Steve Meister on Trinitarian Errors (Part 2)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and today, Part 2, Pastor Steve Meister, Emanuel Baptist Church, Sacramento, California. He was here in town in Boston, and he did a Sunday school for us and preached as well.

I think you've heard of the message already on the NoCo Monday edition, but he has been talking about the Trinity and thinking rightly about the Trinity, and so today is Part 2 of that show. Don't forget you can get the new book that I wrote, Cancer is Not Your Shepherd, A 31-Day Guide to Suffering, and the new Sexual Fidelity book, both on Amazon.

If you order a copy, would you please write a review? That would help push the book up a little bit in some of the charts. People could find access to it out of all the books that I've written. I guess you feel this way about whatever book you've just written, but this one, I think, will resonate the most with people, will help people the most.

It's not technical. It's very easy to read. You could give it to an unbeliever and ask the Lord for them to read it, evangelistic, Reformed theology underneath it all, although not overtly, covertly. Anyway, this is Part 2 of Steve Meister here at Bethlehem Bible Church regarding the Trinity.

But when it was first introduced, it referred to masks, and just as actors or personas face each other on a stage in a performance, so Christians said, hey, we can use this concept to think about how the Father, Son, and Spirit eternally face one another, that they're in an eternally facing relations to each other, divine persons.

And so as we think about these eternal relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit, we're thinking about distinctions without division. So relations distinguish without dividing. So my wife and I, Jen, are married.

I'm a husband.

Right?

She's my wife. What distinguishes us is that I'm a husband and she's a wife, but that's also what unites us as one flesh. I'm the husband, she's the wife in our marriage. Relations distinguish without dividing.

So Father, Son, and Spirit distinguish the persons of God as God without dividing them into separate beings. So we're distinguishing the persons without dividing them. That's the historical use of person or persona.

It wasn't really until the 13th century, kind of the medieval era, that person began to refer to an individual the way we use it today, an individual human being, a separate person. So we can't think of our modern use of person and then reflect back upon the persons of God.

You don't want to think of the Father, Son, and Spirit as having separate wills or separate consciousness or separate anything that we attribute to persons. We want to follow the wisdom of Augustine. He said this, when the question is asked about God, what three, human language labors under great poverty of speech.

The answer, however, is given three persons, not that it might be spoken, but that it might not be left unspoken. And what Augustine was doing there was good analogical thinking. When we say person, we don't mean everything we think of when we say person, but we can't say nothing.

So we'll use person. So we talk about the three persons of God, but we don't mean everything we mean about people. So divine persons are people. Any questions on those two points?

You need unity for Trinity?

Persons are people? Yes, sir. It doesn't because we're talking about... So mode, when we're talking about mode of being, is different from what Sibelius... So what you're referring to is Sibelianism or modalism, and it's still around with us with like oneness Pentecostalism.

So the idea that God is just appearing to us as Father, then he appears to us as Son, and then he appears to us as Spirit. Those are modes of manifestation, and that's a heresy that we rightly reject.

When we use mode or the way the ancients used persona, referring to a mask or a person, they were talking not about manifestation, but being. So it is proper and okay to talk about the mode of being. So when we use that word mode, when we talk about being, we're just saying, how is God?

So when you say, what is God? Well, God is one. Well, how or who is the one God? Well, he's Father, Son, and Spirit. So we're talking about mode in being. That's fine. We're not talking about mode of manifestation.

We're not just saying God merely appears or puts on these masks. We're saying God is the Father, Son, and Spirit eternally facing each other, and that's why Christians picked up persona.

Yeah.

I mean, the short answer to that is no, and heaven help us if it would ever be the case otherwise, right? So sometimes, you know, earnest preachers, well-intended but really misguided say, you know, that God loved you so much that the Trinity was torn apart for your salvation.

No. One that's impossible. It's one God, and if that were possible, just think about the implications. God destroyed himself to save us. Well, what did he save us to and for then? Super problematic at a number of levels.

So there's several things there. If you want to read further, I would recommend articles written by Brandon Smith on the Center for Baptist Renewal on the cry of, what you're referring to as the cry of dereliction on the cross.

