're only going to look at a couple of them. Look at Isaiah 43 .10.
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We already looked at the Shema in Deuteronomy 6 .4. Isaiah 43 .10
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is a fascinating verse that comes into play in regard to the deity of Christ as well, but Isaiah 43 .10,
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we read, "...you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, and my servant whom
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I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no
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God was formed, nor will there be one after me."
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Before me no God, after me no God. He is the only true
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God. In the next chapter, Isaiah 44 .6 -8, this is what
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Yahweh says, Israel's king and redeemer. Yahweh Almighty, I am the first and I am the last.
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Apart from me there is no God. Verse 8, "...do not tremble and do not be afraid, for I did not proclaim this and foretell it long ago.
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You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other rock. I know not one."
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Isaiah 45 .5 -6, "...I am
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Yahweh, and there is no other. Apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting, men may know there is none besides me.
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I am Yahweh, there is no other." Now there are many other passages that could be examined.
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In Isaiah 46 .9, 48, 11, and 12, John 17 .3,
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1 Timothy 2 .5, Revelation 1 .8, many other passages that demonstrate to us that there is but one
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God, not many gods. You say, well everyone believes that. That's not true. There are millions of people on the earth today that believe that there is more than one
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God. Some of these people also believe that God is in his essential nature a man.
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That would be contradicted, for example, by Hosea 11 .9, where God says, I am God and not man, the holy one in the midst of you.
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And Numbers 23 .19, if you want to jot those down. So the first foundational element of the doctrine of the
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Trinity is the fact that there is but one God. Secondly, that there are three persons, the
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Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And since this is one of the smaller groups that is still in existence today, but you still run into them, a lot of Christians are not really prepared to demonstrate this because it seems so obvious from our reading of scripture.
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But there are many indications that this is so. In Matthew chapter 3, for example, you have the baptism of Jesus.
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And you have at that time, three persons demonstrated to be in existence there. In verses 16 through 17, you have as soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water.
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At that moment, the heaven was opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him.
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And a voice from heaven said, this is my son whom I love, with whom I am well pleased. So here you see the
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Father in heaven speaking from heaven, the Son on earth, and the Spirit descending in the form of a dove.
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These are clearly personal individuals that we see here. In Matthew 11, 27, a fascinating Christological passage in his teaching concerning the person of Jesus Christ, Jesus says, all things have been committed to me by my
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Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the
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Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Now you can't make heads or tails out of that passage unless you see that you have the
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Father and you have the Son and there is some sort of relationship between the two.
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If you have the Son and the Father being one person here, you have no sense in this passage whatsoever.
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None at all. Look at Matthew 17.
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In verses 1 -9 you have the transfiguration account. And here you have
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Jesus on the mountaintop. You have the Father coming in the cloud. You have a conversation going on.
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Only persons speak to one another. Jesus is standing there and God says, for example, in verse 5 when the
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Father comes while he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped him and a voice from the cloud said, this is my
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Son whom I love. With him I am well pleased. Listen to him. Now love is an attribute of a person.
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Only persons love. Things don't love. And here the
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Son is the recipient and the object of the love of God, the love of the Father, because the
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Father here identifies him as his Son. There are many other passages, especially in the book of John, that demonstrate this.
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Look at John 1 .18. While you're going there you might want to jot down in the book of Matthew 27 .46
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as well where Jesus cries out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
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A clear communication there that would make a little sense if you have a unitarian concept of God.
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But in John 1 .18 we read, no one has ever seen
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God, but God the one and only who is at the Father's side has made him known.
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Here the Son, Jesus, is described as the unique God, God the one and only.
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Now if you have a King James Version of the Bible, it'll say the only begotten Son. But if you'll look at a modern translation, a modern
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Greek text, you'll see that the reading, the unique God, monogenes theos, is a very strong reading and is accepted by almost all modern translations.
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But the point again is, here is one who is at the Father's side who makes him known, this is
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Jesus. Jesus is not the Father, he is at the Father's side and he makes the
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Father known. Literally the Greek word is exegesata from which we get our word exeges.
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He lets us know about the Father in that way. Look at John chapter 14 and I'll just list some more for you after this.
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John chapter 14 verses 16 through 17.
