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Father in heaven, we thank you for this morning.
Thank you for the opportunity we have to be in a nice, warm place.
Father, we thank you for the reminder of the last few days of
just how blessed we are to have the modern conveniences of heating,
insulated homes, all the things that we have now.
Father, I pray that as we gather here, we'd be thankful for the most important
thing that we have, which is our salvation, procured for us by Christ Jesus, who
descended from your side, took on human nature, lived the
perfect life that we ought to have lived, died the sacrificial life that the painful, or died the
sacrificial death, the painful death that we deserve.
You raised him on the third day that we might know that he is truly the Son of God, and that we might know
that we have all of our sins forgiven, past, present, and future.
Father, bless us as we look to your word, as we study the difficult subject of the Trinity.
Help us to grapple with it and to understand you better, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
So last week, we left off question number 16.
That's where we finished.
We spent a lot of time last week talking about the social trinity.
This week, eventually, we'll be talking about economic and
some other kind of trinity that's keeping my mind here.
Imminent, there we go.
Had to just pull that out of the ether.
OK, so we talked about the social trinity, which is problematic
in a number of respects.
The social trinity basically serving
as, I guess you could say it this way, as kind of a mirror.
What these social Trinitarians want to see in our society, they project on the
Trinity, manipulate the Trinity, and then decide society should be like this manipulated Trinity.
So it winds up being a great emphasis on the social aspects of the Trinity,
their love for one another, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, rather than just who the Trinity is.
So with that said, let's look at number 17 on chapter 3.
Chapter 3, not chapter 4, don't cheat.
True or false, the great tradition puts an emphasis on understanding who God is.
What's that?
OK, John, the eminent theologian John Zook says true.
Any other thoughts, questions, concerns?
The answer is true.
By the way, if anybody doesn't have the list of terms that I've handed out, I no longer have a copy of those.
I don't know where they're hiding.
So I think there's maybe a copy in my tray.
But if anybody needs one, do that.
No, no, we'll get you one.
The answer is true to that.
Now, I think this is really important.
And we're going to talk about this a great deal today.
Liberals and innovators.
Is it good to be an innovator?
No.
No, yeah.
Coming up with new stuff, being innovative, coming up with novel ideas,
bad.
Thus, the great tradition.
The great tradition and the idea again is the idea of a chain of faithful men going back to the
apostles who understood the truths of scripture, understood the truths about the Trinity,
and passed them to the next generation, who passed them to the next generation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Barrett says, Frey believes the great tradition before him was,
listen, misleading.
Guiding the church and academy into theological speculation with this emphasis on who
God is in himself.
Instead, our attention should be on the narrative the Bible presents.
Now, we're going to talk more about this.
But I want to stop there for just a moment.
Because if we just think about the broad swath
of evangelicalism, what do churches focus on?
Who God is or what God does?
I think it's more on the latter, right?
I mean, if you think about, I mean, if it's somebody really dopey like
Joel Osteen, they'll talk about what God does in
terms of how he feels about you, this kind of thing.
But not so much on who God is.
So I think both liberals, innovators, and we could say false teachers, focus
on what God does.
Frey does not think the focal point is to be Jesus' teachings, not even his teachings about
himself, instead we must zero in on the narrative that describes what action Jesus took,
especially in his passion, which is, what's the passion of Jesus?
Because we're not Catholic, we don't often talk like this.
His suffering, okay?
If you want to know who the person of Christ is, look no further than what Christ does.
Discussions about the imminent trinity, which is who God is in and of
himself, and the person of the Son are the stuff of creeds and counsels, according to Frey.
Notice Frey has drawn our attention to a good thing, narrative.
It's important to consider what God does.
And specifically, the Bible stories about Jesus' human experience.
So what's the problem?
The problem is Frey has focused merely on narrative.
As a result, he has ignored other parts of scripture, including other narratives, that tell us who
God is apart from humanity.
Okay, we'll move on and we'll develop this more.
Number 18, true or false, Nicene Orthodoxy has been much
improved over the last century or so, past century or so.
I mean, that should be obvious, right?
If it says new or improved, false, false.
Now, I typed up this box, which you don't have.
I should start just making a copy of these things.
These are from Barrett's book, three
categories.
When, is the first one with a question mark, and then the second, Nicene Orthodoxy,
and the third, Social Trinitarianism, okay?
So he says, his first box says, what distinguishes the persons in the Trinity?
Well, according to Nicene Orthodoxy, early church fathers to the post
-Reformation reformers, so the first to 18th century, so 1 ,700
plus years of church history, they had their own thoughts
about what distinguishes them.