I can't cover everything he covers. Those are good articles. I will say briefly, we have to remember Jesus crying out as a man in his human relationship as mediator for us on the cross and interpret his words in that sense.

Also, significantly, he cites Psalm 22, and Psalm 22 begins with that cry of dereliction. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But it ends with the triumph of the children and progeny of God rejoicing in his victory.

So Jesus wasn't citing that Psalm for no reason. He's citing the part and tending to the whole. So it's not just a cry of anguish. It's a cry of anguish leading to the accomplishment of victory in what he was doing.

It is finished. So we want to keep it in that context. And the whole orb of salvation would be destroyed if God was somehow ruptured or his unity violated. So we would want to dismiss that as even an option.

And then we would get into analogical thinking about justice and what that means and God's wrath and all those other things. Good question. Excellent.

Any others?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're just, all we're trying to do there, all we're trying to do there is try to put some kind of analogical conception upon what God has revealed himself as being father, son and spirit. So really the emphasis and what we would want to, where we'd really want to camp is the idea of eternal relations, that the father, son and spirit are eternally related to each other as the father begets the son and the father and the son breathe forth the spirit.

And we want to get rid of any kind of idea as there was ever a time that God was not begetting the father, begetting the son and breathing the spirit. So we're talking about the key word when we think about begetting and spirating is the eternal part.

So it was never, God never started to be, so it was not like God existed only as father for a long time and then decided to breathe, to beget the son and then with the son breathe forth the spirit, that's who God is.

How is God love? Well he's the father loving the son by the spirit, eternally. And we could go on and on with as we think about who God is. So we're just, we're honing on on what, just really what God reveals of himself in the Bible in his divine names.

Yeah, yeah, good question. Well let's hit number four and then five, we're rounding third here. The Trinity wills and works as one. Number four thing Christians forget. And you guys studied Matthew Barrett's Simply Trinity, is that correct?

So you're all experts in this, right? So if I say opera trinitatis ad extra in divisa sunt, do you all know what we're talking about?

Yeah, yeah.

So inseparable, if I say inseparable operations, does that ring any bells? Nodding heads, praise the Lord, revival's broken out. So all we're saying here, there's one God, right? So when God does something, who does it?

God, right? So we're moving too fast yet? So if the Father, Son, and Spirit, if God does something, he does it as Father, Son, and Spirit. That's all we're saying. The Father, Son, and Spirit never work or operate.

The reason it's called inseparable operations, it's just an old Latin word, opera, for works. It just means works. God never works independently of, the Father never works independently of the Son or Spirit.

And of course, because they're not three gods. That's what we'd have to say otherwise. And so we're saying that God always wills and works as one. How many wills does God have? One, because there's one God.

And will is proper to nature. And because there's one divine nature, God only has one will. And the Father, Son, and Spirit exercise the divine will inseparably from one another. Two places in scripture you can see this.

For example, in Matthew 11. Jesus talks about how the Son sovereignly chooses inseparably from the Father's will. Jesus describes in Matthew 11 that all whom God has shown the Son, and the Son chooses to reveal Him, and He talks about the Son and the Father willing the same.

Or in 1 Corinthians 12, the Holy Spirit works as He wills, which is inseparable from how God the Father chose. And so we say that God has one will, and God has one work. And the Father, Son, and Spirit are inseparable in all the works of God.

And what you can do is you can trace through the Bible and notice how in different places creation or redemption are ascribed differently to the Father, to the Son, and to the Spirit. Who created all things, the Father, Son, or Spirit?

Yes, God created. The same with all the other works of God. When we think of the resurrection, that's a good work to think about. Jesus raising from the dead. Who raised Jesus, the Father, the Son, or the Spirit?

Yes, exactly. So Ephesians 1, the Father, the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead. The Father raised Jesus. We can also say Jesus raised Himself. The Son brought Himself forth.

Jesus said in John 2 .19, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Referring to His divine nature. Or the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 .11, the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead.

And you can do that with all God's works in Scripture. As you see, they're ascribed to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And we could go on. If you want to remember this handily, we can remember Shilin, the rapper, and he has a whole rap on Inseparable Operations.

It goes like this.

Father, Son, and Spirit, three and yet one, working as a unit to get things done.