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Jesus says, I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever, the
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Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be with you, be in you.
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I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. Before long the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Here is the promise of the coming of the
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Spirit. So here Jesus promises that another would come, another of the same kind, that is the
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Holy Spirit. We're talking about the fact there are three persons, Father, Son and Spirit.
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Here Jesus speaks of another, not himself, but another who would come and that is the
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Spirit himself. Some of the other passages you might want to look at have to do with the pre -existence of Christ.
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Now please note that there are some Christian teachers, in fact some that are involved in the counter -cult ministry, who would deny what is known as the eternal generation of the
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Son or the pre -existence of the Son. They would say the Son refers only to Jesus as he was incarnate.
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The Son only has reference to Jesus after his birth in Bethlehem. The problem with that is there are a number of passages that directly refer to the
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Son existing as the Son before Bethlehem. For example, in Colossians chapter 1 verses 13 -17, we have the picture of the
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Son who is the creator of all things. If you follow the context through there, you'll see that he talks about the kingdom of his beloved
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Son and then describes the Son as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, and then goes on to say that this one who is the firstborn, this one who rules over all creation, is the source of all creation, is the one who created all things, and who holds all things together.
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And this is the Son that is spoken of here. The same thing can be found, for example, in Hebrews chapter 1 verses 2 -3, where clearly the writer of Hebrews says that God created the world by the
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Son. And finally in John 1 -1, we see the pre -existence of Christ so clearly set forth when the word says, in the beginning was the
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Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That phrase, the Word was with God, clearly indicates to us that we are talking about two persons here.
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We are talking about the Word being in communication with God, who will be identified in verse 18 as the
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Father, and then the Word will be identified as the unique God who was with him in eternity, as John teaches us.
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So the pre -existence of the Son before Bethlehem obviously demonstrates you have the
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Father, and you have the Son, and then we also looked at John 14, you can look at John 16 as well for the
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Spirit. So, we've laid two of the foundation stones. The two foundation stones are the fact of monotheism, the fact there is but one
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God, and the second foundation is the fact that we have three persons spoken of,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So what is the third foundation stone? If we do not see that Father, Son, and Spirit are equal with one another, that is, that each shares in that being that is
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God, then we are left with either a subordination idea where the
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Son and the Spirit become lesser gods, which violates monotheism, or we have to go some other direction and end up with tritheism and violate our understanding as well of having now three equal gods.
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So we're stuck in a logical quandary unless we can look at what the Scripture says concerning the
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Son and the Spirit. There are very few people who would deny the full deity of the Father. I mean, that would be a little bit difficult to do.
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But what about these others? Well, on another tape we go in -depth on the subject of the deity of Christ.
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So I'm not going to go in -depth tonight. I'm simply going to look at a couple of passages that demonstrate the deity of Christ.
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For example, Colossians 2 .9 says that it is in Christ that all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.
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The word deity is the Greek term theatetos, which refers to the very being of God. Now you might say, well,
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Colossians says that all the fullness of God dwells in us too. It does not say that all the fullness of deity dwells, present tense, in us.
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It says that through Christ we can be filled with the fullness of God, but only
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Christ is described as the one in whom at home permanently the very deity dwells bodily.
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Colossians 2 .9. In John 20 .28, the resurrected
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Lord appears to Thomas and his confession continues to ring down the halls of history today when
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Thomas stands before Jesus and says, my Lord and my God. Jesus did not bring a rebuke upon Thomas for having said that, and rightly so, because instead of rebuking him,
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Jesus viewed that as a statement of faith, because he says, because you've seen me, have you believed?
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Blessed are those who, though not seeing, believe. Jesus calls it a matter of faith.
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In Titus 2 .13, in your translations of scripture, the NIV, NAS, and others, you will see that Jesus Christ is described as our great
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God and Savior. This is an example of what is known as Granville -Sharp's construction in the Greek language, and it applies both nouns, that is,
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God and Savior, to the one person, Jesus Christ. The same type of construction appears in 2
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Peter 1 .1, where Jesus is described as our God and Savior. Paul could seemingly with ease refer to the
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Savior in these terms. John 1 .18, we've already looked at the fact that Jesus is described as the unique God, and if we see monotheism, if we understand monotheism, then we need to take what is said there seriously.
