Have You Not Read - S1:E17

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

Welcome back to Have You Not Read. I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Durham.

And Andrew Hudson.

What Is the Trinity?

We had a question sent in from our listeners about the Trinity, and it is quite general, so it could last quite a while, but we're gonna try and be succinct with this episode. The question is, what is the Trinity?

Michael?

So when we say Trinity, we are using a word that was given to us through the efforts of our brothers in Christ many generations ago. One of them named Tertullian gave us the word that we now have Trinity to describe the nature of God, that in the reading of the Bible, we learn that God is Father, that the Father is God.

We learn that God is the Son. The Son is God. We learn that God is the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit is God. Also learn from the scriptures that the Father is not the Son or the Spirit.

The Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father nor the Son. What we're handed here is a mystery in which there are three persons, but all have the same essence, namely God. So each one of the persons of the Godhead or the Trinity is fully God.

The Father is fully God, and the Son is, and the Spirit is fully God. They all share the same essence, the same nature. They are equally glorious, equally eternal, equally powerful, equally worthy of worship, but the persons yet remain mysteriously distinct.

So we have various stories in the Bible about Jesus telling us to pray to the Father, and we have stories about the Holy Spirit being declared God, and you should not lie to the Holy Spirit, and Christ is worshiped as God, and he receives it welcomingly.

We have all these different evidences in Scripture that show us there are three persons of one essence, that there is a oneness to God and a threeness to God. Now, the word that we use today to describe these biblical truths is the Trinity.

That's the word that we now use. So what is the Trinity? The Trinity is a description of the nature of God. Now, we normally encounter the threeness and oneness of God in the Scriptures by God's mighty and glorious works, such as in creation and in redemption.

So we see that there are different roles of the three persons in the Godhead when it comes to creation, what the Father planned as the architect, the Son as the Word, is declared forth through the Word through the Son, and is brought into fruition by the Spirit.

We have description in Genesis chapter one. Genesis chapter one, where in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We read that the earth was formless and void, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.

We read God saying, let us make man in our image. There's a plurality of God from the very beginning. This is built upon throughout the biblical text, but from the very beginning, from the very beginning, there is God who creates through His Word and then gives life by His Spirit.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all evidenced from the very beginning in Genesis one. Now, of course, this is not as clear as it gets in the New Testament. We see much more clarity there concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.

So throughout church history, there have been many false claims, erroneous ideas about the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. There have been claims that the Son isn't as much God as God is God, that He is a splendid creature, but He has an origin and is not fully God.

And this was the claim of the Arians who said that the Son had like substance rather than the same substance. The Greek word they used was homoousios versus homoousios, like versus same. And the difference there is one iota, but it's extreme.

So when we think about the doctrine of the Trinity, there's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of very, very careful wording. And sometimes it comes to us by the way of negation. So you heard me use that path earlier.

The Father is not the Son, and the Father is not the Spirit, right? So by the way of negation, by saying not, we're clarifying that there's a distinction between the persons. But we're also using the way of negation when we say that the Son is as much God as the Father is God.

So we're saying we should not think of the second person of the Trinity or the third person of the Trinity as somehow less than God. So what we're doing here is we're just trying to echo the truths of Scripture and putting up fences around the mystery where we say this is what we're given in the Word of God, but beyond that, we should not go else we end up in error.

There's a quote I favor from Herman Bavinck who says in his second volume of Reformed Dogmatics, he says, now in the confession of the Trinity, we hear the heartbeat of the Christian religion. Every error results from or upon deeper reflection is traceable to a departure in the doctrine of the Trinity.

And so we see the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity, but we're also reminded that it is a mystery. It's not something that we can fully explain, but it is something that we may fully affirm. And we rejoice in the doctrine of the Trinity, especially when it comes to our salvation, that the Father has chosen us and given us to his Son who died for us upon the cross and was raised from the dead for our justification.

And he now intercedes for us at the right hand and God the Father and God the Son have sent forth the Holy Spirit to us to bring about the work of salvation in our lives, the regeneration, the new birth.