And then, from the Enlightenment to the present, roughly the 18th to the 21st century,
the Social Trinitarianism emphasis came in.
Next box, what is a divine person?
Nicene Orthodoxy said, eternal relations of origin.
Father is unbegotten, son is begotten, spirit is spirated.
Social Trinitarianism, community and relationships, person's form of society,
cooperating with one another in I -thou or I -you relationships.
How many wills are there in the Trinity?
Well, according to Nicene Orthodoxy, one will.
According to the one essence, persons are undivided, indivisible in will
and operation.
According to Social Trinitarianism, three wills, because there are three centers of consciousness,
and in some models, hierarchy between persons.
Modified Social Trinitarians say one will, but three different agents, and in
some models, in other words, if we compare the Social
Trinitarians to Nicene Orthodoxy, we're going to see a vast difference.
Okay, number 19, true or false?
Some evangelicals have fallen prey to Social Trinitarianism.
I mean, sometimes I see people post quotes from William Lane Craig, anybody ever heard of him?
And then J .P. Moreland, familiar with J .P. Moreland?
Yeah, and these guys are known as what?
Both of them, I think.
Christian philosophers, yeah?
I mean, often like, not really evangelists, but kind of the sort of guys that you would
expect to see in a debate with an atheist or something.
They're big on apologetics.
Yeah, big on apologetics, thank you, that was what I was looking for, apologetics.
And so he says, William Lane Craig and J .P. Moreland argue that the central commitment of Social
Trinitarianism is this, in God there are three distinct centers of self -consciousness,
each with its proper intellect and will, three wills, three
centers of self -consciousness.
This is the very DNA of Social Trinitarianism.
No trinity otherwise, they say.
So they reject the classic affirmation of divine simplicity and they conclude, quote,
God is an immaterial substance or soul endowed with three sets of
cognitive faculties.
What's a cognitive faculty?
I think we could call it a will, right, a mind.
Each of which is sufficient for personhood.
So each person has to have his own mind, his own will.
However, they also feel the pressure to explain why three wills and center of consciousness,
centers of consciousness is not tritheism.
Why would they feel that pressure?
Because they're up against this wall.
To say that there are three wills or three minds of God, is also to say
that there quite possibly could be three persons who are separate.
And that would be wrong because there's only one God.
So they have to kind of pull back a little bit and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not saying there's three different gods.
So here's what they say, God is an immaterial, right, three, pressure to explain why there are
three wills and consciousness, and that's not tritheism.
They even acknowledge that their view contradicts many of the church's creeds, including the Athanasian Creed.
Nevertheless, they find comfort and appeal to sola scriptura.
They want to say that they believe in scripture alone, but they sort of abandon it.
They've got this modified trinity.
Number 20, true or false, the father has absolute authority within
the trinity.
False.
This is why I put this here, because the new Calvinist movement is not immune to social Trinitarianism
as much as it thinks it is.
As we will see in chapter eight, evangelicals like, listen, Wayne Grudem, how many have a systematic theology?
And Bruce Ware, how many have taught through Bruce Ware's book in the Sunday school class?
I guess it was just me.
Have also redefined the trinity as a society of persons defined by societal
roles and relationships, cooperating with one another as distinct
agents.
In the 20th century, social Trinitarians redefined persons as relationships of mutuality
and self -giving love to support equality in society, especially between the sexes.
But Grudem and Ware believe this society of relationships in the trinity is defined by functional
hierarchy.
In other words, the father is absolutely in control.
The son is absolutely submitted to him, and then the spirit is
submitted to both of them.
He goes on to say here, the son, for example, is subordinate to the supreme absolute authority of the father within the imminent
trinity, a view known as eternal functional subordination.
How many have heard of that?
How many?
I won't ask.
If you know what it is, it's kind of a controversial, and if you go to Twitter, don't go to Twitter.
Yeah, don't be a twit.
Yeah, it's not good.
Their social agenda comes through just as strong, if not stronger than social
Trinitarians before them.
When they then argue the authority submission inside the trinity within the eternal Godhead is the paradigm and
prototype for hierarchy in society, especially, listen, wives
submitting to their husbands in the home.
And they do argue that.
They say, well, it's not really that bad that wives have to submit to their husbands because
Jesus has eternally submitted to the father.
And again, the problem with that is what does submission mean?
It means we disagree, therefore, somebody has to make the ultimate choice, and
in the home, it's the husband, and in eternity past, it's the father.
Maybe Jesus wasn't so keen on this, but he submits to, there's one
divine will.
That's the important thing, one divine will.