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But one of the clearest identifications of the deity of Christ is the fact that the
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New Testament writers could so freely and easily identify Jesus Christ, not simply as their
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God, but as Yahweh Himself. We've already looked, for example, at the fact that in Hebrews 1 .10
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-12, you have a quotation from Psalm 102 .25 -27. The quotation in Psalm 102, of course, is about God Himself, about Yahweh, and yet it is applied to Jesus directly in the
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Bible. In John 6 .39 -41, you have a fascinating passage where the
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Bible says, and this is the will of Him, this is where, did
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I say John 6? I meant John 12, forgive me there. John 12, we'll be referencing
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Isaiah 6. In John 12, beginning in verse 39, we read, for this reason they could not believe, because as Isaiah says elsewhere,
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He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn, and I would heal them.
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Verse 41, Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about Him.
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I'm reading from the NIV predominantly this evening. Now, the quotation in verse 40 is from the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah, and John, the gospel writer says,
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Isaiah said these things because he saw His glory, he saw
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Jesus' glory, and he spoke about Him. Well, where did Isaiah see Jesus' glory? How is that?
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Well, when you look back at Isaiah chapter 6, where this quotation is originally taken from, you will discover there that in the year that King Uzziah died,
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Isaiah says, he saw the Lord, identified later on as Yahweh Himself, lofty and lifted up, sitting upon the throne of the temple, the train of His robe filling the temple.
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This is Isaiah's temple vision of Yahweh Himself. So, according to John, Isaiah said these things because he saw
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Jesus' glory. According to Isaiah, he saw the glory of Yahweh Himself. So, clearly, for John, Jesus is
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Yahweh. In fact, there is an entire list of passages where the
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Old Testament is quoted in reference to Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and the name of Yahweh is just basically lifted out, and the name of Jesus is put in.
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These individuals understood that they were servants, not of a different God, not of a new
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God, of the same covenant God of the nation of Israel that had always been, but now they knew
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Him more fully. They had identified Yahweh and Jesus in that way.
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Now, having looked at these things, we see the three foundational truths, the fact that there is one
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God, that there are three persons, and that the persons are seen to be equal with one another.
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In light of this, then we need to start asking some questions. How do we work out the doctrine of the
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Trinity, and how is it that we see it in Scripture, even outside of these foundational truths?
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Because though I would say that these foundational truths in and of themselves are enough to demonstrate the doctrine, if these people really believed it, then we should see some evidence of this in the
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New Testament, do we? Yes, I believe we do, and we'll look at that. But first, frequently it is objected that we even utilize a term such as the word
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Trinity, because, as you must obviously know, the word Trinity does not appear within the Bible.
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So how can we use non -biblical terminology to demonstrate biblical truth?
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Well, Dr. B .B. Warfield, long ago, said some things a whole lot better than I ever could, and I'm going to give you some of his comments on the subject and allow him to explain it to you.
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The term Trinity is not a biblical term, and we are not using biblical language when we define what is expressed by it as the doctrine that there is only one and true
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God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three co -eternal and co -equal persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.
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A doctrine so defined can be spoken of as a biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is
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Scripture. And the definition of a biblical doctrine in such unbiblical language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.
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The doctrine of the Trinity lies in Scripture in solution. When it is crystallized from its solvent, it does not cease to be scriptural, but only comes into clearer view.
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Or, to speak without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in formulated definition, but in fragmentary illusions.
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When we assemble the disjecta membra, the various portions, into their organic unity, we are not passing from Scripture, but entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture.
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We may state the doctrine in technical terms, supplied by philosophical reflection, but the doctrine stated is a genuinely scriptural doctrine.
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In point of fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is purely a revealed doctrine. That is to say, it embodies a truth which has never been discovered and is indiscoverable by natural reason.
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With all his searching, man has not been able to find out for himself the deep things of God. Accordingly, ethnic thought has never attained a
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Trinitarian concept of God, nor does any ethnic religion present in its representation to the divine being any analogy to the doctrine of the
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Trinity. Now let me point out here that Dr. Warfield then goes on to examine many of the supposed trinities that are frequently presented, especially by individuals who are members of groups that deny the
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Trinity, as being the forerunners to and the source of the Christian presentation of the Trinity, and demonstrates that each and every one of them has a similarity only on an extremely surface level.
