Keep sharing good news without ads.
No description available
Comments are turned off for this media
It is good to be with you today. I woke up very early this morning someplace else. And that's how road tripping works. And I am not a lifelong RVer or anything like that. So those of you who are, take pity upon me, pray for me as I learn all of the tricks of the trade.
This is my second trip. I went north the first time. And unfortunately there is something called the Rocky Mountains north of me. I am not sure there is a hill between Conway and here. I didn't run into one.
That was pretty amazing. That was, my truck got into a nice rhythm and that was fun. That was very nice. Until we got off the real nice highways and then it's like, oh, this is interesting. Look at all these, you have so many green things here.
I don't really know what those are living in Phoenix. And I have to keep watching because someday the front air conditioner on my unit will be the casualty of my not watching. And that's going to be a horrible sound when it takes place, I can assure you.
But it's good to be with you. I'm on my way to something called G3, the conference in Atlanta. I actually am supposed to be speaking tomorrow night. So tomorrow is going to be an early morning. And please pray that I don't have any issues between here and there.
It's a pretty long, pretty long drive. And but on Friday, I have the assignment of being the warm up for two guys you've probably never heard of before. They'll be preaching after me. Some guy named Votie Balcombe, another guy named Paul Washer.
So I'm not really sure who they are. But yeah, it's going to be a great time hopefully there at G3. And then I've got a number of stops on the way back where I'm going to be speaking and things like that.
So we're just sort of getting used to this. I'm sort of getting used to it. And when I have been up all day and driving, I generally don't throw on the bow tie and things like that. Hope you don't mind.
Because when you have to hook up power cords and water lines and sewer lines and things like that, it's just sort of like, yeah, okay, we'll be casual for the rest of the day after we do all of that. But it is good to be with you.
We have two topics we're going to be covering today. And it was interesting. I just happened to notice, even though I'm pretty much focused on the road and traffic and things like that, you have to be.
By the way, if you drive like a little Prius or something, could I give you a piece of advice? The reason that those of us who are driving something that's over 40 feet long and, in my case, between 16 and 18 ,000 pounds, the reason there's space between me and the next vehicle in my lane is because I need that space to stop.
And so when you take your Prius and zip in front of me and slam on the brakes, I will turn you into a Ritz cracker really fast. It's amazing what people do in those situations. Just a little common sense type thing goes on there.
But I was driving into Jonesboro, and I looked over to my right, and what to my wondering eyes did appear? Then an Islamic center. Yes, a mosque. Have any of you visited that mosque, for example? Y 'all, you have?
A couple of you have? Okay. And very nicely built there. It's sort of a small one. It's not real big, but there's one there. And I passed a Newman Center for the Roman Catholic Church on the way in as well.
So, obviously, there are issues to be addressed, not so much with the Newman Center on this subject, though I would raise some issues concerning Mary on some aspects of things, but especially with the Islamic Center there, there is a real need for Christians who know what they believe, why they believe, and are passionate about what they believe to be able to interact with those folks.
I have a special love in my heart, of course, for the Muslim people, having had the opportunity of engaging in debates with them literally all over the world. Those were the before-corona days, where in 2019 I flew 165 ,000 miles and taught in South Africa, Samara, Russia, Melbourne, Australia, spent two months in London, and will probably never get to do any of that ever again, to be perfectly honest with you.
But in those days, I got to debate in mosques in South Africa. And I love the Muslim people, and they need Christians who know what they believe and why they believe it and are passionate about those things and can answer sometimes very challenging questions as well.
And so, let's use that as sort of the example to walk us into our topic. It does seem to me that most evangelicals in the West are Trinitarians of tradition, but not so much of passion. If any of you have seen my book, The Forgotten Trinity, you know that I began that book by telling a story and by raising the phrase, I love the Trinity, and asking the question, when did you last hear anyone say, I love the Trinity?
You hear people saying, I love Jesus, I love prophecy, I love worship, I love eschatology, you hear all that kind of stuff, but when do you ever hear anyone saying, I love the Trinity? And I think the primary reason for that is that for most of us, it is somewhat of a mystery.
And we feel uncomfortable with it. We recognize, you know, if I right now, for example, I've taught systematic theology and seminary many times, and if I right now said, I'm going to pick one of you out, and I'm going to ask you three questions about the doctrine of the Trinity, and I started looking around.
What's going to happen is a number of you are all of a sudden going to discover that your left big toe is fascinating. You'd never noticed how fascinating that was, right? Because most of us don't want to be put in that position.
And one of the problems, I think, is most pastors don't want to be put in that position either. And one thing I learned a long time ago, my church history professor put it this way, that which is a mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew.
So if the person up here isn't overly clear about a certain thing, it's going to be even less clear in the pew because they are going to struggle to be able to express themselves. They may be inconsistent in how they express themselves on these certain beliefs.
And so if many of our seminary graduates are not really passionate about and have a clarity of thought concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, if it's just something that's out there, it's historical.
Well, it is historical. It's a major part of the history of the church. But if it's just out there, if it's just in our systematic theologies and not a part of the everyday experience of a Christian, let's put it this way.
How many of us could honestly admit that we could easily go through an entire day of our life without ever contemplating the Trinity? That shouldn't be the case because, for example, when you pray, who are you praying to?
Why do you pray in the way that you pray? Why is it that Jesus said in John chapter 14 about the time after his ascension back to the Father, he said, if you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. Well, how would you ask Jesus something in his name after he's ascended back to the Father?
Well, that's why in 1 Corinthians, Christians are known as those who epikaleo, they call upon the name of the Lord. The Lord there is Jesus. They are praying to Christ. So, how do you do that? Because most people simply pray to the Father.
Or, even worse, how many times have you heard someone praying? I don't want to pick on anybody here. But you've heard something like this. Oh, Heavenly Father, we thank you for giving us this day to gather together.
And, oh, Heavenly Father, we thank you for coming and dying for us. And no one even twitches. The Father didn't die for us. The Spirit didn't die for us. It was the Son who became incarnate. And so, I have often heard people make Trinitarian errors in prayer, which indicates a level of confusion on their part as to what role the Divine Persons have had in the Gospel itself.