See, that's it.

You just remember that. Or, your other option is Opera ad extra, Trinitatis indivisus sunt.

So you pick.

You Latin or the rap. Working as a unit to get things done. All that God does, God does. And what that really, really helps us to do is certainly to stay away from tritheism. Because that would be our only option if the Father, Son, and Spirit work separately.

It also very much helps us keep the works of God together when we think about the work of any single person of God. Where this may be most significant for us is thinking about the work of the Spirit. How often in broader Christian circles is the work of the Gospel attributed to the Father and Son solely and then all of a sudden the work of the Holy Spirit has no relation to the Gospel and the Spirit does, makes you do things and say things that have no relation.

To the Son.

Or the work of the Gospel in Him. And so we see that the doctrine of Inseparable Operations helps us understand that the Spirit who comes forth and gives life to the Church of Christ is the Spirit who has been with the Father and Son forever and who was upon the Son in His incarnation, who raised Him from the dead and who applies the Son's work for us.

It's because the Spirit who comes to us that we can say Abba Father in His name, Galatians 4 .6. And just as Spirit and Word, just as breath and Word are inseparable so the Word of God and the Spirit of God are inseparable.

So it's no surprise that the Spirit who carried along the apostles and prophets wrote a book about who? The Son, Jesus who is the sum and substance of Scripture. And it's no surprise then that what the Spirit does is gives us life through the Son to the Father so that we confess Christ the Lord by the Spirit Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 .3 no one says Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.

So you see, as we think about inseparable operations it actually very much helps us stay grounded in the single work of God as He revealed Himself in Scripture and in Christ. Let me finally say, and we can open for a final conversation or questions the final thing that Christians forget about the Trinity and it's kind of tracking Daniel with your unanswerable question the Trinity is for adoration not comprehension so how many of you have heard probably you start, you're sitting down with your friend and you're explaining to them the analogy of being and how all revelation is accommodated and analogical speech about God, you've had those conversations all the time, see?

Right? All the time. You sit down and someone says, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out let's not go putting God in a box here right? You're trying with all these fancy words to put God in the box my God is bigger than that let's deal with that God in the box.

Objection.

It's actually the opposite and the thing is, is that Christians have become so unfamiliar with the grammar about God that we've used in our creeds and our confessions in our language for centuries that now when they hear it, it's so foreign and it sounds like, well, you're just foisting some logical system upon the Bible not at all.

Actually what these formula and language were intended to do is to keep us from doing that and all the things we've said about God even just this morning, about analogical speech and about the singularity of God and remembering persons aren't people and such things, what we're trying to say is put up boundaries and say, don't cross this.

We're actually trying to keep ourselves from putting God in the box of his own creation, because that's what all of those errors inevitably do when you make the Father, Son, and Spirit a council of three people like some really good team or when you think of God in a way where his love and his will is just like ours what are you doing?

You're shoving God in the box of his own creation and we're just making him a big superman not the eternal I am, who is Father, Son, and Spirit and so all of these terms concepts which can be new for many of us for sure, and take some time to reflect on, the whole intention of them is to put guardrails in our minds so that we keep God as God ineffable, incomprehensible we will never fathom his depths and we actually think of it, and even just your question was so great Daniel and even just trying to answer it we understand how modest of claims we're trying to make.

What does it mean? What is eternal begottenness? I have no idea and neither do any other Christians who have been trying to be faithful to God's word. Let's quote Genas again. He asks this, what is the procession of the Holy Spirit?

Well, tell me first what is the unbegottenness of the Father and I will explain to you the physiology of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit and both of us will be frenzy stricken for prying into the mystery of God.

You see what he's saying?

He's saying, I don't know, and quit asking questions, it's above your pay grade right? We can't comprehend these things but we're trying to make these modest claims because that's what God says in the Bible because God has revealed himself as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

And we're trying to take that seriously, along with everything else who's revealed himself as being the only one God who is. And how do we put this together and take the Bible seriously without transgressing what he's revealed.

And the ultimate direction of all of this is for our adoration and for our worship to have rest in him. What is eternal life? To know God and Jesus Christ.

Whom he has sent.