All of the blessings that Christ has won for us in his death and resurrection are applied to us by the Holy Spirit. So this is the quickest rundown I know how to do in terms of what is the Trinity. Questions or thoughts?

Co-Eternity and the Rejection of Modalism

One of the attacks on the Trinity that I've heard before is that this hasn't always been the case of God or he has either Father or Son or Spirit at different times. So would you say that all members of the Trinity are all co-eternal?

Yes, so the thought that God exists or manifests himself as Father in one case, Son in another case, Spirit in another case, perhaps coordinating with various moments of redemptive history is a heresy known as modalism that denies the threeness of God and quite simply just does not accord with what we read the baptism of Jesus, for example, in which Jesus who is God the Son in human flesh, the mystery of the incarnation, how God incarnate, God the Son in human flesh comes to John the Baptist at the Jordan.

And as he's being baptized, the heavens open and a voice from heaven declares over Jesus, this is my beloved Son. Obviously the voice is God the Father, speaking of God the Son. Meanwhile, God the Holy Spirit is said to be manifest in the form of a dove who alights upon Jesus showing the anointing of Messiah.

And in this picture, God is showing himself very glorious but also stooping down to us to tell us something of his nature, that he is three persons yet one essence. We have in this very important story, the revelation of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit all at the same time.

In Colossians 1 .15 it says, he is the image of the invisible God, he being the Son Christ, the firstborn over all creation for by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth.

And I'm gonna stop there.

The Image of the Invisible God and the Word

We also see in the gospels, them wanting to see the Father and yet Jesus shows them himself. In what way could you talk about the image of God in a Trinitarian description in those ways?

Yeah, so Hebrews 1 also echoes the doctrine of Colossians 1 about Christ being the radiance of his image, the exact imprint of his nature. When we think about the nature of the Trinity, we usually, theologians will, not in the interest of making things harder to understand but in terms of trying to break things down to more bite-sized level, they wanna talk about the economical trinity and the ontological trinity.

So in other words, the trinity, the economical trinity, how the three persons of the God had worked together for creation and salvation, which is what we have the most of in scripture. Then there's the ontological trinity in terms of how do the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit relate to one another in the Godhead, irrespective of creation, redemption and restoration.

Now, we're told less about that in the scriptures. So we're not talking about two different trinities here. This is the same trinity. We're just thinking about different aspects of who God is. So when we think about Christ being the image of the invisible God, we also have the expression, which is very similar to that, of the second person of the Trinity, God the Son being called the Word.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. So what we have is, we wanna use biblical imagery, right? We don't wanna use like

Shamrock.

Yeah, shamrocks or an egg or a penguin or ice cube, water vapor. We don't wanna be using unbiblical examples and analogies when we're dealing with one of the most precious and important mysteries.

And the most unique mystery.

It is exactly.

So what we're given, the best image we're given is that of thought to word. When we think about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, we're also given the idea of God the Son being the image of God the Father.

And what we see in this is, Jonathan Edwards did a lot of meditating on the doctrine of the Trinity. And it wasn't published during his lifetime, but a treatise on the Trinity. He talked about the eternal generation of the Son, that the Son does not have an origin, but he does proceed forth from the Father in that a word from the thought, in that the reflection from the Father, he's the image of God.

So that if God had a perfect and complete appreciation and valuing and glorifying in and of himself, that this would be the Son, God the Son, a full and complete, thorough self-appreciation and glorification, which has been noted that God being the most glorious would be an idolater if he held anyone else but himself in highest regard.

But this too is beyond our capacity to grasp. But in the two persons of the Trinity in their joy in one another, in love for one another, in glorying in one another is the proceeding of the Holy Spirit in Edwards' point of view.

So that everywhere he sees in the New Testament where Paul speaks of the Father and the Son in grace and peace be to you, he sees the Trinity, the Holy Spirit being the one who brings grace and peace.