I think that impacts our worship. I think it impacts our hymnology, the worship of the Church together. Now, there are some groups that are very explicitly Trinitarian, and most of their people really do know the doctrine fairly well.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of their theology is going to be balanced and sound. But there are certain groups that have a good, strong emphasis in those areas, and we can be thankful for that.
But we, as believers, should recognize that, historically, the Church has said, this is the defining doctrine of the faith. I mean, at least up until the last few years, I suppose. It's been pretty obvious that we can't have fellowship with, for example, Jehovah's Witnesses.
Not that they were looking to have fellowship with us in the first place. But why couldn't we have fellowship with Jehovah's Witnesses? They think the Bible is the Word of God? Yeah, they've got a weird translation of it.
And yeah, they're constantly trying to convert us, and wake us up on Saturday mornings, and make us angry with them, and things like that. But why can't we have fellowship with Jehovah's Witnesses? Well, because they believe Jesus is Michael the Archangel.
And that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal, active force, similar to the electricity that is lighting these blinding lights that are so wonderful over on the sides of the room. He's not a person. He's an it.
And so, they deny the doctrine of the Trinity. So we can't have fellowship with them. But how can that be when most of our fellowship doesn't actually involve us really understanding what the doctrine of the Trinity is in the first place?
And then those Mormon missionaries, aren't they some of the nicest young men you've ever seen? I mean, they are so clean cut. And they're in good shape, too. They're riding a bike everywhere. And, you know, they want to talk about families.
And they wear white shirts. And it's just great and wonderful. But we don't have fellowship with them, either, because they believe they can become gods. And that God the Father was once a man who lived on another planet.
And that his first born spirit child with one of his many wives was Jesus. And then another one of his spirit children was Lucifer. And we're all his spirit children that lived on another planet that circles a star named Kolob.
And we go, yeah, no, can't do that. Okay. So if it is central to our experience, central to our faith, then shouldn't it be something that we spend more or less time understanding and studying than, say, oh, knowing what's going on in the current popular, whatever the popular TV series are right now, which I will have to admit, I don't have a clue.
I don't have any earthly idea what is popular on television these days. But how many Christians know more about that than they do the doctrine of the Trinity? And does that make any sense? And when we then tell people outside the Christian faith about what we believe, and they know and can tell by the, well, look, when you try to explain something to someone, you know, my daughter is homeschooling my grandkids.
And I think it's wonderful and awesome, and they're great kids, and she's doing a great job. But when you're a homeschooler, there are certain subjects you do real well in, and then there are those subjects you didn't do all that well in school either.
And so you're much more dependent upon the textbook, and your answers aren't so quick, and they aren't so clear, and you really can't give good illustrations and things like that. Can people tell that when we answer questions about the doctrine of the Trinity that we're struggling, that we're having to really put a lot of thought into it?
And that would tell them, we may say it's central, but we're not living as if it is. Now, I don't have time in the amount of time that we have together in this hour, hour 15, something like that, to do a full-orbed seminar on the doctrine of the Trinity.
I've done that many times. There's stuff like that online and things like that. But what I would like to do is look at what is key in defining the doctrine of the Trinity and hopefully lay a foundation for you, clarify some of the key issues.
And also make an appeal. I'm a bit concerned about some of the stuff going on in the church today, and even in what I would consider to be sound circles of theological discourse and discussion, in regards to this doctrine of the Trinity.
When I wrote The Forgotten Trinity, and it came out, I think, in 1998, how many of you were not around in 1998? Anybody here that wasn't around in 19... Oh, there you go. I'm sure you were not around in 1998.
That's true. That's good. So most of you are around anyways. But it was a while back, and I made the argument that I am a biblical Trinitarian. And I laid out what that meant. And fundamentally my assertion was, if you believe Scripture is the sole and fallible rule of faith in the church, sola Scriptura, and if you believe that you have to believe all of Scripture, tota Scriptura, then the Bible teaches three foundational doctrines, that if you believe all three of them, require you to believe it, to be a Trinitarian.
There are some today who would find the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity in some rather abstract philosophical speculations, and would consider my approach to be rather naive, to be perfectly honest with you.
But the fact of the matter is, I can't see any other foundation for believing in the doctrine of the Trinity. And in fact, I would say one of the reasons that liberal denominations, or leftist denominations, whatever you want to call them, they're denominations that eventually die.
For example, you know, all the mainline denominations that are just disappearing into the mists of history right now. I just saw an article just this morning, that the United Church of Christ just sold its headquarters building, where over 300 people used to work.
And it moved into something like the size of a house. And at the current collapsing rate, they will be completely... They used to have over 2 million members. They will disappear into history by 2045.
There won't be anybody left. And there's a reason for that. They abandon any even semblance of belief in the Bible as Word of God. They basically abandon any semblance of belief in the supernatural. And if you do not believe that this is a consistent revelation from God, there is no reason to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity.
There's none. Why in the world would you believe that God is one being and three persons? Why would you make that distinction? Why would you distinguish between the Father and the Son? Just to give you an illustration, I attended a debate, and I wasn't actually debating, which is very unusual for me to attend a debate when I'm not debating.
But I attended a debate about five, six years ago. It was on the subject of homosexuality, but in the process, the leftist that was pushing the idea of becoming accepting of the LGBTQ movement in the church made the argument that we've already learned to think past and believe past what Paul, a first-century Jew, believed.
And we need to do the same thing to recognize that we need to be able to believe differently than Jesus, a first-century Jew, believed. And this professor at the time was an adjunct for Fuller Theological Seminary, so I went up to him during the break, and I said, Did I hear you correctly when you said that?
And he said, Yeah. I said, So you don't believe, for example, the Nicene Confession of Faith in Christ? And he said, Do you really think the apostles thought Jesus was God? Now, this is a professor in a theological seminary.
And once you abandon this as your foundation, and once you abandon the commitment to believe this and to believe all of it, Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura, there's no reason to believe in the Doctrine of Trinity.