And that's where this all leads us. When Jesus talked about giving rest to our souls come to him for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The rest he was talking about he just said in the verse before that was that he reveals the knowledge of God.

That's where we find rest is in knowing God and worshipping and adoring him. And so our design in understanding these truths is for that purpose not to explain God or as though we would somehow ever comprehend him but in order to adore him and worship.

It's been said by a modern theologian that the best way to learn the trinity is worship is we're worshipping the God who is and has revealed himself. And I think that's exactly right.

So.

That was like a lot crammed in 45 minutes. Confusion.

Rebuttals.

Daniel rebuttal. Well I was once encouraged by a professor in seminary. There's no such thing as a dumb question. Just dumb people so don't blame the question. Well the son didn't die either. The divine nature did not perish on the cross.

So there's other.

Distinctions we would make we would call like the communication of idioms and other things to help us. But just to speak just sort of briefly so we wouldn't say you're exactly right. The incarnation solely terminates or involves the son not the father or the spirit.

And in his death on the cross the Lord Jesus for us is dying as a man. So the divine nature of Christ did not perish. God the son did not die except according to his human nature. So you can say as Paul does in Acts 20 -28 that God purchased the church with his own blood.

But we understand what he's saying there he's talking about God the son in his human nature. So properly only the human nature perish and the human nature was raised. So I don't know if I'm getting to your question there.

Well yes in terms of are you talking about the father and the spirit involved in the incarnation. So Hebrews 9 -14 says he offered himself by the eternal spirit. So the whole we would never separate in any aspect of the incarnation the father or the spirit.

Mary is with child as a virgin by the Holy Spirit. Matthew says twice in Matthew 1 Luke repeats the same. She's overshadowed by the Holy Spirit he is the son of the most high and of the father. And so you never separate father son and spirit.

So even in the incarnation the father and spirit are at work just as Jesus talks about in John 5 which is a key passage as I'm working as the father's working. But the incarnation proper in terms of the assumption of human nature was to the person of the son not the father or the spirit.

But they're not. They're certainly not separable in that. Yeah throw it away throw away all analogies and just say I would use catechism kind of questions who is God and how many persons are God. There are three and so on kind of children's catechism type of questions and I find kids are used to being confused and overwhelmed and so it doesn't really come up as a big surprise that God you have to grow up and be an arrogant adult where you're trying to figure out the divine.

So God is more than I can understand usually is readily available. But it's really important though to your question. It's a good question. It's really important that we reinforce for our little ones there is no analogy to God.

There is nothing. There is no one like him, Isaiah 44. The problem with the egg analogy and all the other analogies is that you have three parts and so that put together and we don't want to think of God as father, son, spirit that were assembled sort of three demigods that somehow become a God.

So you want to give those kind of connotations. So I would mostly just get rid of all analogies and say well isn't God wonderful. He is unlike anything you will ever experience and yet he has described himself by names father, son, and spirit that are like so much of what we experience just like in animals and in human life we have parenting and fathers and sons.

We have the breathing and moving air and God wants us to grasp from these analogies what he is like who is the creator of all things and so I would track along those lines more but then just have a lot of emphasis of there is nothing like him.

Does that make sense? Yeah, excellent question Mike? Yeah, so with analogical language we are describing all that God said of himself. So we are just basically tracking with scripture. So even father and sonship and spirit are analogical.

Love is analogical everything God says of himself, God is condescending to us with analogies or illustrations we are trying to take from our own ideas what God might be like and we have to be careful of not putting wrong connotations upon the divine being like egg or water, another common one.

What about like water, it can be frozen and gas and liquid but not at the same time and so that is why that analogy breaks down.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for your time and engagement and good questions, let me close our time in prayer. Father we thank you for your goodness to reveal yourself to us and you are far beyond anything we can comprehend and we will wonderfully spend eternity and never tire or certainly grow bored with your divine glories and revelation of yourself.

Help us now to prepare our hearts to worship you and to adore you our great God, Father, the Son and the Spirit, as you come to us in your word, we praise you in Jesus name.

Amen.

Well that wraps up part two of Steve Meister's message on the Trinity, thanks for listening to No Compromise Radio. Tell your friends about NoCo Radio. Tell your millionaire friends about our Patreon channel.