So when we're trying to reach towards the ontological aspects of the nature of God in terms of the Son being the image of the Father or the word of God, what we're being told is, if we wanna know who God is, well, there's one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

And in the word, we're given the revelation of who God is. That when God wants to express who he is, he does so through his Son so that we may know who God is. So Jesus was not saying to Philip, I am the Father.

He said, I am the Father in one. Right, that's different.

Ontological and Economical Trinity

So let's back up a little bit. You use the words ontological and economical when describing two separate aspects of the Trinity. By ontological, you mean study of being or what is the being of God. And then the economical sense, you're pointing out how each person within the Trinity functions and relates to one another and how they actually work to accomplish salvation, sanctification, and anything else that is their work, right?

Yes.

The One and the Many, Philosophy, and Romans 1

And what we have exhibited in the pagan philosophers is constantly their conundrums that they cannot solve, that they observe and they reason and they, of course, they're made in God's image, but they keep on coming against these things that they can't solve, like the problem of the one and the many, the problem of that which is stable and yet changing and dynamic, and all these basic philosophical problems that they are left with no good solutions to and all they're left with is absurdities is due to the fact that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and understanding. And when we read about and learn about the Trinity from the scriptures, we discover that God, our creator, is we see there the one and the many, the plurality of the Godhead singular.

Okay, there's the fundamental answer to why there can be one and the many at the same time in the creation that this God made. And then also we have God who was unchanging and yet dynamic in his relationships, inter-Trinitarian relationships.

So, humans have observed that they live in God's world even if they deny God, right? So, we look all around us and we see the evidence that we live in the creation made by a God who is a Trinity.

So, the study of philosophy in a pagan sense is just institutionalized truth suppression then?

Well, and if you run the reductio on their claims, you get back to the fundamental starting points where they are forgetting God.

Philo Sophia, loving of wisdom. They don't have wisdom to love because they've rejected God.

Right, so it's a lot of philosophy is the philo pseudo false, the love of the pseudo Sophia, right? So, it's true wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.

Yeah, and that lack of fear, thankfulness always kicks us back to Romans 1 too. And then it gives us a direct progression of what happens. They become futile in their thinking.

And honestly, isn't it pride that leads man to reject God in his thinking? But isn't it humbling for us to embrace the mystery of the Trinity at the beginning of our thinking where we start off by saying, I don't, I don't comprehend.

I can't fully explain. Although I do confess and I do affirm and I humbled myself before this mysterious truth. And that's fundamentally where we have to begin. It's a humbling thing for us to confess the Trinity and to rejoice in God's revelation of himself to us in that way.

Because it's true. And we know the truth carries on without us having to support it. Whereas like, if you're a philosopher, you have to sustain all this truth that you, you know, small T truth that you believe in, but you have no basis for.

And so you're the one supporting it. And once you're gone, it's gone.

Right. Vanity, vanity, all this vanity chasing after the wind.

Thankfulness and Closing Remarks

Well, I think that about wraps it up. We are going to go to the segment where we let everybody know what we're thankful for this week, Michael.

Well, I am, I am thankful for just the creativity that I see in the lives of my children, that they just, that there's just a sense of wanting to create new games and new things and new opportunities.

And they make things and then name them. And you just see the, you know, that they're made in the image of God and they're rejoicing in these simple things. And I'm just thankful to see that every time.

And then every once in a while, you know, I get to get involved in what they're doing. And we just rejoice together in that. So I'm thankful for that today.

I'm thankful to God that even though I've been put into a new position at work, it's given me an opportunity to exercise creativity, to bring in some authority in places that needed it. And the ability to do that.

It's almost like a fresh start in a new place, which is very appreciated.

Amen.

I am thankful for my wife. I know we've repeat that at least once every episode. Somebody's got to be thankful for their wife, but I'm always thankful for Heather and what she does at home. And I know about every time I leave, somebody's having a breakdown or needs help or is teething or there's a mess and she handles it with very good composure and love and care and grace for our boys.

And I'm so thankful to God that he put that woman in front of me and just chiseled away at me until I grabbed her. So I'm very thankful to the Lord for her.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read.