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Extremely surface level. And that in fact, the most important elements of the doctrine are contradicted in all of these presentations from other religious viewpoints.
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Now Dr. Warfield goes on and says, as the doctrine of the Trinity is indiscoverable by reason, it is incapable of proof from reason.
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There are no analogies to it in nature, not even in the spiritual nature of man who has made the image of God.
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In his Trinitarian mode of being, God is unique, and as there is nothing in the universe like him in this respect, so there is nothing which can help us to comprehend him.
01:00:04
The fundamental proof that God is a Trinity is supplied thus by the fundamental revelation of the
01:00:10
Trinity in fact. That is to say, in the incarnation of God the Son, and the outpouring of God the
01:00:17
Holy Spirit. In a word, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are the fundamental proof of the doctrine of the
01:00:23
Trinity. This is as much as to say that all the evidence of whatever kind, and from whatever source derived, that Jesus Christ is
01:00:31
God manifested in the flesh, and that the Holy Spirit is a divine person, is just so much evidence for the doctrine of the
01:00:37
Trinity. And that when we go to the New Testament for the evidence of the Trinity, we are to seek it not merely in the scattered allusions to the
01:00:44
Trinity as such, numerous and instructive as they are, but primarily in the whole mass of evidence which the
01:00:50
New Testament provides of the deity of Christ and the divine personality of the Holy Spirit. When we have said this, we have said in effect that the whole mass of the
01:00:59
New Testament is evidence for the Trinity. For the New Testament is saturated with evidence of the deity of Christ and the divine personality of the
01:01:07
Holy Spirit. Precisely what the New Testament is, is the documentation of the religion of the incarnate
01:01:13
Son and outpoured Spirit. That is to say, of the religion of the Trinity. And what we mean by the doctrine of the
01:01:19
Trinity is nothing but the formulation in exact language of the conception of God presupposed in the religion of the incarnate
01:01:27
Son and the outpoured Spirit. So what he is saying is, that when we come to the
01:01:33
New Testament, we are coming to documents written by individuals who have experienced this truth.
01:01:42
Some of these men had heard God the Father speak, had walked with God the Son, and now experienced
01:01:48
God the Spirit living in their lives. They had experienced the entire Trinity themselves. And since it was a part of their conception of God, and since the
01:02:00
New Testament is a collection of writings and letters that is not meant to be a systematic theology.
01:02:08
If it was meant to be a systematic theology, we wouldn't need systematic theology. You can't go to the
01:02:15
Bible and say, I want to look up the deity of Christ, and it will give you a page where the
01:02:20
Bible talks about the deity of Christ. It doesn't do that. It's not a systematic theology. It's not a catalog. What we must do is realize that, for example, when
01:02:29
Paul is writing to the church at Thessalonica, he is writing to them already knowing that they understand the basics of his gospel.
01:02:38
That they already understand the basics of the faith. And they can communicate with one another in that way, and they don't have to go back.
01:02:46
Every time you write someone a letter, let's say you're in a club.
01:02:54
You're in a model rocketry club. I was in one of those when I was a youngster. And you wrote letters back and forth between someone else who had the same interest you did.
01:03:05
In every single letter, you wouldn't take the time to spell out everything you've already talked to each other about.
01:03:13
You would assume the other person would be able to pick up your illusions and understand what you were saying.
01:03:18
You would have a basis for communication. Well, in the same way, when we come to the New Testament letters, we see that Paul could, for example, speak to the people that he had taught, and he didn't have to go back all the time and restate every single thing he had taught them.
01:03:35
When he talks to Thessalonians, he says, you don't have any need that I should talk to you about the end times. We go, oh yes, we do.
01:03:42
But you see, they had already heard Paul talk about these things. Paul says, I don't need to repeat this, you already know about that.
01:03:51
And so frequently what we find ourselves doing is attempting to, by looking at what is said, determine what is not being said because it's already understood.
01:04:03
Now that's not to say that the Doctrine and Trinity is not directly enunciated. I believe that it is. But the point is, we can see how pervasive is this understanding.
