The Trinity

The Purpose of Studying the Trinity and Common Mistakes to Avoid

I asked Mike, Sunday School, and he said, Hey, why don't we talk about five mistakes that you should avoid on the Trinity? I said, OK, we can do that. So that's what we're going to do this morning. So I have like three hours worth of stuff on my notes here.

So we'll just kind of walk through some things. I want to think about our God and maybe this is something of an appendix if it was looked at the doctrine of God last year and think about him as triune and who he is and common mistakes that Christians and frankly Christian teachers make that we want to avoid to help us think rightly about who God is and to understand the gospel rightly, which is so significant.

In the fourth century, Augustine said, In the case of those which inquire into the unity of the Trinity is no subject error more dangerous, inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.

And he's exactly right. As we think about God, we find our rest in him. And also, if we get God wrong, the dangers of those errors are quite catastrophic. Fourteen centuries later, Boving said the same thing.

He said, In the confession of the Trinity, we have the heartbeat of the Christian religion. Every error results from or is retraceable to a departure in the doctrine of the Trinity. So you think about all the ways that the gospel is misconstrued and corrupted.

It can be traced back to errors in God's triunity. So I just want to think about five this morning. That's how many Mike said to pick there are more errors, but we'll think about five basic ones and things that we five way things that Christians forget when they think about the Trinity, that all our words about God are analogical and we'll talk about that.

Everything we say about God is analogical. We'll look at all you need unity to say Trinity that if we don't confess the oneness of God, his triunity is makes no sense. Thirdly, we're going to think about how divine persons are not people.

So we don't want to think of the father, son, and spirit like three people, three humans, that the triune God wills and works as one. And then finally, hopefully we have some time. The Trinity is ultimately for adoration, not for explanation.

We're not trying to comprehend who God is. We're trying to adore him as triune. So let's think about probably the longest and the hardest. Everything we say about God is analogical. The words we use of God and the words God uses of himself, even in the Bible is analogical.

What is that?

What do we mean by that? We're saying one in the big picture that God is condescending to speak to us. So Augustine in the fourth century, again, said scripture suits itself as to babes that God is speaking to his children.

Calvin said that God lists to us as a nurse is wanted to do to their children, that God is cooing to us. The Bible's baby talk. God is condescending to us. And to put more clarity on that specificity, we say that scripture and all our words about God are analogical.

That is, when we use words that we're familiar with in human experience about on to God, that they are similar but not the same, and that the word we use refers to each reference us and God proper to our natures.

So let's unwind that a little bit and think about it in comparison to what we're denying. So what we're saying is that the words we use about God are not univocal. So univocal, univocal, one voice. They're not identical.

So if I say, if I use the word blue and I say that he had a blue jacket and she had a blue dress, the word blue in those statements is univocal. It means the same thing, right? The color blue. So when we are talking about God, our words are not univocal.

They're not identical because us and God are not identical. They're also not equivocal. So equivocal, two voices. They're not entirely different. So if I were to say, he sang the blues in blue suede shoes, the word blue in that statement is equivocal.

One refers to a musical genre, the blues, and one again is a color, right? Blue suede shoes, same word, but two totally different meanings. So our words about God are not univocal. They're not equivocal.

They're analogical. So when you say as an analogy, they're similar, but not the same. So if I were to say, he listened to the blues because he was blue, that's an analogical use of blue. One, the blues is a musical genre and feeling blue, depressed, discouraged, sad.

Those are not entirely different because the reason we call it the blues is because it sounds like what? Like when you're blue, it's a music in a minor key. And so that's what we're saying when we talk about God.

Now we do this intuitively.

Let's take the word love.

I can say I love a double-double in and out in California animal style, and I love my wife. And you know, intuitively, I do not mean love in the same way in those two sentences. I don't love my wife the same way I love a double-double meal in and out.

You intuitively make an adjustment that I'm using love in that statement proper to the nature of a hamburger and a wife, and you understand there's differences. In the same way, we remember the distinction of our natures between us and God when we talk about love.