I mean, you can say, Well, traditionally, this group said that, and this group said that, and blah, blah, blah. But that's all it is. It cannot have any kind of authority in your life at all. And if you just, in passing, would like to make an obvious connection between what we're talking about now and what's going on in our society right now, and for some of us, it's sort of like, We're talking about what sounds like an abstract theological concept over here, but there are people in my country right now who are hoping to be able to make it so that if I don't say whatever they want me to say and do whatever they want me to do and think like they want me to think, that there's going to be a nice, uncomfortable gulag to stick me in very soon.
And so we sort of go, What's more important? I probably should be thinking about this stuff over here and not this abstract theological stuff over there. Well, let me just point something out to you. One of the primary responses that Christian people are offering to the rise of totalitarianism in our day is the words that we all know from Matthew chapter 28.
We all know the Great Commission. You can therefore go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I've commanded you and along with you always, even at the end of the age.
But there's a therefore there, and the previous verse says what? All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Jesus said, All authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. Now, if Jesus was just simply a man, those would be insane words.
They would be frightening words. You don't give all authority to anyone other than someone who can bear that authority appropriately. And so when Christians say we are to live our lives in light of the Lordship of Christ, we are making claims about this one.
We're not only claiming he rose from the dead, we're also claiming that he was the eternal Logos who took on human flesh. He is the Son of God incarnate. He's the maker of all things. When I talk to my Muslim friends down the road there, I say to them, I say, you can't have a Jesus who's just simply a prophet, a mere Rasul, as the Quran says.
The Jesus of the New Testament gave you every breath of your mouth and every beat of your heart. You can't be neutral toward him. And so what we believe about Jesus is intimately connected to what we believe about the doctrine of the Trinity.
And what we're saying to the world is there is a higher authority than any Congress, than any president, than any premier, than any prime minister. And in fact, every member of every Congress, including that one Democrat who said that the existence of God is not relevant to this Congress, just about what, about a year ago he said that?
Boy, those are words I would not want to take into heaven and answer for. Well, actually it wouldn't be heaven you'd be answering it for, into judgment to answer for. But every member of every Congress, every premier, every prime minister, every president will someday stand before the one who rose from the dead to be judged for the deeds done in the body.
And so the doctrine of the Trinity is very much connected to any decisions that we are making today as to how we are to respond to individuals who are attempting to establish a secular totalitarian state wherein everybody gets to think what they tell them to think.
And the Christian says someday there will be a totalitarian state. What did Paul say to the Philippians? That after the resurrection of Jesus, God highly exalted him and gave him the name which is above every name, that is the name of Jesus, what?
Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is kurios, he is Lord to the glory of God the Father. That is the Christian message and we should not shirk back from that. That is not established by military force, however.
To recognize who Jesus is at this point in time is the work of the Holy Spirit in a person's heart and life. And only when judgment takes place is there a mighty display of his power. So that connection made and that short sermon delivered, that connection made, that short sermon delivered, Doctrine of the Trinity, I put, are you guys good back there with the thing there?
I grabbed just four little slides from my normal presentation to sort of give you a framework to utilize and to function from if you want to take notes or stuff like that. Like I said, there is an entire presentation we could do here.
But I want to give you the framework of the basics as to how to understand the Doctrine of the Trinity. This has helped a lot of folks, I hope it helps you and I hope it makes it easier for you to communicate when you are talking with your friends or if you happen to go by the mosque or whatever.
Are the Jehovah's Witnesses even going door to door anymore? I have not seen them. You still got some around here? Okay, all right. In Arizona, I honestly, I know the Mormons went into hiding in March of 2020 and no one has seen them since.
I have jokingly said that they are going to finally come out of their basements and they are going to be so pasty white it is not even, talk about white and delightsome. They will be white and delightsome at that point in time.
No, really, I do not know what is going on with the Mormons. They shut down their temples. They have not had an in-person general conference since October of 2019. It is amazing. There is going to be a huge massive splintering of Mormonism eventually.
Either that or it is just going to whimper and die, one of the two. But anyway, when talking with all those folks, it is extremely helpful to recognize that there are three foundational truths that are biblical teachings that give us the doctrines of Trinity.
And once you know these biblical truths, these three foundations, then when you are talking with someone and you hear their objections or their misunderstandings or whatever else it might be, you are able to focus in on what is really important and you are also able to take them to the key text.
Let the word of God testify concerning its truthfulness. I think a lot of folks who talk about the Trinity, someone has an objection and we just start becoming, all of a sudden, philosophers. There is nothing wrong with a philosophy that recognizes Christ as the center of philosophy, which most philosophers will not.
But if this is a biblical doctrine, if it is what this presents, and by the way, if you think this is inspired and consistent enough to give you a doctrine like the Trinity, you are today in the minority in what calls itself Christianity.
You go to most seminaries and Bible colleges, maybe not necessarily around here, but I am sure plenty of them you can find around here too, and their doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture will not be sufficiently high to believe that this is consistent enough to reveal something like this.
That is a sad commentary, but it helps you to explain how people end up where they end up. So the first foundation, the bedrock of the doctrine of the Trinity. What is Trinity? Tri-unity. It is that unity that is monotheism.
There is only one true God. Now, you and I may just sort of assume that. We have just grown up with that, right? But in the history of mankind, that was a radical idea. And especially in the ancient Near East, when Israel would say, Yahweh created the heavens and the earth.
That was considered incredibly offensive. Because what you are saying is, your God did not. And in fact, your God does not even exist. Everybody back then, every nation had its own gods, and they ruled within the borders of that particular nation, that particular country.
And that is how you got along with everybody. You worship your God, we will worship our God. It is cool. And if you went to war, then if you could steal their God, hey, now you win. Because their God can't do anything about it anyways.
So when Israel comes along and says, Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, even great nations, great empires like the Babylonians, their gods came out of the creation. The creation preexisted them and gave rise to them.
So when you have the constant testimony from Genesis through Malachi, or as the Jews would have said, Genesis through 2 Chronicles, their order of canonicity is different than ours, that Yahweh is the maker of all things, that he is the only true God, he knows of no other gods, all the gods of the nations are idols, those were incredibly offensive words to the people around them.
But everybody knows how a Jewish person would identify themselves, right? You know what would identify a Jewish person in the days of Jesus or before that, was you said the Shema. Each day you would pray the Shema.