01:04:13
And once we understand that it is pervasive within the New Testament, then we see that when, for example,
01:04:19
Nicaea comes along, we can see why the church reacted so violently to Arius' denial of the deity of Christ.
01:04:25
It was not because this was some new thing. Arius didn't come along and point out that all of a sudden someone had just introduced this new thing.
01:04:34
It was because Arius came along and Arius was the one who introduced the new thing, and that was the denial of the deity of Christ.
01:04:43
So when we look at the New Testament and we see the deity of Christ, we see the personality of the
01:04:49
Holy Spirit, we are seeing evidence of the Doctrine and the Trinity. We've already talked about that in the foundational element.
01:04:55
Now when we go to the Old Testament, you might say, well, is there anything in the Old Testament about the Trinity? Well, since the
01:05:01
Trinity really is revealed to us by the Son and the Spirit coming, as Warfield has demonstrated, this is a part of God's salvation plan.
01:05:14
And obviously, since it did not reach that type of fullness until the coming of the
01:05:20
Son, the coming of the Spirit, then in the Old Testament you're going to see nothing more than illusion.
01:05:27
I know there are some people who feel they can prove the Doctrine of the Old Testament. I don't think you can. It's a clear fact that no one, using the
01:05:35
Old Testament as their only source, has come to a Trinitarian understanding of God. I believe there are allusions to the
01:05:42
Trinity. I believe that when you shed the light of the New Testament onto the Old Testament, you will see it there.
01:05:49
I'm not talking about reading the New Testament back into the Old Testament. I'm talking about having, for example, a dimly lit room.
01:05:56
When you turn the lights on brighter, it's not that you're adding anything to the room, you're just able to more clearly see what was there in the first place.
01:06:03
Using the New Testament in that way. Some of the possible allusions would be the plural pronouns, let us make man in our image.
01:06:13
The trihagion of Isaiah 6, where the angels say, holy, holy, holy.
01:06:20
The possibility of there being a plural of the Yahweh's in, for example,
01:06:25
Genesis 19 -24, where Yahweh in heaven rained fire and brimstone down upon Sodom and Gomorrah.
01:06:33
Actually, it was Yahweh on earth rained fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven down upon Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 -24, where Yahweh in physical form has been walking down towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and you have this physical form of Yahweh being seen that we can see if we look at the
01:06:53
New Testament. It seems to be Jesus Christ in his pre -incarnate state, but whatever that may be, we have these types of things in the
01:07:01
Old Testament. In the New Testament, of course, we've already talked about the deity, the Son, and the
01:07:06
Spirit in correlation with the fact there is only one God. Matthew 28, 19 -20 is one of the standard passages to refer to, because there you have the
01:07:17
Bible saying Jesus himself directly proclaiming to his apostles, go, baptize, teach, and when you baptize them, baptize in the name, singular, of the
01:07:30
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. There's some important things there. Notice it does not say, baptize them in the name of the
01:07:40
Father, Son, and Spirit. You say, well, what do you intend to get?
01:07:48
Father, Son, and Spirit are not just simply three modes or something.
01:07:55
There are three persons clearly spoken of here, because it says to baptize them in the name of the
01:08:02
Father, as the Greek article, the Son, as the article, and the
01:08:08
Spirit, as the article. If those articles were not there, then you're open for civilianism, modalism, the oneness teaching, things like this.
01:08:19
But the article is before each and every one of the person's name. Now, what we frequently don't catch is the
01:08:32
Hebraic background to what Jesus says, because I think if you really latch on to that, you'll see how revolutionary
01:08:38
Jesus' words were. How did His disciples understand this? Well, if you look back in the
01:08:44
Old Testament, for example, at Deuteronomy 28, 58, we read this glorious and fearful name,
01:08:51
Yahweh thy God. Now, the idea of the name of God is important.
01:09:03
It is important, and when we look at how the Old Testament uses this, we see that there is the concept of the fact that the people of Israel were peculiar people, because they had a covenant with God, and they knew who
01:09:16
God was, they knew God's name. That doesn't mean that the name was some magic type of thing, but you need to understand that in that cultural setting, having the name spoken over you, invoked over you, demonstrated that you were a part of the covenant community.