When we love something, the loveliness of what we love is drawn out of us. It's brought forth from us. Does God love us because he saw what was lovely in us? He looked down the corridors of time and saw how beloved you were and decided he just couldn't live in eternity without you.

No, right? No, so God's love actually is not what Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, that God's love does not find but creates what is lovely to it. So God's love is actually generative. It's not responsive.

It's creative. God's love bestows goodness upon the object of his love. He wills to love. He doesn't respond in love. But we can say we love and God loves. They're similar, but they're not the same at all.

So as we think about God's triunity, we're remembering this important fundamental principle of analogy, that everything is an analogical between us and God. So when we think of the divine names, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, we never forget the analogical nature of those words, of those names, and we need to remove all the creaturely connotations that we have in our minds as we think about fatherhood and sonship and even of spirit.

I'm a father. I'm a father four times over, but I became a father. I did not always exist as a father. I became a father by change, by procreation, all these kind of things. None of that is true of the eternal Father, of God the Father.

So when we think of the eternal begottenness of the Son, we're talking about a non-physical, non-sequential, non-temporal act. So then what's the point of the analogy? What's the similarity?

Origin.

As a son is like his father and originates in him, so the father communicates the divine essence to the son in an eternal, non-temporal, non-sequential, simple act. That's why Jesus says in John 5, 26, as the father has life in himself, so he's granted the son to have life in himself.

So we look at the origin of the son proceeding from the father. Or what about spirit? We think of the Holy Spirit. In the Bible, the word translated spirit in Hebrew is ruach, in Greek is pneuma, and they both can be translated as wind or as breath.

It basically means moving air. But does God have moving air in himself? So what's the analogy? Well, we breathe, we inhale our moving air, and we exhale the air outside of us. We depend on our environment for life.

So the origin, the analogy, is life. Just as we're alive, God is alive. We have life in us by the breath we derive outside of us in the environment. God has life in himself and derives none of it from but any of himself.

He is spirit. He's the very fountain of life. That's why the Bible refers to the God, the spirit, as the spirit of the living God, the spirit who gives life. Romans 8, 11, 2 Corinthians 3, 3, repeatedly, the spirit is identified with life.

So we see that we live and God lives. So we call these father and son, we call these social analogies. We also have psychological analogies in the Bible to refer to the persons of God. The social analogies help us distinguish the father from the son from the spirit, and the psychological analogies help us always unite them as one God.

So we think of the son as also called what in the New Testament? He's the word. He is in Hebrews 1, 3, he's the radiance of the glory of God. He's shining forth from the father. So the eternal relation of the father and son is also analogous to a word, a procession of intellect.

Just as your words proceed from you as a thought internal to you, but are identified with you and remaining in your mind, so the son proceeds from the father while remaining internal to God. So the procession of the son from the father is as the word, just as our words proceed from us and indicate something internal to us.

Or what about the spirit? The spirit is also the analogy of love. Notice in your New Testament, as you notice the work of the spirit, how often the spirit is identified with the love that God creates in us for him.

So for example, in 1 John 4, we have the well-known statement in verse 8, God is love. And then in verses 12 to 13, John writes, if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us of his spirit. So John identifies God abiding in us and his love with us with his spirit being with us. He does this, Paul does the same thing in Romans 5.

And we describe this not as a procession of intellect like the word, but as the procession of the will, just as your love proceeds from you, but remains within you. So the spirit proceeds from the father and the son remaining internal to God or sometimes will reflect on the spirit being the bond of love between the father and son in God himself.

And we find these analogies mutually enlightening as we pull the logic of scripture together. So we can think of word and spirit. How do breath and speech go together? We can't have one without the other.

Can you speak without breathing? Try to say a word without exhaling air. It's impossible. And you can't have word without breath and no breath without word. So the word and spirit are inseparable just as the son and spirit are inseparable.

And so when we think of these analogies, we think about how God is revealing himself to us and the inseparability of the persons of God in the one triune God. And to raise our thoughts one more step on this last very deep point, the God who spoke all things into existence designed everything for us to understand him as who he is.