Let's just pause for a moment before we go on to the next quiz.
What's the most confusing part about one divine will?
What's the single most difficult thing?
I'll tell you from my perspective what it is.
I feel like Columbo here for just a moment.
You know, just one more thing.
For those of you who are 97 years old, you understand that reference.
I'm just channeling my inner pastor Mike here at the moment.
If there's one divine will, how can there be three persons?
That's the problem.
Because we associate persons with will.
I mean, just imagine a family in which everybody uniformly,
internally, always agrees.
I mean, we'd go, hmm, people, I mean, this is like Twilight Zone stuff, right?
Yeah, I mean, perfectly, oh yeah, that's what I was thinking.
You know, a good idea, that's what I was thinking.
I mean, never.
I mean, imagine your home, you know.
Oh, what's for dinner?
Oh, that's what I was thinking.
You know, that's funny, that's what I wanted, you know.
Where do you want to go tonight?
Sure.
What do you want to watch?
Oh yeah, that's what I was thinking.
What movie should we watch tonight?
Okay, what is the obsession with relating marriage to the Trinity?
What is the obsession with saying, well, wives, you need to submit to your husbands
because, and then they point to the Trinity as an example.
Why, Dave?
Dave, because this is how Sharon submits, so he's about to explain it.
I think that, well, but I mean, if you can somehow
say, you know, look, what did Jesus say?
Not my will, your will be done.
Then that's a bigger bat, like Dave said.
Look, Jesus submitted, so, you know, wives, you need to submit to.
Sharon, you were going to say?
Same thing, probably, because you guys have the unimind.
That's what I was going to say.
Submission sounds bad in our feminist culture.
Why?
Because if you, you know, if the Bible says submit, then that necessarily means what?
You're less.
So I'm going to lessen that load on you by saying, didn't make Jesus less.
He submitted to the father, didn't make him any less.
And of course we know the problem with that, which is, Jesus submits in
his humanity, not in his deity.
We have that neat little diagram, you know, with the, you know, Jesus doesn't submit in the triangle.
He submits in the rectangle, which helps a lot, if you have that.
But the pressure to find some kind of reason to say, well, this is why
Jesus submits, or this is why you need to submit, because Jesus submits, or whatever.
And I think it is because, you know, there are
two schools of thought.
One is, you know, the egalitarian.
There's no difference between men and women.
And then there's a complimentarian.
I was fumbling, stumbling, mumbling about the word here.
Complimentarian view, which is,
husband and wife compliment each other.
You look very nice today.
So do you.
No, I just.
Yeah, you do that too.
It's just the idea that there, you know, I'm trying to think of a good way, other than just using the word again there.
Yes, good.
They have different roles, and together it makes them more than the one, right?
They become greater.
The sum of the parts is greater.
No, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Yeah, there you go.
I knew I'd figure it out eventually.
So, in order to say, well, you know what?
We're not egalitarians, but I don't want you to feel bad about being a complimentarian.
Ladies, we don't want you to be embarrassed, so we're going to compare your submission to that of
Jesus so that you can feel better.
I mean, why not just tell the truth, which is, you know what, women?
Your husbands might be a jerk.
That's not the issue.
Bible doesn't say submit to your husbands if he's a good guy.
It doesn't say that.
It says submit to your husbands.
And notice, you know, if we went to Ephesians five, and I don't really care to do that at the moment, but if we went to Ephesians five and we could,
it doesn't say, wives, submit to your husbands, even
as Jesus submitted to the father.
It does say, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself
up for her.
So there's to be a self -sacrificial love, you know, which should theoretically,
you know, negate the whole idea of my husband's a jerk, because if he's obeying the word, then he won't be a jerk.
Don't talk to my wife after the class.
So thoughts or questions before we move on, Corey?
Bigger picture than the Trinity.
Oh, okay.
Well, I think, you know, cause see, now we're backing up into the bigger category of
social Trinitarianism.
And I think, you know, social Trinitarianism writ large, I was talking to Mal about this last week,
is particularly attractive to people who
have a political bent.
And so they reshape the Trinity and then impose that reshaped Trinity on society.
But getting into marriage, you know, why, I would put it this way, social
Trinitarianism in small font is kind of
entering into, you know, he calls it new Calvinism, you know, the evangelical, the
conservative evangelical world in people like Ware
and people like Grudem, because of
exactly what we've been talking about, about the unpalatable nature of wives submit to your husbands,
Andrea.
Almost always, you know, heresies, wrong views, you know, and there are different, I
suppose, grades we could assign to heresies, but they're almost always trying to close the gap
between God and man to make God more understandable and to make us
better than we are.