01:09:34
It was not the hocus -pocus that you see in television shows and things like that, but it identified a person as being a follower of God.
01:09:46
So when you read, for example, Jeremiah 14, 9, Yet thou art in our midst, O Yahweh, and we are called by thy name.
01:09:56
So that identification of Israel by the name was important to them. Look at Jeremiah 15, 6,
01:10:05
I have been called by thy name, O Yahweh, God of hosts. This was important.
01:10:11
It was a demonstration of the covenant relationship with the individual.
01:10:17
In 2 Chronicles 7, 14, a passage that we know because it's frequently quoted all the time, where it talks about, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and call upon me, et cetera, et cetera.
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Literally from the Hebrew it would read, and my people over whom my name is called.
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You can see a similar construction in Daniel 9, 18 through 19. Well, what does all this have to do with Matthew 28, 19 through 20?
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Listen to what Dr. Warfield says. When therefore our Lord commanded his disciples to baptize those whom they brought to his obedience into the name of, he was using language charged to them with high meaning.
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He could not have been understood otherwise than as substituting for the name of Yahweh, this other name, quote, of the
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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, unquote. And this could not possibly have meant to his disciples anything else than that Yahweh was now to be known to them by the new name of the
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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is no alternative therefore to understanding Jesus here to be giving for his community a new name to Yahweh and that new name to be the threefold name of the
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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Nor is there any room for doubt that by the
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Son in this threefold name, he meant just himself with all the implications of distinct personality of the
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Father and the Holy Spirit, with whom the Son is here associated and from whom alike the
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Son is here distinguished. This is a direct description to the Yahweh God of Israel of a threefold personality and is therewith the direct enunciation of the doctrine of the
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Trinity. Now, if this was the only one, I can see how someone could pretty well not worry about it because they just might not follow all the historical background that went into that.
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But what I did a long time ago, many years ago, was I sat down with the chronological order in which
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Paul's epistles were written from the earliest, which we believe to be 1 Thessalonians unless you're
01:12:31
FF Bruce in the translations, but which most scholars would say is these 1 Thessalonians, and went through the first seven books that Paul wrote.
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I went through them and pulled out a number of passages that within a short space of context are what we would call triadic formulae.
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That is, they mention Father, Son, and Spirit together, and normally you will discover, and I'm going to give them to you, that they are intimately connected in the process of the salvation of God's people.
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For example, 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 verses 3 -5, 2
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Thessalonians 2 .13, 1 Corinthians chapter 2 verses 2 -5, 1
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Corinthians 6 .11, 12, 4 -6, 2 Chronicles 1 .21
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-22, excuse me, did I say Chronicles? 2 Corinthians 1 .21 -22, 2
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Corinthians 13 .14 is a classic Trinitarian passage. Romans 8 .26
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-27, Romans 14 .17 -18, 15 .16, 15 .30,
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Colossians 1 .6 -8, Ephesians 2 .18, 3 .16 -17, and 4 .4 -6.
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The Ephesians passage is the last one I mentioned there.
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Look at Ephesians chapter 4 verses 4 -6. Listen to what he says, there is one body and one spirit, just as you recalled one hope when you were called.
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One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
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In three verses you have the Spirit, you have the Lord, you have the
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Father. Now realize that normally, normally in Paul's thinking when he refers to the
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Son, Jesus, in his Trinitarian mode of being, he uses what term? Kuria, the
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Lord. And when you look at how kuria is used in the Greek scriptures, the
01:14:34
Greek translation of the Old Testament, you realize that kuria is what was used to translate the tetragrammaton
01:14:41
Yahweh in the Septuagint. So that word kuria, in that context, would have deep and high meaning to Paul.
01:14:51
A deep high meaning in regards to his deity. Now, having gone through all of that, we have just a few more things we need to look at, and that is,
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I have borrowed from Dr. Burkhoff a direct statement of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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You will notice that all this does is put into formalized language the three foundational aspects we've already examined.
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We will look at these, we will look at an audio, not audio, a visual aid you might say, to help us understand this a little bit better, and then we will complete our examination of the doctrine of the
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Trinity. So the statement of the doctrine as given by Dr. Burkhoff is as follows.