So it's not that God saw that there were fathers and he thought, you know what, my creation understands fathers, so I'll take up that name to describe the fatherhood of God. Or God saw our environment as depending on expiration of carbon dioxide in the respiratory system and said, you know what, I'll use spirit as analogy.

No, he created all things, including our living and breathing and depending on breath. He created fatherhood and progeny and all that we understand of procreation with the intention that these would be the very means that we would conceptually understand who he is.

All of creation is a theater for his glory. And the God who is father, son and spirit made all things that we might have a conception and understanding of who God is. And even our very engagement with ourselves is a revealing of the triune God.

So as we think about the names that God reveals of himself as father and of son and of spirit, we want to remember they're always analogical. We want to remove any creaturely connotations and we want to think about the similarity that God intends to communicate that we would better understand him.

That's the longest thing to remember and is often misunderstood. Any questions on that point? Anything lack clarity or we could go even deeper on? That's a massive point. Lull everyone into a false sense of security.

The Oneness of God as the Foundation for Trinity

Okay, let's think secondly then about unity to say Trinity. The most important thing about Trinity that people forget, secondly, is that it begins with the oneness of God. And the basic emphasis of the Bible is the oneness of God.

In fact, one theologian said that the Bible is a continual emphasis upon the unity of God with an appendix that he happens to be three. And he may be over-arguing the point but not by much. What he's saying is the main thing the Bible emphasizes is there's only one God.

And we can see the significance of that because the main default for humanity and human religion is what? It's polytheism. That's the basic default of human religion. And so when we think of monotheism or the significance of the unity and singularity of God, Trinity is not in tension with that.

The Trinity of God is not trying to solve the problem of monotheism. It is explaining how the one God is. How is he? He is Father, Son, and Spirit. One example is in 1 Corinthians 8. In 1 Corinthians 8, the Apostle Paul takes the Shema, which is the basic confession of Israel in Deuteronomy 6 .4.

The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And Paul expands and explains that and applies it in 1 Corinthians 8 verses 4 and 6.

He says this,.

As to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence and that there is no God but one. For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

What Paul does, he takes the three key terms of the Shema, God, Lord, and One. And he says it applies to the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Both of whom are God. And we know that that's being emphasized.

He says it's both from both of whom are all things. So Paul takes Jesus and puts him in the God category because from God are all things. And he says Jesus belongs in that category. So the Son is God.

And the Shema properly applies to Him, the One who has dwelt among us and become flesh. And so when he describes who God is, He is the One God, is Father, Son, and Spirit. And the Trinity is not in tension with the oneness of God.

It's an explanation of how God is One. Now we must always remember, unity in Trinity or temptation will always be to go with the drift of human instincts and consider the Trinity as basically a big community in heaven, like human society.

Or we'll think of the Father, Son, and Spirit like we think of other people, as three separate people with the same nature. Or even as a divine council that we just call God, like many polytheistic religions will have a pantheon of deities, a sort of council or congress of deities.

And so the reason we confess God as triune is in the une part, because He's One. If God were not One, we wouldn't need Trinity. We could just be polytheists like everyone else. Sometimes I like to say the word triunity for that very reason so you don't lose the unity of it.

And as we think about then our God as revealed in His Word, we're reminded, if we think about it mathematically, or according to numbers, you don't need three to explain God. Because we can always say what the Bible says, that there is one God.

The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. You don't need to say three, but you absolutely need to say one. Because if you only say, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, what conception is left out there as a possibility?

Oh, that we have three gods. So you have to emphasize, as the Bible does, over and over and over again, God is One. And so that's what Scripture does. God is One. And how is the One God? In what way does the One God exist?

Well, He exists as the Father, eternally begetting the Son, and with the Son, breathing forth the Spirit. That's how the One God exists. So the essential number, when you think about the Trinity, is not actually three.

The essential number for the Trinity is one. You always need one if you're going to count to God. Now, why is that significant? It's absolutely vital, if you and I are going to hold forth the Gospel rightly to the world today.