Shema means hear in Hebrew. So Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. And that's how they were identified, that was their profession of faith. And that was a profession of faith that was very offensive to the people around them.
Most of us would go, yeah, I know the Bible teaches there's only one true God, and because we assume it, and unless you've spent time witnessing the Mormons, who don't believe there's only one true God, you might struggle to find all the passages in Scripture that say it, but I would just suggest to you, if you want to read and contemplate this particular truth, go to what's called the trial of the false gods, in Isaiah 40 -48, chapters 40 -48.
And there Yahweh places the idols of the people on trial, and in the process reveals so much about himself and the unique attributes of his divine being by demonstrating that the gods of the peoples are just idols.
And interestingly enough, one of the primary arguments that that section gives is the true God knows the future. The idols cannot tell you the future, but the true God knows the future because he's the creator of all things.
So, monotheism, the fact that there is only one true God, and that does not change in the New Testament. We don't have one God in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. If you want to see especially how this is, just for a second, look at 1 Corinthians chapter 8 with me.
1 Corinthians chapter 8, if you've not seen this before, and I get to show it to you first, well, great. Then you will always thank me for this. But 1 Corinthians chapter 8, remember I just quoted to you the Shema, and that's what defined the Jewish people.
But in 1 Corinthians chapter 8, Paul's talking about things sacrificed to idols because back in that day, if you wanted to go pick up a pound of beef to make dinner tonight, you'd go to the meat market, and you knew if you were in some place like Corinth, every bit of that meat in the meat market had been offered in one of the pagan temples to one of the gods.
So it had been put on the altar, and sacrifices had been made, and then it's taken out the back door and sent to the meat market and sold. And so there were some Christians who knew this, and their consciences were troubled by this.
And so Paul's discussing this in 1 Corinthians chapter 8, and he says, you know, there's no such thing as an idol of the world. There's no god but one. There are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many gods and many lords, and so there are all sorts of deities that people will identify.
If you were in Corinth, there was a temple to a deity on almost every corner. But then he says in verse 6,. Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him.
Now, I have all sorts of cool graphics I could illustrate this, but what Paul does in verse 6 is he takes the Shema. If you look at verse 6 in Paul's writing in Greek, and you look at the Shema from the Old Testament in Greek, and what's called the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is what everybody in Corinth would be reading at this point in time, and you compare the two of them, you can see Paul is taking the Shema, where it says one God, Lord, is Kurios, Yahweh.
He's using all the same language, and he's expanding it in light of the Incarnation. And here is an early, most people believe, early Christian creed. Some English translations even put verse 6 in poetic form to show that that's probably what it is.
But this is an early Christian confession of faith, an early Christian creed. There is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist through him. Notice the creation aspect. And one Kurios, that's the Greek word that translated the name of God, Yahweh, in the Old Testament.
Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him. So, this doesn't change then. You don't have monotheism in the Old Testament, and Trinitarianism in the New Testament. Trinitarianism is a monotheistic belief.
And this is one of the places where our Muslim friends can be very confused, because it seems like the author of the Qur 'an was greatly confused at this very point as well. Every time the Qur 'an says, do not say three, referring to the Trinity, the next line is, there is only one God, Allah.
And so the author of the Qur 'an thought that whatever it was we were saying implied polytheism. And that simply is not the case, if you understand the doctrine of the Trinity, and it does not seem that he did.
So, monotheism is the foundation. It has to be rock solid at the bottom. The second foundation is where most of us struggle. So, let me come back to it, because the third foundation we sort of understand, and that is the co-equality and co-eternality of the person.
So, in other words, if you have ever tried to demonstrate the deity of Christ, the places where Jesus is called God, where he is described as being the creator, being eternal, things like that. Discuss the person, the Holy Spirit, and you have gone to Acts 5, you have not lied to God, but you have lied to the Holy Spirit, and so on and so forth.
You have been defending the third foundation, and that is the co-equality and co-eternality of Father, Son, and Spirit. And so, that is where the deity of Christ arguments come in, with the Jehovah's Witnesses, or other Unitarian groups and things like that.
And so, it is important to know those things, but that is the third foundation. Where a lot of people struggle is foundation number two, the existence of three divine persons. How can you say one in the first foundation, and three in the second foundation?
And so, there are a lot of groups. They will try to confuse us by saying, well, you are saying one plus one plus one equals three. No, we are not. Well, you said one in the first, and you are saying three in the second, and you cannot tell us what the difference is.
Well, but we assert there is a difference. We are saying that there is one being of God, and three divine persons that share perfectly that one being. Well, how do you distinguish between being and person?
Well, we distinguish between being and person every single day. It is a natural part of our language. So, I don't know if any of you, very few of you in the room are old enough to remember, but back in the 1970s, there have been some really dumb things.
Remember mood rings? Anybody remember mood rings? A couple of you are going, eh, eh, eh. I am not admitting that. No, I don't remember mood rings, no. We had mood rings, and I remember, I think I was in junior high school when everybody was running around with mood rings.
But right around the same time, someone came up with the idea of having pet rocks. Pet rocks. Now, the nice thing about it was they weren't expensive because they are rather plentiful in almost anywhere you live.
You can find rocks of pretty much any size and shape you want, paint some eyes and stuff. It thankfully didn't last for a long time, but the fact was you could take a rock, and you could spend a lot of time painting it very nicely and making it very, well, as attractive as a rock can be, I suppose.
But if you picked up that rock, and you swung it at somebody, and you hit somebody with it, you could go to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, right? Why? Because the rock has being. It exists. And how do I know that?
Throw it at my face, and I will know that it exists. It can prove it exists. However, all the painting in the world, all the nice stories about how much your pet rock means to you will never make it personal.
And how do I know that? Because I could put my pet rock right there, and I could go, I love you, pet rock. You just mean the world to me. And you know what? Its expression would not change. It would not care because it's not personal.
Or I could call it every name in the book. It still wouldn't care. It has being, but it's not personal. We distinguish between the two. Now, my cats have being. And in a way, they can tell when I'm angry at them because they just ripped up something I didn't want them to rip up.
I remember I still have a couple Bibles that I bought when I was younger that my cats got to, and the spines are just, those are great for sharpening those claws, you know, and just all torn up. And they knew I was not happy with them, but they forgot about that by the next day, and they can't see themselves as part of cat kind, for example.