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Number one, there is in the divine being but one indivisible essence, and then
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I have two words that follow after, ougia and essentia. Ougia is Greek, essentia is
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Latin. Why did I put them there? When we attempt to describe the unique being of God, we obviously encounter the difficulty of language, because our language is going to carry with it meanings that should not be attached to God because God is unique.
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For example, when I say essence, what do you think of? Think of perfume, I don't know, that's the first thing that comes to my mind.
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We're not talking about God's perfume. When you use such words as substance, what do you think of when
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I say substance? You think of a material thing, and we've already looked at the fact that God is spirit.
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So what I'm saying is one of the main problems that people have in dealing with the Trinity is dealing with the language barrier, but then again, the same individuals who, because of that, will reject the
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Trinity, will believe that God is eternal, and yet they will not be able to express that concept of God's eternality in my language either.
01:16:54
So they're somewhat inconsistent at that point if they're willing to say, well, because my language does not serve me well in attempting to draw analogies to the doctrine of the
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Trinity, I'm going to reject that God exists that way. So the first thing we see is that there is in the divine being but one indivisible essence.
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God's being is indivisible. We've already seen that. That's one God. That's monotheism. We saw that already.
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Number two, in this one divine being, there are three persons or individual subsistences,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why the word subsistence? Because if you said the word person, what do you think of?
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I think of you and you and you and physical bodies and total separation, and I again attempt to bring
01:17:40
God down to my level. The word subsistence might not be as familiar to you, but it also probably wouldn't carry as much excess baggage with it that you wouldn't want to attempt to import into your understanding of God as well.
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Well, what is this? This is simply the second foundation we've already looked at. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
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Number three, the whole undivided essence of God belongs equally to each of the three persons.
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What's that? That's the third one. Full equality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now what this is attempting to say is that the
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Father is not a third of God. The Son is not a third of God.
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The Spirit is not a third of God. We can't divide that up. It even says the whole undivided essence of God belongs equally.
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Colossians 2 .9, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form in Jesus Christ. You cannot divide
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God's being up. So if you've got three persons, they each share all that is God. They must.
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Fourth, the subsistence and operation of the persons and the divine being is marked by a certain definite order.
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That is, in Scripture, normally we see Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We see the
01:19:01
Father sending, the Father and the Son sending the Spirit. Now when we think of order, because we think within time, order implies greater, lesser, even lesser.
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That's one of the big problems we have. What this is actually attempting to emphasize is the fact that we don't end up confusing
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Father, Son, and Spirit. They have voluntarily taken the places that they have in the work that they have undertaken in this world.
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And we can tell who the Father is. The Father is identified for us. The Son is identified for us.
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The Holy Spirit is identified for us. Five, there are certain personal attributes by which the three persons are distinguished.
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This sort of flows into what we were just saying, and you cannot draw black and white lines here, but generally
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Christian theologians have identified creation with the Father, redemption with the
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Son, and sanctification with the Spirit. But realize those are all human aspects on the work of God from time.
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This is how we are seeing this. Now I could go into the more technical theological discussion of the opera ad intro and opera ad extra and things like that, but I don't think
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I need to do that. The sixth point is the Church confesses the Trinity to be a mystery beyond the comprehension of man.
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Now, why does it say that? Is that a nice cover -up for philosophical language and things like that?
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No. There are a couple things you need to realize about that. When I hear the word comprehension, I get the idea of taking in all of something.
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When I comprehend something, I'm big enough to wrap myself around it. Now the problem is, if you really believe
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God is infinite and eternal, and you really believe that man is finite and temporal, then you've got a problem on your hands.
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Because if you can ever get to the point where you can comprehend all there is to know of God, guess what?
01:21:11
You have become God. And no one that I've yet met would make a very good candidate for God.
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So in reality, what this is saying is the Church confesses that this is the highest revelation of God's being, and if we can't even fully comprehend how
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God is eternal, and he revealed that to us right off the bat back in Genesis and Exodus, who are we to think that we can comprehend and wrap ourselves around and put into a nice, tidy little box suitable for mailing
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God's highest revelation of himself, if we have to struggle with the most basic revelations of himself?