So when I went to college, I went to a drifting liberal arts college, liberal in more ways than one, Christian college. And I took a class on theological ethics, and we had to read a book about how the cross and the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus was actually divine child abuse.

And we needed to get different paradigms for the Gospel. Now, I had the same reaction you did, but I didn't know how to explain it. I was just a college kid, but I'd read the Bible, and I thought, well, that doesn't seem to make sense.

The Bible doesn't talk about the cross as child abuse. But if we think about how sometimes some analogies and illustrations that are used for the Gospel, we can sometimes unwittingly give that kind of connotation.

And I know as a pastor, I've met many, many professing Christians who think somehow Jesus is the loving God protecting them from the angry Father. Have you ever maybe thought that yourself or run into that in the church?

Certainly. But remember, God is one. Is the God and Father of the Lord Jesus a different God from the God, the Son, who assumed human nature to take it upon himself to live a perfect life for Adam's race and die on the cross for the sins?

Are they different gods?

No.

It's the one God. And it's vital that we understand that. If they are different gods, then God has not revealed himself in Jesus. We've had some kind of sub-deity, and the real God is hiding somewhere behind the curtain somewhere.

And when we think about the Gospel, we remember that the Gospel is that God saves us from God, by God, and brings us to God, through God, that we would glorify God forever. That works, if you sit and think about it.

It does, trust me. That's the Gospel. And so as we think about, then, the love of God being demonstrated in Christ, in his death and his resurrection, and that there is no dissonance between God's eternal love that sent the Son to satisfy his own justice, and on the cross, the offended God, in human nature, in the person of the Son, is dying to suffer his own justice as God.

And so it's really, really significant that we think about who God is as one as we think about the Gospel.

It's vital.

And what it just means is that we're always have a double way of speaking as we think about God. We're always going back and forth, like on a seesaw, between the unity and the tri-unity, the threeness, of God.

I like, probably my favorite patristic author, Gregory of Nazianzus, or you can always remember by his rapper name, G. Nass. So G. Nass said this, No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three.

No sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of any one of the three, I think of him as a whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I think escapes me.

I cannot grasp the greatness of the one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the three together, I see one torch, and cannot divide or measure out undivided light.

It's excellent.

And that's the confession of the Christian. We consider the three together, and we cannot divide indivisible light. Our triune God is absolutely one. Let me hit the third thing, and then I'll pause to see if we clarify anything.

Divine Persons Are Not People

The third thing we neglect that needs to be added right to this is divine persons are not people. So when we use the word person for the Trinity, we're not talking about people. When you and I use person in common conversation, we're thinking about a separate individual being.

That's how we think of person in the modern day. But person in the Trinity is the personal subsistence of the Father, Son, and Spirit as God. And that's why some confessions like the Second London refer to three subsistences.

It has less devotional connotations, but it's a bit more precise. A subsistence is an individual instance of a given nature. And because the divine nature of God, the singular nature of God, is indivisible and simple and singular, then we're not talking about three beings.

We're talking about three instances of how the one God is. So we remember there's no division in God. So as we think about human persons, we're thinking about three separate beings of a shared or common nature.

And we are separate because our nature is not simple. It's not singular like God's nature. But God is wholly different. And when we remember that, when we talk about the persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit, person has always been a bit imperfect.

It's been a challenge for the church. Remember we talked about in our first point with analogy. We're using this analogically. We don't mean everything we always mean when we say person amongst ourselves.

In fact, when the word person was first introduced into talk about God, about the third century, second century, it referred to a mask. It actually was the persona that actors put on in a play. It didn't refer to individual human people.

If it did, we probably never would have used it. But when it was first introduced, it referred to mask. 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, you know, 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. So, 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 it 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 wanna 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 wanna 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, 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 wanna, where we'd really wanna 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 wanna 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 coning on on what, just really what God reveals of himself in the Bible and 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 indivisa 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 is called inseparable operations. It's just the 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. So, 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.