They cannot recognize their own personhood over against any other cat. What beings do we know in Scripture are properly described as personal? Well, God is. He uses personal pronouns. The angels seem to be as well, and human beings.
We know that we exist in humankind. We can distinguish ourselves from others. So we see the connection we have to all the people as far as our humanity is concerned, but we also recognize that we are not all other people.
We are distinguished from all other people. And so when we're talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, we are distinguishing between being and person. So keeping those in mind then, when we talk about the three divine persons, we are saying that we can distinguish between divine persons, and there's two different ways we can distinguish between them.
We can distinguish between what they've done in redemption. So it was the Son who became incarnate, not the Father, not the Spirit. It's the Spirit who's been sent by the Father and the Son to indwell the Church.
It's the Father who sent the Son to be the Redeemer and the Savior of mankind. Each has taken a different role in what's called the economic trinity or the actions of the Trinity in redeeming mankind.
But theologians have also said that there are intrinsic differences that distinguish the persons even before creation itself. Now I'm not going to go into all that today. If you want to read the Forgotten Trinity, you can get into a discussion of those things.
But there are distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit and how they relate to one another. And this is where people struggle. Because have you ever talked to someone who's, for example, a Oneness Pentecostal?
Jesus only? And they will, at least if they're part of the UPCI, they will believe that Jesus is two persons. He's both the Father and the Son. The Father is the divine aspect of Jesus. The Son is the human aspect of Jesus.
Hence the Son came into existence at His birth in Bethlehem. He's not an eternal person. And there's some confusion as to exactly how to identify the Holy Spirit, especially in regards to the resurrection of Christ.
But anyway, this is a form of what's called modalism, dynamic monarchism. This was an actual error of the early church. In fact, by the second century, there was a great deal of consternation about this particular teaching.
But if you've talked to those types of folks, you know that they'll point to verses and they'll say, well, Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. Jesus said, I and the Father are one. And so there Jesus was identifying Himself as the Father.
Well, no, He wasn't. Even in John 10 .30 when Jesus said, I and the Father are one, the verb there is plural. I and the Father, we are one. In the context, it's one in the salvation of God's people, not the same person.
Jesus always distinguished Himself from the Father. He referred to the Father and used different personal pronouns, one person speaking to another person. John 17, He said, Father, glorify me with the glory which I had in your presence before the world was.
That's one person talking to another person. There's no question about that. And so foundation number two is where there's a lot of confusion in people's prayers, there's confusion in songs. There are well-known singing groups today in contemporary Christian music made up of people who used to be one of the Pentecostals and now their churches go, we're not really sure.
We're not really sure what to believe about that. But these are your three foundations. And so when someone starts objecting to what you believe, what your mind should do is immediately go to these foundations.
Which one of these foundations is this person confused on? Have they been misinformed about? However you want, whatever the situation is, your mind should go to them. So let's go to the next one. And when you see a triangle, you automatically start thinking of that graphic where you've got God in the middle and it says, is not, is not, is not, is, is, is, etc., etc., etc.
That's not what this is. You already got that one. I don't need to give you that one. These are the three doctrines. And monotheism is on the bottom, the foundation. The three divine persons is over there on the left side.
The equality of the persons is on the right side. And so if you write this down and put it like that, if you cross out monotheism, if you deny monotheism, if you deny there's only one true God, like the Mormons do, and then you take the other two sides, you have three divine persons, they're equal to one another, but you don't have the affirmation of monotheism, what's the result?
Polytheism. You're going to have three gods. Maybe more, but at least three, because if you've got three divine persons and they're equal to one another, but you don't have the foundation of monotheism, the result is polytheism, a belief in more than one God.
So let's go to the next one. If you negate the existence of the three divine persons, then you have monotheism and inequality of those persons, and the result is modalism or oneness. So either you have the idea that Jesus is multiple persons, or the more ancient idea that God sort of behaved in different ways, and so he would take different modes of existence, and so he'd have a mode of existence as a father, but then he'd have a mode of existence as a son, a mode of existence as a spirit, and it's frightening how many Christians default to this by mistake.
I have said for decades that I would be concerned to give a test to most people attending church this coming Sunday, because a large number of those folks would test positive for oneness. Not for that other thing, but would test positive for oneness.
And I remember I was in a church in Florida. Was it Florida? I think it was. Anyways, and this was before YouTube. And yes, young people, there was a world before YouTube. It was a dark and lonely place.
Windswept plains, nothing to do. Dinosaurs walking by outside. It had to be very quiet when they came by. And before YouTube, I could role-play with people, because who in the world would know who in the world I am?
My picture wouldn't be all over the place. There wouldn't be hundreds of debates that I've done wandering around the Internet. And so it's really fun. It was fun to do. I can't do it anymore, but it was fun to do, especially with junior high schoolers.
Any junior high schoolers here? Good. Yes? He's saying yes. No? Junior high school, see, you're born, you're human, you're human. Junior high school, back up the humanity in high school. It's just, anyone who works with junior high schoolers, God bless you.
I mean, no purgatory for you. So, anyway, trying to keep junior high schoolers' attention is really difficult to do. And so I was in this junior high school class, and the youth minister was in there.
And the youth minister introduced me as elder somebody from the local Kingdom Hall, one of Jehovah's Witnesses. And so I'd get up there, and I would start speaking, and they're freaking out, of course.
And honestly, with this poor youth minister guy, I had him spouting oneness heresy within about 34 seconds. Was that easy to do? Well, you know, Jesus said he would see me as seeing the Father, right?
So Jesus and the Father are one person? Well, yeah, I guess. Well, then how can this be true? And just tied the guy up in a knot so fast. And the kids are just like absolutely, they don't have any phones to be looking at back then.
So they are fascinated by this, but they're also freaking out. And then, you know, halfway through, you stop and tell them what's really going on, and they go, oh, and then you lose their attention for the rest of the time, but at least you tried, so that's the best you can do.
But I think most, I would estimate minimally 70 of people attending conservative Baptist churches across the United States would fail a quiz and fall into this camp. Not because they have a conviction of it, but they just don't know how to distinguish being in person.