You know, and I think the fundamental reason we wanna maintain and even enhance that
gap, you know, do we wanna make God holier than he is?
No, because we can't, right?
Do we wanna make him greater than he is?
But having that right view of God and that right view of man helps us because then we understand
what a great condescension our salvation is, what a great accommodation it
is that Jesus would, in fact, come to earth, you know, and take on humanity.
Let me do Charlie Furser.
And that is right.
I mean, there's one thing that you said that I would quibble with.
And for that, we need to go to Genesis chapter two, you know, because I
have an advantage that you do not have.
I heard Voti preach a couple weeks ago on a Saturday morning, and I thought,
it is good.
I mean, you know, if I were to say to you, and this is gonna sound bizarre at first when I say this,
I think the most important chapters in the Bible are Genesis
one, two, and three.
You know, and you say, well, wait a minute.
You know, how can that be?
Well, because it just, as he was preaching through it, I just thought, again, I mean, I went
through part of Genesis three several months ago, and I was just on a Sunday evening where
nobody was here, but it blew me away to see all the truths
that are there.
And then he was in Genesis one and two, and I thought, oh man, this is pretty good.
You know what I mean?
So Genesis chapter two, and
let me just start in verse 19.
Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens
and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.
And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.
Okay, now what are we to see just right there?
Who's in charge of the planet?
I mean, it's God's world, God's creation, but he's put Adam
essentially in charge.
I mean, we could go through, he's put him in charge of the garden.
He's told him, in fact, this was something else that came out of this was he talked about the
need for Adam to work and it was before the fall, right?
So it goes on, he says, but for
Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him.
A helper, help meet.
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.
And while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Then the man said, this is at last bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, she shall be
called woman because she was taken out of man.
And his point here was, you know, well, why are wives to
submit?
That was the design.
That was always the design.
He could have, God could have, could he not, just like he took, you know,
a clump of clay or dirt, whatever you want to call it and made Adam, he could have done
the same thing with Eve, but he didn't.
I think it's right there just to kind of show that the relationship, the roles,
she was taken from the man.
So I think those things, you know, the submission part,
not saying different, not equal, I'm not saying that at all.
I'm just saying complementarianism was from the beginning, not related to the fall, but from
the beginning.
Now, I think things are certainly heightened because of the fall.
I've mentioned work a minute ago.
You know, what's one of the results of the fall?
Work is hard, right?
It's hard, why?
Because you work and the earth, it fights back, right?
You're fighting, you want to subdue the earth and the earth says, I don't think so.
And, you know, in that same way, I think submission was made much more difficult by the fall.
God says, you know, your desire will be for your husband.
However you want to interpret that, it probably isn't the best.
So comments, questions, concerns, heresies?
Okay, Mal, Mal has a heresy he'd like to bring up.
And I think that, I think this is right.
You know, the emphasis in so many places in evangelicalism and even in the world is
a God who is more apt to be mildly crass
here.
Somebody that we would like to have a beer with.
You know, I say usually the measure of a presidential election is
who won?
Well, the guy you'd most like to have a beer with.
And I think there's a large swath of people in the world, whether it's evangelicalism or just paganism, where they
just want God to be somebody that they'd like to go out and have a beer with.
And I'm like, probably not.
Because that God is not the God of the Bible.
I thought it was interesting too when you say, you know, they want to feel better about themselves
and everything.
I mean, there are so many falsehoods floating around.
I mean, I just saw the other day, you know, I guess God wanted another angel.
Somebody died.
And I'm like, hmm, hmm.
A, you can't, you know, I want to just write, no, angels are created beings.
You can't, you know, it's not a rank.
You can't ascend to be an angel.
You know, you want to just correct everybody's theology, but you don't.
But this is how the world thinks.
And so much of how the world thinks, which is a good point too, is
infiltrating the church.
You know, well, this whole submission thing's really hard.
How do we make it easier?
I mean, it'd be interesting.
I'm sure there is one out there, you know, the me study Bible or something like that, you know.
Yeah.
Well, that's the, isn't that the goal, right?
I mean, to eradicate the right view of God, to replace him with a God of our own choosing, so.
Okay.
Chapter number four.
Yay.
They said we wouldn't get here.
Number one, true or false, collapsing or conflating the imminent trinity sounds like an economic
problem.
With the economic trinity leads to disaster.
Anybody not have a quiz?
We have more quizzes.
We have one more quiz.
How can that be?
There must be more somewhere.
That chair gets one.
Collapsing, true or false, collapsing or conflating the imminent trinity with the economic trinity
leads to disaster.