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Now I believe that every Christian should understand the doctrine of the
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Trinity. I differentiate between understand the statement of the doctrine and comprehend how
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God exists in his fullness. I differentiate between those two things. A finite being can understand the statement of the doctrine of the
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Trinity, the statement of what it says. But how, for example, the three persons fully and completely share the one being that is
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God is something that is without analogy within nature and therefore is beyond our total comprehension.
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Now it's important that you understand the distinction. We are not talking about three beings. We are not talking about one person that is three persons.
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That would be contradictory. That would be illogical. How many times have I heard people say, but the Trinity is contradiction. You believe that there are three persons that are one person.
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No, I don't believe that. You believe there are three gods that are one God. No, I don't believe that.
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You believe there are three beings that are one being. No, I don't believe that. Well, what do you believe? I believe there are three persons that are one being.
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Well, what is it? I define what person is and I define what being is.
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Person does not equal being. There are a lot of things that have being. Rocks have being. They have a rock being.
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It's their being to be a rock. And cows have a cow being.
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That's just what they are. Being, you can have being without personality. You cannot have personality without being.
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God is personal. Angels are personal. Man is personal. It is my being to be a human being, but I also happen to be
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James White. I am not someone else. I am not you.
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We both share one kind of being, human being, but I'm a different person than you are.
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Now, your human being is separate from mine because my being is finite and limited. There is only one person sharing this being because that's the way
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I've been designed. My being can't be shared by three or four different people. That's abnormal. God's being is infinite.
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God's being is unlimited. And God's being is shared by three persons fully and completely,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's an important thing to understand. Now, how can we understand this a little bit further?
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Well, I have here a small, very small, I don't know what you'd call it, visual aid.
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Now, this is a little box that I came up with one day. And as you're looking at it now, and those of you listening by tape are going to have a little problem following this, so I'll do my best to explain what's going on here.
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There is a light inside of a black box. Right now, those in the audience can only see basically a white circle.
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This represents what we see, for example, in the Old Testament, in the beginning of God's revelation of Himself.
01:25:03
We simply see God as holy, as just, as merciful, but we do not see, for example, all that we have spoken of this evening in regards to the
01:25:12
Trinity. Now, we come to the New Testament, however, things change. I have now turned the box around and those in the audience can see a larger opening in the box and across this opening are placed three colors.
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There is a red square, a green square, and a blue square. These are meant to represent the
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, there's some points I'd like to make by using this box in regards to what we've said this evening.
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First of all, you are not seeing anything different than what you saw before I turned the box around.
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If you know what the primary colors of light are, they are red, green, and blue. If you had a prism, you could have split those colors up and seen those colors, but your eyes do not have the ability to clarify and to distinguish between those colors.
01:26:06
You were seeing them, but you just didn't know it. In the same way in the Old Testament, the Trinity is there, but the differentiation is not made clear enough for us to see it in the way that we see it in the
01:26:16
Old Testament. Also, I'd like to point out there is only one light in this box. There are not three lights.
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There is only one light, and the red square, and the green square, and the blue square are each sharing that one light.
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The light is not being divided up into three separate sections, but you are simply seeing the one light expressed in red, green, and blue.
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You can also distinguish between them. You're not going to confuse the red and the green unless you happen to be a guy and be colorblind, but you're not going to confuse those two.
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You're not going to confuse the green and the blue. You can tell that there is a difference between them.
01:26:58
And so you have the fundamental thing. You have the fact there is but one light here. This is we have but one being of God.
01:27:05
You have the fact that you have three colors being represented here, red, green, and blue.
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This also has an equality of these, because you do not have one of these that is superior to another, one that outshines another.
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Each is drawing equally from the one light that is contained within the box. Hopefully that helps you somewhat in understanding some of the concepts of the
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Doctrine and Trinities. So hopefully in the brief amount of time we've spent looking at this information,
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I've been able to express to you some of the biblical concepts that go into our understanding as Christians concerning the
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Doctrine and Trinity, and how it is that we can call this a biblical doctrine, because it is forced upon us by biblical teaching of monotheism, of the three persons, and of the deity of the of the
01:28:07
Son and the Spirit. I thank you for your listening, and I hope that you will be able to take this information and apply it to your life in an ever greater understanding of the great