It's that second foundation that's the issue. I really think that would happen. So the last one then, obviously, if you deny the equality of the persons, you have monotheism, you have three divine persons, and so what you have to do is you have to subordinate, because you don't have equality, you have to subordinate one to the other.
And so subordinationism, the denial of the full deity of Christ, people saying that Jesus is a great messenger, whatever else it might be, Unitarianism, if you want to see how this sort of fleshes out in one example, the debate that Michael Brown and I did against two Unitarians, Anthony Buzzard and Joseph Good, on the Jewish Voice broadcast 2011, I think.
I think it was ten years ago. It may have been even 2010, I don't remember now. But it's on YouTube, three some odd hours long, and you can see how all that works. So what this triangle allows you to do is to, when you hear where the objection is, you can identify what section of biblical verses that you've already memorized, because we're going to memorize lots of verses to be prepared, right?
Which testimony of scripture you need to be moving to to help them to understand what their error is. Or it may not even be people that just have objections, it may be someone in your Bible study class that just doesn't understand.
They've got some bad information, they've heard some bad preaching, they've listened to Phillips, Craig, and Dean. That was the music group I was talking about. Beautiful music, but they're not Unitarians.
And so they end up with some level of confusion, and you can help them. You're called to be able to help them. It's extremely important, I think, for you to be able to assist them and to help them. But it also is so vitally important, I think, for you.
For us in the church, when we worship, we need to have the proper biblical categories for that worship to be pleasing to God, and for us to recognize what our God has done in our own redemption. The Trinity is central to the gospel.
The gospel is a Trinitarian belief. When you don't have the doctrine of the Trinity, you're going to end up with a false gospel. What do I mean by that? Any text where you start working through what is being said, Ephesians chapter 1 takes us all the way back into history.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And all these spiritual blessings that are then listed as coming from the decree of the Heavenly Father. And what is the only way in which they are found?
Ten times in 13 verses, Paul says, in Him, in Christ, in the Beloved One. They are uniquely in Christ. They are the blessings that flow from the decree of the Father. They come into our possession only as we are in Christ, as we are in Him.
And then how does it end in verse 14? And how do we know all these things? We have the Arabon, the down payment in our own spirit. And who is the Arabon? The Holy Spirit of God that makes us to understand all these things, that seals us, and that directs us in our worship.
It's Trinitarian. Think about what Ephesians 1 would actually be about if you were one of Jehovah's Witnesses. First of all, Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe that... In fact, I remember the first time I was talking to a Jehovah's Witness and found out that they are basically open theists.
And you know what an open theist is? An open theist does not believe that God has exhaustive knowledge of future events. Most forms of open theism would say he doesn't have exhaustive knowledge of future events because he cannot know what free creatures will do.
So you can surprise God. He may know that, you know, I went out with the guys to grab a bite of lunch when I got here. I am one of those speakers that is extremely demanding. You know, because I know some speakers.
When they come into a church, they have to have a hotel room at a certain temperature, and there has to be these things in a basket waiting for them when they get there, and all that neat kind of wonderful stuff.
My hotel room is parked right out here. You passed it when you came in. And we went to Arby's. Yeah. I saw Arby's on the way in. I said, that would be good. That would be quick. It's safe. I love Arby's.
But you know what? There are a couple of things at Arby's that I really like. Their chicken fingers ain't bad. They're not as good as Cane's, though. And I'm sorry. You guys got Zaxby's down here? Can't touch Cane's with a 10-foot pole.
No, no, no. We can get an argument going here because all you Chick-fil-A people go, well, what about Chick-fil-A? Well, let's not go there right now, shall we? But they've got chicken fingers, and they've got the regular roast beef sandwich, and they've got a beef and cheddar, and they've got a number of different sandwiches you can get at Arby's.
Now, normally I'd get the regular. But I may have surprised God today, if you're an open theist, because I got a beef and cheddar instead. Now, the open theist is doing that for other reasons. The open theist is doing that so that man can have an autonomous will, there's no doctrine of election, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
But the price is huge that God created, but he didn't know how it was all going to turn out at the end. And he's doing the best he can, but there have been some detours along the way, shall we say, some, you know, world wars and things like that, atomic bombs and whatever.
But he can't really be blamed for that, because he didn't know that that was all going to be here. So leaving open theism, you know, off to the side, Jehovah's Witnesses sort of embraced that idea. And so in talking with them, what I found, and this is true of many different groups, what's one of the best ways, not only for us to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but to explain it to somebody else?
I'll tell you a story. Again, before YouTube, I got to meet with more Mormons than Jehovah's Witnesses. Once YouTube came along, then that became more difficult to do. But I was asked to come over and meet with three elders of a Jehovah's Witness congregation at a Christian's home.
And I was straight up front with them when I met them. I teach, at the time I was a scholar in residence at Grand Canyon University, and I teach apologetics. In fact, I lecture people about what you believe.
Now, some Jehovah's Witnesses, they're straight out the door as soon as you say that. Some of them. Others, because these were elders, so they felt a little bit more comfortable. Others find that fascinating.
And so what I said to them, I said, in fact, could I sort of run through what you believe for you, just to give you an idea whether I'm, you know, am I being accurate? No one had ever offered to do that for them before, so I ran through using their own language and gave them the most accurate representation of what they believe I possibly could.
And they just sat there. They're like, and one of them said, you could have done that in a kingdom hall and nobody would have been the wiser. I said, well, I try to be accurate in my understanding of what you're saying.
Now what have I done? I've purchased the opportunity to have a few minutes of their attention now. I said, and they said, and you're a Trinitarian? And I said, yes, and let me explain why. Can I explain why to you?
And since I had accurately represented them, they said yes. And so what I demonstrated to them really left them speechless. And this is, they're not going to, they're almost never going to take literature from you.
You've got to show it to them in their own Bible. The key way to help a Jehovah's Witness see the truth is not to argue with them about John 1, 1, whether it's God or a God. A Jehovah's Witness can argue John 1, 1 with you in a comatose state.
They don't even have to be conscious. You're not getting them to think about anything. Don't even bother. It's not that it's not an important text. It's not that there isn't a way of demonstrating what it's supposed to teach.