And some of you are like imminent and economic.
What do those mean?
Well, that's kind of what the whole thing is about.
So I'm not going to tell you.
The secret things belong to the Steve.
That's true.
The trinity is revealed in the gospel, but we must not, Barrett says, conflate or
collapse God in himself apart from the world, imminent trinity,
with God's actions towards creation and salvation, economic trinity, or here's the
point of this question.
What happens if we do these things, collapse or conflate?
Now I'll just explain.
Imminent trinity.
What's the imminent trinity?
Oh, I see that hand.
And I'm going to talk about it more next week.
It's who God is, right?
Apart from anything else, who is God?
That's the imminent trinity.
And then the economic trinity is what?
What God does.
I mean, that's the short and sweet version of it.
If you don't have a version or if you don't have the list of terms, you probably want that
because you'll be going imminent trinity, economic trinity, and trying to figure it out.
And eventually it'll be clear because we're going to keep drilling down on that.
But here's his point.
His point is if you change these things or if you mash them together, you
manipulate the trinity.
You wind up with a trinity that's not the trinity.
You wind up with a trinity where there are three wills of God or something of this nature.
Number two.
Yes.
Can you take it too far, the difference between the two and then mess with simplicity?
What God does and who he is and can you take that too far?
I don't know.
I'm thinking about that.
Did you have a specific idea in mind or?
Well, let's just, because we're going to see this, so I'll just kind of foreshadow it and then we'll move on.
What God does reflects who he is.
Jesus comes to earth not because God in a lightning bolt thought I need
to do something loving, right?
It's because he is love.
So let's move on to number two and we're going to close here for sure.
True or false.
John the Baptist's attention was directed to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.
And then I even cite John 1, 29 to 34.
I hear a fru.
Okay, sounds true.
I hear a tulse.
This is Barrett and then we'll go to the passage.
John stopped what he was doing and after a long period of awkward silence, no one's sure why,
John paused for so long.
He pointed to Jesus and shouted, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
This is he of whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks before me because
he was before me.
This is the son of God.
Now let's go to John 1, 29 to 34 for a moment.
Well, I don't have to open my Bible because I cut and pasted the verses here.
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
This is he of whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks before me
because he was before me.
I myself did not know him, but for this purpose, I came baptizing with water that he might
be revealed to Israel.
And John bore witness.
I saw the spirit descend from heaven like a dove and it remained on him.
I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, he on
whom you see the spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
And I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God.
So the answer is true.
And why is it true?
Because only the Holy Spirit, only the Godhead could make such a thing known to a human
being.
John the Baptist for all of his strengths was still fallen, still sinful, and still needed
the Holy Spirit to tell him what's what.
But I mean, even that, you just think here he is doing his ministry
and he sees Jesus coming toward him and says, behold, the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world.
How did he know that?
Because of what he'd seen and what was revealed to him.
So thoughts, questions, Charlie?
I think there's something to that.
I mean, what's interesting, I mean, there are a lot of things that are interesting about John the Baptist.
Wouldn't it be kind of fun to figure out why he was in the wilderness, how long he was in the wilderness?
You know, I mean, there are a lot of things.
I mean, like, did he leave, you know, Galilee at
let's say, you know, age 12 or whatever, when he was a man and then just, you know,
wander out in the wilderness for 15 years or whatever, and then, you know, 18, 19
years, and then wander back into, you know, the scene years
later.
I don't know, we don't know.
But what we do know is from the very, from the womb, he was a Nazarene
and his life was different.
You know, in the womb, he recognized the Lord.
So he had the Holy Spirit seemingly from at least some sense of the Holy
Spirit from the very beginning.
So thoughts, questions, concerns before we close.
Seeing none, let's sing the Hallelujah Chorus, and then we'll, okay, we'll
waive that until next week.
Let's close in prayer.
Father, even as we consider these things, who you are and what you do,
it's easy to confuse these things.
It's easy to conflate them, compress them, to make you less than who you
are.
We think about how many professing churches, even this day, will
make Jesus sound like less than what he is.
Make you sound like less than who you are.
The Holy Spirit sound like less than who he is.
All in an effort, as was said here this morning, to make us feel better about ourselves.
Father, we confess that there is an incredible gap between you
who are holy, holy, holy, and us who are
born into sin, who desire sin and even after salvation
still stumble into sin.
Father, help us to strive to keep that gap, that we might
love the Lord Jesus Christ all the more as we consider the greatness of what he has done for us.
Father, prepare our hearts to worship you in this service here.
Let us think about these things and just honor you, Father, Son, and Spirit, all the more.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.