The point is that in most situations, we don't have time to dig that deeply. And so what I did is I said, well, as you know, the name of God in the Old Testament is Yahweh, or as you pronounce it, Jehovah.
In this instance, I didn't argue about the pronunciation. There wasn't any reason to do it. I just went with Jehovah. That's not how it was pronounced, but anyway. And I said, that name's used thousands of times in the Old Testament.
A lot of Jehovah's Witnesses don't even realize that Christians know these types of things. And I said, what's fascinating is when we come into the New Testament, we know that the Father is identified as Jehovah, and you would agree with that.
And they said yes. For example, who was it that laid our sins upon the Messiah in Isaiah 53? It was Jehovah. Jehovah has laid our sins upon the Messiah. I said, but where we disagree is the New Testament writers frequently identify Jesus as Jehovah.
Now, for a Jehovah's Witness, if Jesus is Jehovah, that's the end of the debate. You can talk about God and agod until the cows come home. If Jesus is Jehovah, they are wrong. That's all there is to it.
And so they're very interested in where this would be. And so I took them, and it's important that you do this in the right order. Yeah, I've got just about enough time to do this. It's important you do this in the right order.
I took them to Psalm 102, 25 -27. And in Psalm 102, 25 -27, in their translation, you can back it up, it's talking about Jehovah, because their translation uses the name Jehovah. It's all through the Old Testament, even in the New Testament.
And there, Jehovah is described as the one who of old made all things, but they will wear out, you never change, you will change them like a garment, but you yourself never change, your years never end.
It's this whole description of what's called the immutability, the unchangeableness of Jehovah. And so I asked them, I said, okay, here in Psalm 102, Jehovah is being described as unchanging. Would you agree with me that only Jehovah is unchanging?
Well, yeah, of course, he's the creator. Exactly. Keep your finger in there, and turn with me to Hebrews chapter 1. And I could have started earlier in Hebrews chapter 1, and we could have ended up having arguments about some mistranslations they have in their version, and not worth doing it.
There are a number of references to the deity of Christ in Hebrews chapter 1. But if you go to verse 10, there the author quotes, and I backed them up a little bit, and even their own translation, but of the sun he says, and then there's a quote, and then this quote.
So it's about the sun. Even their own translation says it, and in fact, I'm not sure if they've removed this. They came up with a new edition, the NWT, just a few years ago, and I haven't looked this up yet.
I need to. I have a new one. But in those days, anyways, there was a cross-reference in the center column that told people where verses 10 through 12 was being quoted from, and it's Psalm 102, 25 to 27.
The very same text that's about Jehovah being unchanging and eternal is applied by the author of Hebrews to the sun in Hebrews chapter 1, verses 10 through 12. And since they already read the Psalm passage, it's identical in Hebrews.
There's no way to avoid it. Now here is just a very practical little thing to remember. If you ever get yourself in this situation, now the temptation hits you. Okay, I've got him. So I'm going to get out my theological sword, and I'm going to run him through.
Tell me about that, Mr. Jehovah's Witness. And here's the problem. They'll come up with an answer. It may be the craziest, dumbest thing they've ever said in their lives, but they'll go their grave defending it because you forced them to.
You have to be very careful at this point. You've just presented something to them that if they will have the time and if there's another Jehovah's Witness with them, they cannot give any indication they're even hearing what you're saying because they're scared of what that other person could do.
So you've got to give them the freedom to think about these things at another point in time when they're not under that pressure if you really want to help them the most. So here's what you do. You say, now, if you've never seen that before, it would be unfair of me to ask you to give a response to that.
So now you've taken the pressure off. They're not going to forget it because they don't know how to answer it. They've never seen that before. So you've taken the pressure off, and then what you do is take advantage of having taken the pressure off and go, but could I show you another one?
I've never had a Witness say no because I took the pressure off them. I didn't make them answer the first one, and so now I've bought myself a few more minutes to give them a second one. And the second one I do is I go to John 12.
And this is at the end of Jesus' ministry. John's quoting from a number of passages, wrapping things up in regards to God's judgment upon Israel, and he quotes from Isaiah 6. Now remember what Isaiah 6 is?
It's Isaiah's temple vision. I saw the Lord lofty and lifted up sitting in his temple and so on and so forth. And it's also where Isaiah is commissioned to be a prophet. And so when you read John 12, all of a sudden there's this verse on 1241.
He said these things, Isaiah said these things, because he saw his glory and he spoke about him. And then it goes on to continue to talk about Jesus. Jesus is the only person in the context. John says Isaiah saw Jesus' glory.
Now what did he just quote? He just quoted from Isaiah 6 .10. Who did Isaiah see in Isaiah 6? He saw Yahweh, Jehovah, sitting upon his throne. So if you ask Isaiah, Isaiah, who did you see? I saw Jehovah.
John, who did Isaiah see? He saw Jesus. Most of us just fly right over it, don't even notice it. But it's actually stronger than just that. So how many in here have heard my presentation on this and you already know why it's stronger than that?
One person. You want to come up and explain? Nope. He says, no, I'll leave it to you. I need more practice, right? Yeah, I need more practice. It's actually even stronger than what I just presented to you.
Now I didn't tell them this part, okay? So you don't have to if it goes beyond where you want to go. But this is just for your benefit. Remember it says he saw his glory and he spoke about him? I remember I was writing the Forgotten Trinity.
So this would be in the late 90s. And I was responding to a really good Jehovah's Witness who was trying to find a way around all this stuff. And that's when I looked at, again, the Greek Septuagint. The Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament was the Bible of the early church.
That was the language that everyone spoke in the Roman Empire at this time. And so the Greek Septuagint had been translated about 200 years before Christ. At least 85 to 95 of the quotations from the Old Testament and the New Testament are from the Septuagint.
They're not from the Hebrew. And so it was the Bible of the early church. And John is writing to primarily Greek-speaking individuals. And so if you go back in the Septuagint to Isaiah chapter 6, there's a fascinating textual difference between the Hebrew and the Greek.
I remember the first time I saw it. You may have memorized it from the Hebrew translation. And it says, I saw the Lord lastly and lifted up. And what? The train of his robe was filling the temple. Remember that?
The train of his robe was filling the temple. That's not what the Septuagint says. His glory filled the temple is what the Septuagint said. His glory. The very same Greek word John uses in John 12, 41, when he says Isaiah saw Jesus's glory.
So anybody with a Septuagint that looks up the quotations that John has been giving knows exactly what he's saying. John is identifying Jesus as Jehovah, the one seen by Isaiah. So I presented those two, the Hebrews 1, Psalm 102, John 12, Isaiah 6, to these three elders.
And, again, they had never seen it. And so what I did then is make application. I said, so what we see in the New Testament then is we have three persons who are distinguished from one another, and you would agree with me that they are distinguished.
In fact, you don't even believe the third person is a person. You don't believe that the Holy Spirit is a person. But they are distinguished from one another, and yet the New Testament writers identify each one with one divine name.
What's the doctrine of the Trinity? One being of God shared by three persons. In the New Testament, you have the name Jehovah shared by three persons. That's why I'm a Trinitarian. They had never heard it.
Never heard it. And so you want to present that kind of argument because they, I've never had a Jehovah's Witness walk out of the house leaving their Bible behind. They're not going to take literature from you, but you show it to them in their scriptures, and they're going to be taking that with them, and it's going to gnaw upon them.
And what you do is you pray that God, by His Spirit, will help them to remember and to understand, and yes, that can be the beginning point. Those folks especially need to run into Christians who know what they believe and can show people what they believe in the scriptures, in the scriptures.
And that's one way of doing it. But it also helps us to understand that identification of Jesus as Yahweh, Father, Son, Spirit. What's the Spirit? The very phrase Spirit of the Lord in the Old Testament is Spirit of Yahweh.
And that's how Yahweh speaks is by His Spirit. And so there are so many other, I mean, we could obviously spend a great, great, great, great deal of time looking at all the other passages that demand of us a belief in the doctrine of the Trinity.
But now you understand what I say when I say I'm a biblical Trinitarian. If you believe all that this book teaches, and you believe it's consistent with itself, not a surface-level consistency, but a deep consistency from Genesis through Revelation, then you see those three doctrines are taught, and you have to come to understand the early church was forced to make this confession on the basis of what happened in the Incarnation.
One last thing, then we'll wrap up. One last thing. Some people ask, well, where is the doctrine of the Trinity revealed? People want to have a certain verse. I remember when I was in high school, I was in a Bible study class once, and somebody asked, well, where is the Trinity in the Bible?
You know what we all did? We turned to the concordance. And if you turn to the concordance, you're never going to find the word Trinity. And we were bothered by this. We hadn't been properly instructed to understand where the terminology came from and how it developed.
We want a chapter on the Trinity because we don't recognize the nature of what Scripture is. We don't understand the way in which God has revealed himself. So I am going to show you exactly where the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in the Bible.
You ready? Okay. This is right after Malachi, and there's Matthew over on that side. So it's right there. Right there. There's where the Trinity is revealed. Can you see that? Do you see the Trinity in there?
You're just going to smile at me, aren't you? The brightly colored gentleman, do you see the Trinity? He says he can. All right, good. What do I mean? Am I just trying to wake people up right toward the end?
No. The Trinity is primarily revealed in the historical reality of the Incarnation, the life, ministry, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, his ascension to heaven, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church.
Where did all of that happen historically? Right there. Every single word written in the Old Testament came before that, and every single word of the New Testament is written after that. And so what happens in between the Testaments is the revelation because it took place in history.
And so what that means is every writer of the New Testament is already a Trinitarian. And so they're not going to be stopping, and every time they make some reference to the Trinity, stopping and saying, oh, by the way, you might not understand what that is.
Let me explain to you what that is. We wish they did that, but that's not how the revelation took place. And so think about Peter. Peter was an experiential Trinitarian. He had lived three years with the incarnate Son.
He stood on the Mount of Transfiguration, heard the Father speaking from heaven. He was now indwelt by the Holy Spirit. He's an experiential Trinitarian. And so when Paul can in one sentence talk about the Spirit of Christ, and then the next sentence is the Spirit of God, and then the Spirit of the Lord, and he just keeps going that way, and he doesn't stop and explain things, there's no reason for him to stop and explain things because there's already that understanding between himself and his audience as to what has happened in history in the incarnation of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
So that's where it's revealed, right between the two, and hence the New Testament is a Trinitarian document. That's why Paul can say to the Corinthians, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
He doesn't stop and go, okay, I need to explain to you how I can associate these three persons together so easily because, you know, if you're not a Trinitarian and that's pretty weird. I mean, think about Jehovah's Witnesses.
Jehovah's Witnesses think that Jesus is Michael the archangel and that the Holy Spirit doesn't exist. So baptizing them in the name of Jehovah, Michael the archangel and an impersonal active force. The grace of Michael the archangel, the love of Jehovah and the fellowship of electricity be with you all.
Doesn't make any sense, does it? No. And there's all sorts of texts in the New Testament. They're just simply Trinitarian. That's the only way to understand them because that was the context out of which they were written.
It wasn't trying to prove it. The proof was in the resurrection. The proof had already taken place in history. That's why you don't have a chapter called Trinity chapter or something along those lines because that's how God has chosen to reveal himself.
So I hope that at least some of these considerations have been helpful to you and I hope that you see that the doctrine of the Trinity should be something we do not fear. It should be something that we love because it holds everything else together.
It's central to how we worship. It's central to how we pray. It's central to how we evangelize, how we understand the entirety of God's revelation in history. I hope that's been helpful to you. Let's pray.
Our dear Heavenly Father, we do thank you for this opportunity to gather together even in this midweek period to consider your truth. I'm thankful for those who have come out this day. I pray that you would bless them.
And indeed, Father, I pray that they would be given opportunities to speak these truths to others, that you would give them a desire to do so and that you would bring to their mind these realities when they have the opportunity of sharing them with those you bring into their lives.
We thank you for your revelation. We thank you for the freedom that we yet have to be able to meet like this and to be able to bless others through the broadcasting of these things across the Internet.
We ask that you would be with us again this evening and we come together again to talk about the glory of your gospel, that you would be honored in all these things. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.